• Confirmation came yesterday afternoon that the films long expected to open and close the Cannes Film Festival, Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness and Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened?, will in fact do so, despite recent rumors that the latter film had been nixed due to its post-Sundance loser taint.
• Magnolia has purchased Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which premiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival.
• At Tribeca, IFC has selected the “Spanish-language psychological thriller” Fermat’s Room for its Festival Direct video-on-demand only program.
  

“Why did everyone have Che wrong?” reads the headline at Variety’s festival blog The Circuit. “The headline all over last week’s Cannes prognostications were about how Soderbergh’s Che epic wasn’t going to make the Croisette,” Mike Jones writes. “Today, all the Cannes headlines lead with Soderbergh. Surprise, surprise: Che will storm the south of France - all 4 hours of it.”

Jones says that after sales agency The Wild Bunch failed to find a distributor for the film in Berlin, “the Cannes rumors started, becoming a near-fact in the blogosphere that there would be no revolution on the Croisette.” The implication is that Wild Bunch spread rumors that the movie wouldn’t make it to Cannes, in order to make it instant news when it did.

But the thing is, I just did a pretty exhaustive Google BlogSearch, and though I found several post-Berlin posts indicating that Che would make its debut in the south of France, I couldn’t find a single blog post trying to pass off Che’s absence from Cannes as fact dated before this Variety story from April 17. …Read more

The lineup for next month’s Cannes Film Festival has been announced, and it’s excellent timing, because I just found out yesterday that I’m going to be attending the festival for the first time. Some notes on the lineup:

• Contrary to previous reports, both Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four hour epic Che will screen at the fest, although both will premiere out of competition.
• As expected, Charlie Kaufmann’s Synechdoche, New York will compete against new films from Philippe Garrel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, but it’s not the only American film in competition anymore, thanks to the unexpected inclusion of Clint Eastwood’s The Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie.
• A modified version of Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time will screen in the Special Screenings section, as will a new film by Terrence Davies and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
  
• Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt’s follow-up to Old Joy, will screen in the Un Certain Regard section, alongside James Toback’s documentary on Mike Tyson, and Tokyo!, and omnibus with sections directed by Bong Joon-ho, Michel Gondry and Leos Carax.
• The Dardenne Brothers, who won the Palme D’Or in 2005 with L’Enfant, will return to competition with The Silence of Lorna.
• Only one Chinese film will screen at the festival, Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, due to ” a current bottleneck in the Chinese censorship process, which includes authorizing overseas travel.”

• Variety says the only American film currently locked into a competition slot at Cannes is Charlie Kaufmann’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Steven Soderbergh’s Che epic isn’t finished, and Woody Allen’s Barcelona film is caught up in international red tape. But it looks like we can look forward to new stuff from Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Philippe Garrel, as well as a documentary on Mike Tyson by James Toback.
• Squashing rumors that the film would be exclusively distributed via iTunes, IFC has announced that they’ll release Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, in the fall, with a theatrical run concurrent with VOD as is their custom.
• Brett Ratner has been “tapped” to remake The Incredible Shrinking Man. I am only posting this story so I can screencap the incredible photo of Ratner at right. The black-on-black bow tie––who does that?

• Barry Levinson’s meta Hollywood comedy What Just Happened?, which premiered at Sundance to a chorus of shrugs and remains undistributed, had been selected to close the Cannes Film Festival.
• SAG has announced nine interim deals with indie production outfit The Film Department, in an effort to put pressure on the major studios to settle on a new contract in advance of a threatened strike. Variety says the studios are “unlikely” to be scared enough by the prospect of Catherine Zeta-Jones going back to work without them to be moved into immediate action.
• Women in Film, “a non-profit organization dedicated to helping women within the entertainment, communication and media industries,” will honor Salma Hayek, Diane English, Ginnifer Goodwin and Sherry Lansing at their 35th annual awards ceremony in June.
• The title for the long-awaited (apparently; if you’re acquainted with an awaiter, let us know) X-Files movie sequel has finally been released. The X-Files: I Want to Believe opens on July 25.

• Quentin Tarantino will give the Cinema Master Class lecture at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
• A new New York State budget makes room for a tripling of film production tax incentives, designed to stop the flow of productions running away to nearby states like Connecticut.
• The remake of Prom Night is expected to narrowly beat out Street Kings at the box office this weekend, and Sony distribution president Rory Bruer knows why. “Prom night is a common sort of experience,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. And really, this is what people look for when they go to the movies: a reflection of an experience they’ve had, plus murder.

• Predictions that Leatherheads would take the top spot at the weekend box office in spite of middling reviews and virtually no hook for young viewers proved to be unfounded. The Film That Turned George Clooney Fi-Core made just $13.5 million, barely enough for second place behind the still strong 21.
• Sundance vets Trouble the Water and Man on Wire both took jury prizes at the Full Frame Film Festival this weekend.  In a Dream and The Betrayal also left Durham with awards.
• In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, this year’s Cannes Film Festival will screen a number of retrospective titles from past years, including Stranger Than Paradise and Aguirre, Wrath of God. The program will then travel to Rome and Buenos Aires.

• The Hollywood Reporter imagines what the lineup might look like for May’s Cannes film festival. Among the titles named: Woody Allen’s Scarlett Johansson Kisses a Girl in Spain Vicky Cristina Barcelona; both of Steven Soderberg’s Che Guevara movies; and Wong Kar Wai’s “reworking” of his own 1994 film,  Ashes of Time Redux.
• In a rags to riches screenwriter story to rival Diablo Cody’s (although presumably with less nudity), Brad Ingelsby, a 27 year-old who apparently lives with his parents in Pennsylvania, has sold a script for a high six figures that will be produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. DiCaprio is expected to star, and Ridley Scott is expected to direct The Low Dweller.
• Tina Fey, John Hodgeman and Jeffrey Tambor have joined the cast of Ricky Gervais’ This Side of the Truth. Gervais is writing, co-directing and starring in the film for Warner Brothers.

• Oh, good: Indiana Jones and the Dorian Grey-ing of Harrison Ford Into Shia LaBouf will premiere at Cannes! Maybe. No one’s seen the thing yet, but according to Variety, “The cast, which includes Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett, have already been notified to pack their black-tie outfits for the French Riviera’s red carpet unspooling even though the fest has yet to confirm its official lineup.” Because celebrities pack suitcases 10 weeks in advance.
• Theatrical exhibition conference ShoWest will confer a special “Freedom of Expression Award” to Ang Lee and James Schamus, for releasing Lust, Caution with an NC-17 rating instead of cutting the film to get an R. National Theater Owners president John Fithian is inexplicably trying to push studios to revitalize the NC-17 market, even though even Lust, Caution made just under $5 million domestically, and in fact was a super-hit in China…where it was cut to appease the censors.
• Semi-Pro, which opens today, suddenly bears the dubious distinction of being the final release from New Line before the studio is subsumed into the clusterfuck that is Time Warner. It may not exactly send the studio out with a bang: although the comedy is said to be “tracking well among males under 25″ it’s nonetheless expected to “open well lower than Ferrell’s most recent films.”