“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

In continuing to use his movie blog as a platform for Hillary Clinton hate wrapped in the thinest of pop cultural guises, is Jeffrey Wells doing some kind of brilliant, absurdist theater, or has the presidential election simply driven him insane? First, when Baby Mama was announced as the opening night film for the Tribeca Film Festival, Wells admitted “a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for [Tina] Fey’s Hillary shilling.” I went to SXSW and ignored Wells’ blog for a week; when I came back, I discovered a post titled “Funny Games = Hillary Campaign.” Note the lack of prevaricating question mark in the headline: this is an unequivocal statement.

So what’s Wells’ evidence that Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 thriller has anything materially or spiritually in common with the troubled campaign of the first serious female presidential candidate? It’s specious, of course––amongst other things, he notes that the antagonists played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett “are clearly monsters, a term that has recently been used to describe Senator Clinton by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power”; they and Hillary also have “similar” haircuts!––but Wells’ balls-out committment to his own craziness is, as always, engaging.

• Don’t criticize Chris Matthews when Jeffrey Wells is looking. Says the film blogger of the MSNBC anchor: “He’s the greatest free-associating blabbermouth provocateur on the airwaves right now. A brilliant shoot-from the hipper, an old-school boomer newshound, a Bill Maher facsimile, a sardonic preacher, a print guy from way back, an agitator, a stalker of evasion, a carrier of the old-liberal Kennedy nosalgia flag and a bullshit spotter par excellence.” Also, he really likes movies.
• There have been so many tributes to the late Roy Scheider on the web today that by early-afternoon, I felt like I had nothing else to add. Self-Styled Siren offers her own, as well as a compilation of some of the best from other sites.
• A female writer at Entertainment Weekly contends that an Amy Heckerling movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer is going straight to DVD because movies about middle-aged women are unmarketable. Erin at Steady Diet of Film calls bullshit on that, as well as the notion that Pfeiffer hasn’t worked in six years. “Uhm don’t tell that to anyone who saw Hairspray or Stardust (totaling $335M worldwide).”