2009 may be remembered as a “down year” for the Cannes Film Festival — certainly, some press and industry faces familiar from previous years were nowhere in sight; certainly, celebrity directors like Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar and Quentin Tarantino showed up with new films that failed to single-handedly rescue the world economy by the end of their first screenings — but isn’t it a down year all around, not just for film but for, like, life on Earth? In a time as stagnant and depressed as this, what can we reasonably expect a film festival to do? Never once in my eight days at the festival did I question whether Cannes does or does not matter. Spending hours each day in Market badge lines composed of Cannes’ equivalent of rabble (myself included — I was standing in those lines because my coverage is not important enough to the Festival to merit press accreditation) the weight of the event doesn’t seem up for debate — you’re literally fighting over seats with too many people to whom Cannes matters to.
Back in New York now, maybe I should have a clearer perspective, but it’s hard. Even as the bigger films failed to meet my expectations, even as Lars Von Trier stomped in like Godzilla, swallowed the press corps whole and left the festival in ruins (and I *liked* Antichrist), even if I went home without seeing anything that matched 2008’s A Christmas Tale or Modern Life as sure-to-endure masterworks international cinema … I’ll still do whatever it takes to go back next year. I spend an awful lot of time covering things out of obligation because they’re perceived to matter to someone; in return, let me be selfish. Let me have Cannes, if for no other reason than because it matters to me.
And with that: after the jump, you’ll find my collected coverage. At right, the one photo I managed to take of “local color” - because even the coffee at Cannes this year came with unneccessary nudity.
In the twelve months since I was last in Cannes, I forgot the difference between “real” Festival screenings, and Marche (market) screenings. Everyone talks about the rigorous rules of Cannes festival screenings — the ceremony of lining up; the draconian stratification of press badges, in which your relative importance is proscribed by the color of the plastic ID card around your neck; the near-ritual standing ovations. What people generally don’t bother talking about, and I had forgotten, is the diametrically opposed informality of the market: the fact that lining up is only required for the hottest tickets (usually those that have already screened once in the festival); that most films play to mostly empty rooms, with badgeholders drifting in and out throughout; and that sometimes things happen that defy any attempt to trainspot the schedule to carefully.
So I arrived at the Star for the 9:45 screening of Kore-eda’s Air Doll twenty minutes early, not realizing that at 9:30, the lights would go down and I’d get a surprise glimpse at a 10-minute extended trailer for Gainsbourg, Je t’aime moi non plus (that, at least, was the title flashed at the end; IMDB calls it, Serge Gainsbourg, vie héroïque), written and directed by French graphic novelist Joann Sfar.
Paul Schrader is reportedly done with Hollywood. His next film will be a Bollywood production titled Extreme City. The action pic will be a cross-cultural story, though probably more Bollywood-style than Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire; it won’t be a masala film but is likely to have a few more musical numbers.
In a much more respectable marketing tie-in, The Soloist has been connected to a food drive called Feed the Need, which will collect 1 million pounds of food by December 15 — four months before the film opens.
The moviegoing demographics for this week’s “stuffed” Thanksgiving schedule are to be as follows: older woman to Australia; younger women to Four Christmases; youngest women/girls to Twilight; all men to Transporter 3; kids to Bolt. And some lucky people in 19 cities who don’t mind sold out shows will go see Milk.
I don’t exactly know why this is necessary, but 100,000 dudes on YouTube apparently disagree. MEAN Magazine did a photoshoot with Kate Beckinsale “in homage” to Anna, the 1967 musical starring Anna Karina and featuring songs by Serge Gainsbourg, over which I marveled a couple of months back. In the above video, footage of Beckinsale on set is woven into Anna’s iconic dance number, “Rollergirl”, in which Karina’s nerdy cartoonist literally lets her hair down and sings about her fantasy life.
Though Beckinsale actually copies a few poses directly from the original scene, her interpretation couldn’t be more different in tone. It’s all Bardot hair, thick eyeliner and studied hyper-sexiness, with barely a nod to Karina’s goofy-geeky abandon. Not be one of those assholes who’s all, “old is better than new!” but, um…old is better than new!
Sex and the City made almost $56 million over the weekend––almost twice what tracking would have indicated as late as Friday morning. Pamela McClintock says the debut “mystified Hollywood and shattered the decades-old thinking that females — particularly older ones –can’t fuel the sort of big opening often enjoyed by a male-driven event pic or family movie.” I’m mystified that Hollywood––or anyone––could believe that they could spend that much money promoting that beloved a brand and not see results.
Transformerswon the big award of the night at last night’s Attempt to Remind Children Who Mike Myers Is Three Weeks Before The Release of His New Movie MTV Movie Awards.
Bryce Dallas Howard is in talks to replace Charlotte Gainsbourg in that new Terminator movie. Yes, Charlotte Gainsbourg was apparently going to play John Connor’s wife in that new Terminator movie. Good thing the daughters of men who were famous in the 70s are interchangable!
So this afternoon, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to finish this thing I’m writing about the Pierrot Le Fou Criterion release, and as I always do in times of trouble, I turn to YouTube for guidance/inspiration/distraction, and I find the above clip from Pierre Koralnik’s 1967 TV musical Anna. I’ve never seen the film, but I remembered reading a Filmbrain post about it a couple of years back. Anna Karina, singing songs by Serge Gainsbourg, stars as a love-lorn, bespectacled ad agency illustrator who apparently fantasizes about transforming into some kind of comic book biker vixen … ? I don’t know, but this clip made my day.
Zooey Deschanel is so adorable that even I––usually such a knee-jerk skeptic when it comes to Things People Think Are Adorable––have to just give myself over to her absolute adorability. The indie actress, who sang in Elf and recently in a teeny role in The Assassination of Jesse James, is releasing an album with M. Ward under the name She & Him this March. The two will be playing at SXSW on March 14; in the meantime, Stereogum has an MP3 from the album, for a track called “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?” It’s totally 60s, like something Serge Gainsbourg would have produced, but a little less breathier and a little more garage-ier. Above: She and Him perform the Ricky Nelson classic, “Lonesome Town.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Sex and the City made almost $56 million over the weekend––almost twice what tracking would have indicated as late as Friday morning. 
