Saturday, May 29, 2010

Sisteron photo

Chambéry, Ville Départ

Friends: Sisteron stands alone among the four Ville Etapes I've visited the past three days in its preparation and excitement of getting to play host to the Tour de France come July. It is the first time that Sisteron has had such an honor and it is making the most of it, even going to the extent of hiring someone with experience to oversee it.

Sisteron is a gorgeous town of 8,000 people in the foothills of the Alps at the confluence of two rivers. It boasts a variety of tourist attractions including a citadel on a promontory above the city and a museum devoted to scouts, as well as an eco-museum. The Tour has passed through it on occasion during its 108-year history, but surprisingly it has never been a Ville Etape.

Of the 32 Ville Etapes in this year's Tour, eleven are first-timers, though Bour-lés-Valence and Bourg-de-Pèage, which I've just visited, don't really count, as they are smaller towns adjoining cities that have previously hosted The Tour. Neither of the Bourgs had a tourist office. There were no banners or posters to be seen anywhere in Bourg-lés-Valence, next to Valence, advertising itself as a Ville Etape, and Bourg-de-Péage, next to Romans d'Isere, had a mere banner hanging from a fence announcing it will host the 12th stage of The Tour.

I did notice one home-made banner stretched across the top floor of a three-story building depicting a series of cyclists riding up a road. I didn't see it until I'd crossed the Isere river to Romans and looked back across the river. If I manage to make it back when The Tour passes through I expect to see the round-abouts decorated with bikes and shop windows adorned with bicycles and yellow and green and red polka-dots. Not yet though, unfortunately.

The large city of Chambéry, about forty miles north of the even larger city of Grenoble, has the honor of being the departure point for the Bastille Day stage, always one of the preeminent stages of The Tour. Its been a while since Chambéry last hosted The Tour, but its not thumping its chest about it just yet, with only a small billboard outside the former tourist office announcing that The Tour would be passing by.

The new tourist office had no mention of it whatsoever, even though it will be departing from the square right in front of it then heading through the heart of the city past the Fontaine des Elephants, one of the most unique fountains in all of France. It features the front half of four larger than life elephants bursting out from its central pillar. It was built in 1838 to honor General de Boigne, a local who made a fortune in India and became a great benefactor to the city before his death in 1830. The peloton will head 112 miles south to Gap over one category-one climb and a couple of other minor ones along the Route de Napoleon. It will pass behind L'Alpe d'Huez. The Tour is neglecting it this year, the first time in decades that it has by-passed it two years in a row.

It will be a beautiful stage, but it will be hard to surpass the beauty of the next day's stage, the 115 miles from Sisteron to Bourg-lés-Valence, that I biked a couple days ago. Though it has only one climb, up the Col de Cobre, it is sandwiched between thinly settled mountainous terrain and follows for miles the Drome River. It is such fine cycling there were quite a few cyclists out enjoying it, though none with packs such as mine. By July the Drome River will be full of canoeists and kayakers.

I've had superlative forest campsites all to myself each of the past five nights since leaving Cannes. I've hardly needed my sleeping pad so soft has the ground been from fallen leaves. I continue to marvel at the ease of cycling and camping in France, especially in contrast to my recent travails in Africa.

Though this region doesn't have the chateaus and cathedrals that draw many to France, it has scenery that would delight anyone, and all the minor features of France that are so easy to take for granted, but all contribute to its grandeur. Picnic tables abound along the roads and water spigots jut out of cliff sides and are on offer in town plazas, many designed with artistic flair. Just as French women are attentive to their appearance, but without overdoing it, so do towns try to make themselves attractive in some subtle way with flowers or or sculpture or art. France is truly a cyclist's paradise.

Later, George

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Sisteron, France, Ville Départ

Friends: I've been following La Route de Napoleon the past 100 miles since Grasse, a ten-mile climb up from Cannes. It is the route Napoleon took back to Paris from his exile on the island of Elba nearly 200 years ago. There has been considerable climbing over several passes, with the highest peaking out at over 3500 feet, high enough for there to be lingering patches of snow on the surrounding peaks. There was even more snow to be seen when I reached Digne-les-Baines and the dramatic, snow-drenched high Alps came into view.

I will be leaving Napoleon's route here in Sisteron to follow the Stage Eleven route of the Tour de France, departing here on July 15. It will be a relatively easy stage for the peloton after three hard days in the Alps. Just as I arrived at the Hotel de Ville (city hall) just across the street a crew was hanging a large yellow jersey proclaiming Sisteron a Ville Etape (stage city) on a high tower across the street. In front of the city hall was the sculpture of a sheep wearing a yellow jersey. The sheep is a town emblem as Europe's largest slaughter house for sheep is in Sisteron.

A large banner also hung across the street announcing that The Tour would be here on July 15. The city hall already had an exhibit of Tour photos with the theme that The Tour is like a Hollywood Western with all its shootouts and grand myths and heroic figures. It led off with a quote from John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence"--"When the legend becomes reality, it is the legend that becomes known."

Included among the many photos of all the grand heroes of The Tour and its many legendary moments were Orson Welles at the Grand Départ of the 1950 Tour and one of the peloton stopping in the middle of a stage to greet DeGaulle in his small village during the 1960 Tour. There was a category of photos called "Duel in the Sun" and another "Shoot Out at the OK Corral." There was also a set of cartoons celebrating The Tour and another of renowned magazine covers.

The woman at the adjoining tourist office didn't have information on the route the peloton would be taking out of Sisteron that I wished to follow today. She told me to go back to the city hall and ask for Monsieur Lamy, who was in charge of organizing it. He wasn't in his office. After asking around, the city hall receptionist learned that he was outside overseeing the hanging of the huge yellow jersey. She looked out the window and pointed him out to me.

He was along side a photographer. He didn't mind being interrupted at all. He said he would go back to his office and get the route information for me. He was a young man new to the town who had been hired to orchestrate all The Tour events. This was the third different Ville Etape he had worked at and next year he hopes to be at another. He was doing a superb job. Many Ville Etapes have nothing going on at this point. He also had organized a couple more exhibitions of Tour art, not opening until next month though.

He said I was the first Tour follower to come through town and asked to take my photo in front of the yellow jersey for the Tour Facebook page:

Later, George

Monday, May 24, 2010

Cannes, Day Twelve, The Awards

Friends: This year's Palm d'Or winner will no doubt set a record for the fewest number of people to see it once its released to the public. Only the most daring and least bottom-line caring of art houses will find the courage to program "Uncle Roonmie Who Can Recall His Past Lives," by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a largely incoherent Thai film with a few striking images, but nothing otherwise that would appeal to anyone but the most cerebral of film-goers.

I won't criticize Tim Burton and his jury for making this their choice. I'll only say that like horror films, this is not a type of film that I care to watch. I appreciate subtlety in cinema, but not obfuscation. I would not recommend this film to anyone other than the most devoted of cinephiles, as I'd risk the friendship of anyone else I might encourage to see it.

This was by far the most challenging and original and incomprehensible of the 19 films in Competition. With not a stand-out among them, it was an easy choice for the jury to make. But what it lacks in clarity it makes up for in sincerity. There is no art-house pretension as so often permeates such exercises.

Among those the very reserved and humble young director thanked in his nervously read acceptance speech were "all the spirits and ghosts in Thailand who made it possible for me to here." He said he'd like to kiss everyone on the jury. Then the bald-headed young man added, "Mr. Burton, I really like your hairstyle."

Burton had to be continually prodded during the awards ceremony by an increasingly impatient and exasperated Kristin Scott Thomas, the mistress of the ceremony, that it was time for him to announce the next award. He seemed as frazzled as his hair.

When it came to the best actor and actress awards Burton and his eight fellow jurors violated the unwritten rule of giving awards to unknowns who the award would mean much more to than big-named stars who have a closet full of awards and hardly need another. In that they genuinely awarded the best performances--Juliette Binoche and Javier Bardem along with Elio Germano, the token outsider.

Binoche began her acceptance speech for her role in "Certified Copy" in English saying, "What a joy, what a joy, what a joy to work with you Abbas," looking out at Kiarostami, who she had been sitting beside. Then she lapsed into French. Someone sitting beside Kiarostami whispered a translation into his ear during her uncharacteristically long speech that included a mention of the jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi.

Bardem shared the best actor award for his sterling performance in "Biutiful" with the less well known Italian Germano for his frenzied performance in "Our Life." Bardem was quite sincere in thanking quite a few, concluding with "mon amour" Penelope Cruz who was there with him. Germano was the only one of the award winners not to speak in either French or English.

The second and third place films were the French "Of Gods and Men" and the African film "A Screaming Man" from Chad, also commendable choices. So was the best screenplay going to "Poetry," a film that could have easily won best actress or best film or best director.

There always seems to be one controversial choice. This year it was the best director honors going to Mathieu Amalic for the French film "On Tour," a film universally pooh-poohed for being mundane and unfocused, perhaps the least-well directed film of the lot. Even Amalic seemed stunned to have received the award. After making his remarks in French he muttered, almost under his breath, "I didn't think I could direct."

Overlooked was Mike Leigh's crowd-pleasing "Another Year," the highest rated of the films by Screen magazine's panel of critics. So too were the other two English speaking entries, Ken Loach's "Route Irish" and Doug Limon's "Fair Game." Binoche's movie was largely in English though interspersed with a fair amount of French and Italian.

Before the awards ceremony I squeezed in four more movies, the two Competition entries I hadn't seen and two others that I liked so much I was happy to see a second time. I could have done without seeing "Outrage," Takeshi Kitano's latest Japanese gangster film for those who like violence and torture. Besides the usual cutting off of fingers there was a dental drilling scene and a decapitation and plenty of knifing and pummeling of bodies. This was a lesser effort of his, that not even his devotees much cared for, and received the lowest score by far from Screen's panel.

Unfortunately Ken Loach's "Route Irish" conflicted with the awards ceremony, so I only had time to see its first half, just as the tension was ratcheting up in this film about the death of an Irish contractor in Iraq. It looked like another solid effort from the former Palm d'Or winner.

I joined Patrick McGavin and a critic for "Variety" to enjoy Binoche's performance for a second time. The "Variety" critic had seen it before and wasn't impressed. He wanted to give it a second chance. Patrick was seeing it for the first time. Patrick was won over, but not the "Variety" critic.

I was able to appreciate aspects of the movie I had missed on my first viewing, including audience reactions. The Americans in the audience all laughed at the sneering comment of Binoche's English companion, "How could I forget, the French know everything about wine and restaurants." But the French got their revenge laugh when Binoche says a wine they are drinking is not as revolting as the English guy thinks, saying, "Its not as good as ours, but better than yours."

I also gained a heightened appreciation for "Of Men and Gods" upon my second viewing and noticed a few things that hadn't caught my attention earlier. One of those was a world map on the wall in a room the monks use to discuss whether to stay or leave Algeria. I had been so caught up in the movie the first time, I had overlooked a feature that I always enjoy feasting my eyes upon.

Maps on walls are not uncommon in movies. There was one in Loach's film and in a handful of others during the festival. Two different Manhattan apartments in "Happythankyoumoreplease" had maps that I was always straining to see, hoping the camera might focus on. Maps can distract me from the dialgoue, but can also lead to a pleasant revery if I need one.

The awards ceremony was followed by the Closing Night Film "The Tree" from Australian starring last year's best actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. This was the third film I had seen in the past two days of someone grieving over the loss of a loved one. Gainsbourg has just lost her husband. She is barely capable of looking after her four young children. A monstrous tree on their property begins overwhelming the house. She and her children and the house and a relationship she has just started are all falling apart. This was almost worthy of having been included in Competition.

I now have a load of movies to revel over in the days to come as I resume my bicycle travels. Despite what the critics said, there were plenty of fine films on offer. I saw eight films that I was very very happy to have seen, about the usual number--180 Degrees South, Chongqing Blues, Beyond the Summits, Another Year, Of Men and Gods, Certified Copy, Poetry and Fair Game. There were another ten that I was very glad to have seen--Big Fan, Tuesday After Christmas, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, Mao's Last Dinner, Bear Nation, A Screaming Man, How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster, Going Vertical, Two in the Wave, and The Robber. There were only a handful of the 74 I saw that were a waste of time.

Now its off to the Alps to scout out a few of this year's Tour climbs and Ville Etapes. There are eleven new stage cities in this year's Tour, more than usual. Then it will be on to Germany to visit the bicycle museum of the Tour de France Devil and also a bicycling museum outside of Amsterdam before the Tour starts in Rotterdam forty days from today. That will give me plenty of time to get my legs in shape.

Later, George

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Cannes, Day Eleven

Friends: Today began with another Competition film that has been surrounded by controversy, though not as intense or as genuine as that around yesterday's Algerian film. The controversy over "Exodus: Burnt By the Sun 2," its running time and cost and faithfulness to history, seemed largely contrived by its distributors to bring it more attention than it would otherwise receive or deserve. The makers of this film have a huge investment, $55 million worth. It is the most expensive Russian film ever made. It has already opened in Russia and hasn't been particularly well-received.

This World War Two film has one extravagant battle scene after another--bridges and ships and buildings blown up and huge squadrons of tanks and squadrons of planes engaged in battle--but its portrayal of the horrors of war is largely cartoonish and idiotic. Part of the ploy to bring attention to the film was that in whittling it down from three hours, a topless scene had been cut. The distributors loudly refuted that claim emphasizing that the film did indeed have a topless scene.

It is actually the climatic scene of the movie. It could not possibly have been cut. A dying soldier in the battlefield demands of a nurse, "Show me your tits, I've never seen any." Though she is bundled up with snow and carnage all about, she strips to the waist as the camera slowly pans back to show acres and acres of rubble. It might have been a jaw-droppingly powerful scene had it ended a more meaningful film.

"The Frankenstein Project" by the Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo, who dazzled the festival a few years ago with "Joanna," easily the most audacious film of that year, retreats to the mundane material of a director making a film. He adds the possibly intriguing twist of the director casting his 17-year old son, who doesn't know the director is his father, and has no acting experience. When he auditions him with a woman who also has no acting experience and asks the woman to try to seduce him, he reacts with anger. After trying the scene a couple more times in a more subtle manner he accidentally kills her and then is on the run. This had potential, but falls flat.

The Thai Competition film "Uncle Boonmie Who Can Recall His Past Lives" gave me a great opportunity to reflect back on all the films I've seen as I zoned in and out of this venture into the otherworldly. A dying man is visited by a pair of relatives who have already gone to the other side. They know he is in distress. One tells him, "Heaven is over-rated. Nothing is there." Interspersed throughout the film are jaunts into the jungle, the exploration of a sparkling cave, swimming in a lagoon, all with minimal dialogue.

This film is one of those puzzles full of symbolism and lack of clarity designed as a challenge for audiences to figure out. The director of an English film festival took a seat in front of me and told the friend he sat down beside, "I'm seeing this for a second time, hoping I can understand it more than the first time."

With this trio of Competition films, I have now seen 17 of the 19 entries. I'll see the final two tomorrow on repeat Sunday. Unlike past years there is no clear favorite for the Palm d'Or. It could be anything. No one has a handle on this year's jury.

The spritely, husky-voiced French director Claire Dennis headed the four person Un Certain Regard jury. They were on stage in the Dubussy to announce their winner--"Hahaha" from South Korea. I had nearly seen it last night, but opted instead for the Uruguayan film, so I wasn't among the several hundred who walked out of the theater after the announcement, followed by the screening of the film. Thierry Fremaux actually took a vote from the 1036 people in the theater asking us if we wanted to see it or the second place film. Way more people hadn't seen it than had seen it.

Having been fresh in the jury's mind must have clinched its victory, as nothing genuinely stood out in the Un Certain Regard field of twenty plus films either. There was speculation that either of the Romanian films could win, especially "Aurora" by Crisit Puiu, who won Un Certain Regard several years ago with the highly acclaimed "Death of Mr. Lazarescu," but also speculation that since he and Romanian films had been winning so many awards, the jury would award something else. I was hoping for "Aurora" to win, as it had slipped past me earlier in the festival.

It had to have been more interesting than "Hahaha," a dialogue between two young goofy, slightly simple-minded and socially inept guys who frequently end their sentences with a nervous "hahaha." The film is largely flashbacks to the visit each had to the same city and affairs they had there. Nothing unique or exceptional about this film at all.

I also saw one of the Director Fortnight's award winners, "Lily Sometimes." Lily is an uninhibited, free-spirited young woman who "isn't all there," as her lawyer broth-in-law terms her schizophrenia. The mother she's been living with in a nice home in the country has just died. Her older sister hires a woman to look after her. That doesn't work out, so the older sister comes to live with her. She is very prim and proper. Her younger sister tries to loosen her up. Her husband grows impatient. At least this film had some energy and a few surprises.

My final film of the festival was "The Tiger Factory" from Malaysia, a Director's Fortnight entry receiving a second showing over at the Arcades. This final time slot has occasionally presented a surprisingly exceptional film. It was there that I saw "I Killed My Mother" last year, which I just learned from Patrick McGavin has finally gotten distribution and could be showing up in Chicago this summer.

"The Tiger Factory" was an eminently forgettable low-budget film shot in documentary style of a morose young woman working on a pig farm and then in a small restaurant. There was much genuine telling detail about life in both of those realms, but not material enough to merit a movie.

Later, George

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Cannes, Day Ten

Friends: Four super-sized and super-enforced police vans were stationed in front of the Palais this morning. The riot-police were out in force to stem whatever protests there might be over the Algerian film "Outside the Law" that was screening at 8:30 this morning in the Palais and then at three and seven later in the day.

The film has been widely condemned by French ministers and others over its distortion of history in Algeria's fight for independence, some insisting that it shouldn't be shown at Cannes or in France at all. The film is directed by Rachid Bochareb, whose "Days of Glory" about Algerians who fought with the French during World War II won its cast the joint best actor award at Cannes four years ago and was a hit on the film fest circuit. This film stars several of the actors from that film.

A police officer, rather than the usual usher, searched my backpack even before I passed through the gate to the holding area for those of us without an "invitation." When he discovered my can of ravioli, he confiscated it. I asked for it back and proceeded over to the nearby back-up theater for the nine a.m. screening hoping for a less thorough search and better assurance of getting in to the movie. If I had been more pressed for time, I would have simply hidden the can in the bushes, and hoped to get into the earlier screening, but today I had time to spare. Yesterday, though, that half hour delay disrupted my timing and prevented me from seeing a movie I had hoped to see.

I was most disappointed in not being able to meet up with Charles in the balcony, as I hadn't seen him in a couple of days and wished to hear his always informed opinions, especially on "Fair Game." There was no Screen magazine this morning with its reviews and scorecard of ratings by its panel of critics. With the crowds diminishing yesterday was its last issue. Hollywood Reporter and Variety had stop publishing a day earlier. They had all been significantly thinner this year with a drastic cutback in advertising.

The authorities evidently weren't concerned by anyone disrupting the "Outside the Law" screening at the 60th Anniversary Theater. It was just the usual woman giving a cursory glance into my pack. Though the festival has suddenly turned into a police state, as an usher initially refused me entry to the Debussy last night for wearing sandals--"Its for the beach life," he said--, up until now the festival's search policy had been greatly reduced this year. Ushers don't even look into bags this year at the entry to the market screening complex, just waving a wand over everyone's body. I have no idea what people could be smuggling in on their bodies that they couldn't be smuggling in their bags, but I'm not going to ask.

"Outside the Law" was as nonsensical as that search policy. It opens with a grotesquely absurd slaughter without any provocation of hundreds of Algerians peacefully marching in Algeria on the day WWII ends demanding independence. Such an event did take place, but not to the extent it is portrayed. It sets the tone for this shameless propagandistic film that may delight the rabble of Algeria but will have no impact on anyone with any discerning sense.

Algeria and France have come to terms and are not at odds. There was no reason to rile passions with such a heavy-handed, simple-minded, one-sided film. There was more killing and violence in this film than in all the films I've seen these past ten days.

A most worthy film could be made about the Algerian fight for independence, especially with all the talent involved with this production, but this was not it. There is not much reason to protest the film though, as it obviously does not depict reality. But it is so blatant, it is understandable that some could be upset. The defenders of France can relate to at least one comment in the film. A French officer says, "I fight for the grandeur of France. Our empire exceeds that of the US and Russia. DeGaulle says so."

Pride in country was on parade down the main shopping avenue, Antibes, after I left the screening and headed to the Arcades Theater. A thousand or more marchers, men and women, some in uniform and many carrying flags and banners pronouncing "respect our history," quietly and peacefully ambled along.

I was joined in line to Frederick Wiseman's "Boxing Gym" by one of the directors of the Telluride Film Festival, Julie. It was the first I had seen her. She too had rushed over from the Algerian film and was shaking her head over it. She said she had liked "Fair Game," but wasn't sure how much. She had gone into it poisoned by insider Hollywood scuttlebutt that Penn looked old and haggard. Indeed, he was, just as was his character, but he was still charged with the energy of a bull. He lets nothing stand in his way in his principled fight for the truth, much as Jack Lemmon in the sensational Costa Graves film "Missing" from nearly thirty ago. Lemmon plays a father, rather than a husband, relentlessly trying to find his son who had disappeared in Argentina during a CIA led purge. "Missing" was an award winner when it played at Cannes.

Julie said no one on the Telluride team had wanted to see "Fair Game" and it was left to her. There were further doubts about the film, as its director, Doug Limon, doesn't have the greatest respect in Hollywood. She said many people didn't even think he directed "Swingers," rather that its star Jon Favreau had.

After all the senseless violence of "Outside the Law" I at first resisted the barbarism of boxing, but Wiseman, as masterful a documentarian as there is, soon won me over. The majority of the documentary is of boxers conditioning not fighting. The movie takes place entirely in a hard-to-find small New York neighborhood gym based out of a garage behind a Goodwill store. Anyone can pay $50 a month to use it. Some of the more interesting scenes are of potential customers, men and women, signing up. One woman buys a membership for her 40-year old husband. Several women with babies are clients. There is no narrative or featured characters other than the gravel- voiced owner, but it is most mesmerizing.

I ping-ponged back to the 60th Anniversary Theater for the repeat of the Competition film, "Our Life," from Italy that I missed yesterday. The frenzied performance of Elio Germano as a suddenly widowed 40-year old father of two redeems this not fully realized film. He works in the building trades but doesn't make much money. He uses blackmail to land a big job as a contractor that is way beyond his capabilities. The film greatly begs reality, but does lend a semblance of insight into Italian corruption and the drive of someone trying to make something of himself.

"Life, Above All" took me back to South Africa to a small town of blacks without a single white. Race was not an issue in this film. Not a single white is seen or even mentioned. Rather it is a story of lives of struggle and small-town prejudices, not particularly well or interestingly told.

I made my first appearance at the Critic's Weekly for one of its award winners, "Bi Don't be Afraid," by a young Vietnamese director, a film with minimal narrative. Its series of minor glimpses into daily life--a young boy being bathed, a man getting his hair washed, a guy eating an apple, boys sloshing through the mud playing soccer--were more mundane than riveting.

A young woman suffers a horrifying night of terror in an old two-story house in the forest in "The Silent House" from Uruguay. It was said to be inspired by a true story. The young woman and her father are alone in the house, or so they think. In the middle of the night the woman hears creaking in the floor above. Her father goes to investigate and doesn't return. The girl then goes in search. The house has no electricity. She carries a small lantern. She gives a formidably intense performance. I'd like to know what she drew upon to portray such terror, her face contorted in unspeakable horror for quite some time.

Later, George

Friday, May 21, 2010

Cannes, Day Nine

Friends: Sean Penn knows cinema well enough to recognize that "Fair Game" is so good that it didn't need his presence here to insure its success. If he were an adulation-craving star he would have swum the Atlantic to be here to bask in the accolades for his performance and the greatness of this movie. Instead, he's in Washington attending hearings on Haiti, just as would Joe Wilson, the fiercely idealistic, morally upright and fearlessly committed former diplomat who Penn portrays.

Doug Limon brilliantly directs this true story of the outing of Wilson's CIA agent wife Valerie Perrin by the Bush administration in retaliation for Wilson disputing in a New York Times op ed piece Bush's claim that an African country supplied Iraq with uranium, his justification for invading Iraq. Limon has come a long way as a director since his first film "Swingers" in 1996.

Naomi Watts is also sensational as Perrin. It is meticulously detailed enough to be a documentary, and does include quite a few clips of Bush and Rove and Chaney and Rice. Rush Limbaugh and the conservative right will do their best to suppress and condemn this. This film could sweep the Oscars. Whether it will win the Palm d'Or here is another matter, even though it is by far the most powerful film of those in Competition so far. It might be too commercial. One never knows with juries. One of the nine jurors, English actress Kate Beckinsale, confessed that with an eleven-year old she hardly gets to see many movies.

"The Robber" was also a very authentic portrayal of the true story of an Austrian bank robber/marathoner. The robber in this German film is as obsessed about robbing banks as I am of seeing movies when I'm at a film festival. And as I put my bike to use to get to a distant theater, he puts his legs to use after a robbery running for miles and miles.

He is so obsessed about robbing banks he's back at it the next day even after a 100,000 euro haul. Once when he is thwarted at one bank when all the money falls out of the bag the teller has put it in when she passes it to him over her window, he knows he can't linger and scoop it all up, so he just runs a few blocks and robs another bank just as the cop cars are rushing to the first bank.

He is a champion runner. His parole officer knows to show up at a marathon to have a talk with him after he hasn't seen him in two months. The robber fears the law is closing in on him, so he clobbers him with his trophy and runs off. That sets off a massive police hunt, the largest in Austrian history. There is lots more running to come.

Just as a bicycling scene in a movie gives me a warm glow of delight, so too do driving scenes down rural roads filmed through the windshield. It is the same view I'm so accustomed to seeing as I'm perched upon my bicycle seat. It sets off pangs of longing to be on my bike, but also stirs a rush of fond memories. I was in a state of near ecstasy watching the Russian Competition entry "My Joy," as it follows a truck driver through forests and small towns. It hardly mattered that it didn't have the most coherent of plots.

I made my first appearance at the distant Director's Fortnight theater for "The Joy," a Brazilian fairy tale about teens who can walk through walls made by a couple of young directors. With the festival winding down there aren't so many films to choose from. I was sorry I had to see this film, though I did learn that jackfruit can be found in Brazil. I discovered it for the first time earlier this year in Uganda. I wished I'd known about this sweet, juicy, delicious fruit when I biked through Brazil back in 1989, though the eating there was pretty good otherwise.

Just before Thierry Fremaux scampered up the steps to the stage in the Debussy Theater to introduce American Lodge Kerrigan and his cast of "Rebecca H (Return to the Dogs)," Scott Fondras and a European critic slipped into the seats beside me. Fondras was telling his friend that he was flying back to New York after the festival and then had to return to Romania.

Kerrigan wore the most ill-fitting tux of the festival. It looked like it might have been used by David Bryne in "Stop Making Sense." Kerrigan said, "I don't make many films (this was his fourth) so its nice to be back at Cannes. I'd say enjoy the film, but if you know my work, that's not the right word to us." He also got laughs when he said this film was a musical, then repeated, "No, it is."

Kerrigan has a hard time scraping up money to make his films. This was a French production staring two French actors mostly speaking French. One of the story threads is Kerrigan shooting a Grace Slick bio pic, allowing him to make several appearances in the film. He gently induces his leads to reshoot a scene all too many times. His two actors don't seem to mind, but it was a bit much for the audience. It happened early enough that people hadn't started walking out on it at that point.

About twenty minutes into the film Foundas started taking notes on a large notepad that he held up near his face. Fortunately he wasn't using an illuminated pen. This 75-minute film had a bare bones script with minimal dialogue. There are a couple of extended swimming scenes, one in a pool and another in a lake, and a long walk. When the film concluded, Foundas turned to his companion and said, "auteur masturbation."

Later, George

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Cannes, Day Eight

Friends: I took a risk ending the day with a 138-minute non-Bollywood Indian film, but it had been a long time since an Indian film had been invited to the festival, so it was sleep be damned and hopefully no nodding off in the theater. A 78-minute American film from the Director's Fortnight that had some rafting in it was playing at the same time was very very tempting, but if it was good, it would turn up stateside.

"Udaan" did have a couple of rousing musical interludes, songs with a montage, and also several running scenes that amped up the voltage, so there was little danger of this strong story of a demonic, extremely-demanding, single father abusing his two sons, a seventeen-year old just expelled from his boarding school and a six-year old, of putting me to sleep.

The father owns a small factory and wants his son to become an engineer. The son has aspirations of becoming a writer. When the seventeen-year old returns home, the father puts him to work in his factory during the mornings and makes him take science classes in the afternoon. He tells him, "If you let me down again, I'll slit your throat." He wakes him early every morning to go for a timed run with him concluding in a sprint. He can't keep up. His father calls his efforts disgraceful.

My day began with my only other non-documentary of the day, "Poetry," a Competition contender from South Korea. It will be a strong contender for one of the seven awards the jury doles out, including best actress for the stunningly heartfelt performance of Jung-Hee Yoon as a 65-year old grandmother with creeping Alzheimer's Disease who looks after her grandson and attends poetry classes.

The movie opens with the corpse of a young girl floating down the river. Director Chongdong Lee doesn't rush the story along. Its a while before it is revealed that the corpse is a fellow student of her grandson. She jumped off a bridge and left a suicide note saying she had been repeatedly raped by six boys at her school. One of those boys is the grandson. The school wishes to hush up the story. The fathers of the six boys get together along with the grandmother and decide to offer the mother of the girl some money, more than the grandmother can come up with, not to press charges or to go to the press with the story. "Poetry" weaves and maintains interest in several stories with the adeptness that Inarritu so severely lacked in "Biutiful."

Two of my day's films were variations on the documentary. "Howl" was a recreation of the 1955 obscenity trial seeking to ban Allen Ginsberg's poetry-book "Howl" published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti is the one on trial for publishing it. Ginsberg did not attend the trial, but he is the central figure of the movie shown reciting the poem in fragments in a night club and also talking into a tape recorder recounting his life. The film includes photos of the era of Ginsberg and his fellow Beats Kerouac, Corso, Cassady, and more.

The Italian "Foccaccia Blues" was more documentary than feature, though it did have some superfluous acted out scenes trying to pad the length of this movie about the true story of a McDonald's in Altamura, Italy that went out of business due to a lack of interest. The movie tries to be an indictment of fast food, even accusing McDonald's of being an imperialist plot to spread American culture. The director goes to the corporate headquarters in Chicago, for no apparent reason other than to get a trip to America.

Unlike Michael Moore he isn't successful in finding anyone to harangue, or coming up with anyone who can indict McDonald's for being an evil plot. He can do no better than one young girl who worked at the McDonald's who complains she was told she had to smile all the time, even when sweeping. A handful of locals complain about how tasteless the food at McDonald's was. He does allow one woman screen time whose sons love McDonald's. They had their birthday parties there and whenever they go to Rome, McDonald's is the first place they want to visit. This was extremely half-baked, not even saying how long the McDonald's lasted or how many are in Italy or if any others had closed.

While Ginsberg and Kerouac were establishing a Beat generation in America, the French New Wave generation of film-makers was galvanizing on the other side of the Atlantic. A superb French documentary, "Two in the Wave," traces its origins through the friendship of its two prime proponents, Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. The New Wave was launched with Truffaut's "400 Blows" at the 1959 Cannes film festival and cemented a year later with Godard's "Breathless," based on a Truffaut script. This film was thick with sensational interviews from the time when Godard was talking to the press.

The film concludes with the end of their friendship twenty years after it began as ardent young cinephiles in 1949, who regarded cinema not simply as a passion, but as a religion. The film excellently captures their fervor, making me want to watch movies all day, just as they did. I saw this film partially because I was unable to see Godard's latest provocation, "Socialism," playing in Un Certain Regard. Truffaut wouldn't have seen it either. He ended their friendship with a twenty-page letter in which he referred to Godard as "a piece of shit."

One of the traditions of Cannes is a "Dog d'Or" for the best portrayal of a canine in the festival. If there were an award for the best bicycling scene in a movie it would go to this documentary for the extended clip from the 1957 Truffaut short "The Brats" following a young woman on a lengthy bike ride through the countryside. When she leaves her bike, a pack of young boys cluster around its seat giving it a sniff.

"Black Diamond," a documentary about African soccer players, was my fourth visit to Africa during the festival. It argues that grooming Africans to play soccer in Europe has become a modern day form of slavery. The film focuses on camps for boys to hone their soccer skills and hopefully be discovered. It costs quite a bit of money for a boy to attend such a camp. And with there being little chance of one being good enough to go on to Europe, as is the dream, it is a monumental waste of money. The film goes to the Ivory Coast where a tour guide describes the slave trade of centuries past telling how Africans would be kidnapped and sold into slavery. This fell short of effectively arguing its case.

Next year's festival has already gotten a boost with news that fest favorite Lars Van Trier is set to start filming an end of the world film called "Melancholia" that will no doubt be the talk of Cannes 2011. The cast includes John Hurt, Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland and Charlotte Rampling. Roger Ebert is also in the news. He's offering a reward for the return of his computer, left behind in a taxi. Its the computer he uses to speak with. Also lost was a black sweater.

Later, George

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Cannes, Day Seven

Friends: With complaints rampant about the quality of the Competition slate so far along came a pair of films today stemming the tide of negativity and rescuing the festival from its malaise.

Enthusiasm for the Competition offerings is so low I had no problem getting into the Palais for both the morning's screenings without an "Invitation." First up at 8:30 was "Of Gods and Men" by the French director Xavier Beauvois. Its not immediately evident that this true story of French monks in Algeria in 1996 is going to break the tide of lackluster fare. But once the movie establishes its story of eight French monks debating whether to maintain their mission dispensing medical care in an isolated mountain village or flee under the threat of terrorists, this becomes a movie of note.

Terrorists have recently murdered a crew of Europeans building a road. The monks are torn between leaving or staying. Their chief is very calm and wise. He puts the decision to a vote, though wishing to defer the decision. The majority aren't quite ready to abandon their mission just yet. Their fears are realized when the terrorists raid their quarters on Christmas eve. They are seeking medical assistance. The chief monk deals with the terrorists with aplomb, winning their favor.

Still the monks are worried. The government advises them to leave. But the villagers are very dependent on them. When the chief next puts the decision to a vote again, this time it is unanimous to stay. The film continues the kidnapping theme of the festival when six of the eight are taken hostage and held for exchange with terrorists being held.

Though this didn't have the power of the two great French films of the past two festivals, "The Class" and "The Prophet," it has all the French excited over another possible Palm d'Or. The announcer on the festival cable station commented during the evening broadcast of the cast walking up the red carpet for its gala formal screening that they will undoubtedly be back on Sunday for the awards ceremony.

Immediately after this screening I was back in line for Abbas Kiarastomi's
"Certified Copy" starring Juliette Binoche, who adorns this year's festival poster waving a wand of light spelling out Cannes. Despite the star power of Binoche and the artistic power of Kiarastami, a former Palm d'Or winner, there was so little interest in this film I didn't have to sit in the balcony.

Binoche owns an art gallery in Tuscany. She attends the lecture of an English author who has just written a book on art. She invites him over to her gallery and then takes him on a drive out into the country to see some more art. Conversations in cars is a Kiarastami trademark. This one goes on and on without lagging a bit. Their less than amiable talk continues in restaurants and plazas and while seeing the sites. The verbal sparring is a refreshingly engaging dose of serious, adult conversation.

When they adjourn for a cup of coffee the writer's cell phone goes off. He apologizes that he must take the call and goes out on the street for a prolonged conversation. Binoche and the waitress, an older woman, have a delightful conversation of their own about men and marriage. She takes them as a married couple, and Binoche goes along with it.

An older man later also thinks they are married. He takes the writer aside and offers him some fatherly advice. He says there appears to be some friction between the two of them. He suggests he simply put his arm around her shoulder and everything will be well. He later hesitantly does and she is immediately transformed. She goes into the toilet and puts on makeup and earrings and is aglow. Kiarastami masterly develops their relationship. The end fizzles a tad, reportedly causing a few boos at the press screening, but I'll be rooting for this film to make it to Telluride for a second viewing.

The day also included a couple of films with name talent that didn't quite fulfill expectations, but were still enjoyable. The first was "Heartbeats," the French Canadian film that I fell twenty people short of getting into a few nights ago that I was so eager to see. This time I was among the first twenty people in to the eventually packed theater.

Xavier Dolan, the latest enfant terrible of cinema, stars and directs once again, but with astonishing restraint compared to his no-holds-barred incendiary first film, "I Killed My Mother," that was so subversive hardly a film festival or art house has been brave enough to show it. There are just a few, barely satisfying dollops of his satire in this gay-tinged tale of a love triangle. The film still smartly showcases his talents as a writer, director and actor. Fans should not be concerned that he will disappear. This largely inoffensive film assures his fans of more to come, hopefully with less restraint.

Harvey Weinstein made a rare on-stage appearance with the cast and director of "Blue Valentine," though only the director, first-timer Derek Cianfrance was handed the microphone by festival director Theirry Fremaux. He thanked Weinstein and said it took him twelve years to finally get this made.

Despite a cast of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, also in attendance, Weinstein must be sweating, as there is no guarantee he will recoup his investment in this well-done tale of a disintegrating marriage. The couple's agonizing arguments are interspersed with flashbacks to the happier days of their courtship. Both have musical talents. When Gosling asks Williams if she has any hidden talents she responds by breaking into a song reciting the presidents from Washington to Bush. Gosling then sings to her strumming a ukulele. But these few charming moments are drowned out by Gosling's drinking and harangues of his wife.

As I was sitting in a theater awaiting the start of the Australian surfing documentary "Going Vertical," the director greeted an Aussie friend, thanking him for coming. The guy said, "This is the first movie I've seen. I don't come here to see movies. I can do that on the plane over." Many of the 35,000 industry insiders attending the festival have a similar attitude, making it easy for me to go wild seeing as many movies as I wish.

"Going Vertical" is a surfing term for cutting back on a wave and climbing its face. This wasn't possible until the l960s when shorter, lighter, more maneuverable surf boards made their appearance. Until then everyone surfed on sixteen-foot boards weighing over thirty pounds. This film sets out to resolve the argument over who instigated this revolution, the Americans or the Australians. It offered a good history of surfing with loads of old footage and interviews with those pioneers, now in their 60s.

I had to fight through a mob clogging the lobby and stairways of the Palais complex of screening rooms in line for a repeat screening of "Biutiful," playing in the 300- seat Bunuel Theater, to see "Siren" a British thriller that bordered on being a horror film. This was the first piece of schlock that I had stumbled into, a genuine waste of time.

The siren is a mostly mute, wispy, blond-haired woman on a deserted island in the Mediterranean. A guy and his girl friend and her ex-boyfriend run aground on her island when they respond to someone flashing a mirror at them. It is a guy down to his last gasps. They see the woman on a rise in the distance and go in pursuit of her. They find more dead bodies and can't figure out how to escape the island. It was a mystery to me what kept the fifteen or so men in the theater in their seats watching this drivel. They must have known someone in the film or involved with its making and felt a responsibility to watch it to the end. I stuck it out simply as a study of market fare.

From the very start of the festival the Russian Competition film "Exodus: Burnt by the Sun 2," the most expensive Russian film of all time, has been in the news over its three-hour running time and controversial version of WWII. It has opened in Russia to a very tepid box office. It screens here Saturday. It seems as if we will see an edited version. There was a report yesterday that a topless scene had been cut. Its French distributor, Wild Bunch, responded to that in today's papers, saying, "We've never cut a topless scene in any film. At Wild Bunch we love nudity and blood."

Later, George

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Cannes, Day Six

Friends: Rare is it for a film to come out of Greenland or Chad and rarer yet for such a film to be good. Yet today, Day Six of the festival, such a rarity struck. This delightful pair of films weren't merely windows upon life in Greenland and Chad, but offered good solid stories with insight into the people and the culture of these countries.

"A Screaming Man" from Chad was worthy enough to be included in the field of nineteen films competing for the Palm d'Or, something that doesn't happen very often for a film from Africa. The acting and writing might not measure up to its competitors, but the story of father-and-son pool attendants at a luxury hotel was as gripping as any of the movies I have seen so far.

The movie takes place as rebel forces disrupt life in the country. New management has taken over the hotel and decides one person is enough to look after the pool. The father is relegated to a lesser position of tending to the gate. Just as his salary is reduced, it is time for him to pay his taxes, collected in an arbitrary and under-handed manner. He is faced with a huge moral dilemma of how to come up with the money to pay his taxes.

The lead character in "Nuummioq" also has a dilemma. He learns he has a serious case of cancer just as he falls in love with a woman. He finds it extremely difficult to tell her. The stunning ocean and mountain scenery of Greenland make this a visual, as well as cinematic, treat.

Cancer also figured prominently in the day's first film in the Palais, Alejandro Gonzalez Innarritu's "Biutiful," perhaps the most anticipated film of the festival, what with Inarritu having won best director honors the last time he was here four years ago with "Babel" and the star of the movie, Javiar Bardem, having won a best supporting Oscar for "No Country for Old Men," which premiered at Cannes a year after "Babel." There had been buzz that this movie was Oscar worthy. I didn't even bother to get in the line for non-ticket holders for its 8:30 a.m. Palais screening, knowing that was a hopeless cause, but went straight to the back-up theater where it would play half an hour later. At eight a.m., I was the fourth person in line.

By 8:25, the Palais was "complete" and hoards of press and ticket-holders began descending upon the back-up theater. The only worse frenzy I've seen in my seven years here was last year for Tarantio's "Inglorius Basterds." I was in a secondary line and had to watch all the press and ticket-holders storm past me. They were already clamoring and climbing over each others' backs trying to get in.

The festival anticipated this and had three burly gendarmes at the top of the stairs to manage the mayhem. They had learned from last year's "Basterd's" mini-riot. A few people were turned back for not having the proper credentials. Rather than going to the back of the line, they stood aside ahead of us. That set off screams of protest. Most of those in line had to have been festival regulars and ought to have known enough that no movie is so important that it has to be seen immediately, but they weren't behaving so.

I was resigned to not getting in. At least there was a Laura Linney film playing at ten a.m. that I wouldn't otherwise have an opportunity to see. I felt as if I was wasting my time lingering, but I was trapped and couldn't escape and was enjoying my ringside vantage of all these people desperate to see this movie. But miraculously after 25 minutes of this crush, there was no more press and those of us with lesser credentials were allowed in, not everyone, but several dozen.

As "Basterds" was a mispelling, "Biutiful" is the misspelling of beautiful by the young son of Bardem, a rambunctious kid who causes him and his off-and-on wife no end of trouble. That is just one of the many story lines that is left dangling and is never fully developed. Drugs and illegal immigrants and marital strife and dying from cancer are all woven into the ambitious plot. Unlike Inarritu's previous films, the movie isn't fully splintered into separate stories, though it could have been. At least it all takes place in one location--Barcelona.

No one will like this movie more than Guillermo Arriaga, Inarritu's screen-writer on his previous three pictures. The two had a widely publicized split. This will vindicate his claims of deserving more credit than Inarritu was willing to give him. Screen magazine's panel of nine critics gave it the second worse score of the eight Competition films screened so far, though the Hollywood Reporter critic called it "a home run with the bases loaded." He seems to be in a distinct minority.

I put my credentials to full use today ducking in to movies after they'd started and slipping out of some before they'd finished to catch something else. Every day is a bountiful smorgasbord of films begging to be sampled. Documentaries don't necessarily need to be seen in their entirety to be enjoyed. I saw most of "Mind of the Demon" about drug-addicted motocross legend Larry Linkogle, who sets a world record 255-foot jump in Australia in the film. Hardly a single one of the talking heads who knew him can speak a sentence without the f-word.

I only had time for thirty minutes of "Oceans," the latest doc from the creators of "Microcosmos" and "Winged Migration." This too was spectacularly shot. It opens with waves crashing upon rugged sea shores, then shows creatures emerging from the ocean on blissful beaches, before diving into the ocean and its world of many creatures. It would have been a relaxing 90 minutes to have stuck with it, but I limited myself to just a sample.

"What's Going On?" wasn't a documentary, though it could have been. This was another film from a country that doesn't produce much cinema--Lebanon. It was a poetic ode of a guy wandering around Beirut having exchanges with assorted women. When I stopped by the theater 15 minutes after it started I was surprised to see the number 39 flash on the scanner of the guy who let me in after waving it over the bar code of my credentials. I didn't expect to see more than two or three others in the theater, but word must have gotten out that this was more than pedestrian fare.

A documentary I did see in its entirety was "How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?" about the British architect Norman Foster. The title comes from a question posed to him by Buckminster Fuller, a friend and great influence. I passed one of Foster's most acclaimed projects on my ride to Cannes, the world's tallest bridge through Millau. Several minutes of aerial views of the breathtakingly beautiful bridge, whose pylons are virtual sky-scrapers, are featured early on in the film.

I flew out of one of his more recent buildings this past December, Beijing's international terminal completed in time for the Olympics. It is the world's largest building. Foster gushed astonishment and praise over how hard-working the Chinese were and diligent in accomplishing grand projects. Three crews that worked around the clock for several years were housed on site to complete the project.
Skiing and bicycling are Foster's two leisure activities. He is shown doing both. He said some of his best ideas come to him when he's bicycling.

Melanie Laurent, one of the stars of Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds," stars in "The Roundup," also a Nazi WWII movie. She plays a nurse who tends to the Jews who are rounded up (kidnapped/taken hostage) in Paris July 16, l942 and taken to the indoor winter velodrome for several days before they are trained to a holding camp and then sent to Auschwitz. Before they are rounded up the Nazis realize they must establish an anti-Semitic consciousness among the Parisians so they won't interfere. However, enough do, that they prevent the Nazis from meeting their quota of 24,000 Jews, only getting 13,000. The Nazis are pleased though that the round-up didn't spark rioting and only four suicides.

Laurent accompanies the Jews to their mini-concentration camp and tries to help them as much as she can, assisting a couple of boys to escape and trying to improve their food. The film is meant to be a defense of the French, emphasizing their effort to stand up for the Jews.

At the half way point of the festival we were still waiting for a great film. My favorite is "Chongqing Blues" the first of the Competition films to be screened. Screen magazine's panel does not agree. They liked Mike Leigh's "Another Year" by a full point more, by far their top film.

The weather remains ten degrees cooler than normal thanks to the volcanic ash. So many people are concerned about flying out that one paper reported "train reservations are more popular than pommes frites."

Later, George

Monday, May 17, 2010

Cannes, Day Five

Friends: When I saw the title "Bear Nation" in the program I instantly knew this was a movie I'd want to see, figuring it might be another "Grizzly Man," or at least a study of those huge carnivores. Having had a few heart-pounding encounters with them during my two summers in Alaska and on various bike trips in bear country, they are a matter of interest to me. I also thought the title might refer to Chicago football fans, another species I am well acquainted with.

But I was quite surprised to learn from the paragraph description of the movie in the program that it was a documentary on a sub-culture of a sub-culture that I couldn't have imagined--burly, furry gay men. It is a large enough sub-culture to have a magazine and numerous web-sites and various gatherings. I wasn't sure if this was a subject I wanted to know more about, though it could qualify as the oddest, most perverse, movie of the festival, a good reason to give it a look. It had a single showing in a small hotel screening room.

A couple years ago the most outrageous film at Cannes honors when to "Zoo," a doc on men who like having sex with horses. That was well done and even was distributed. No one I mentioned "Bear Nation" too knew of the movie nor the concept or had any interest in seeing it, invariably reacting with repugnance. I was curious just to see what kind of audience it would attract.

There wasn't a bear in the audience of the seventeen brave enough to attend. The director of this American production, Malcolm Ingram, did nothing to sensationalize his movie. He found a good array of bears who were very articulate and frank. For some finding their community had been the best thing to happen to them, one even saying it had saved him from suicide. Many had felt like outcasts from the outcasts, not fitting the gay "well-groomed, twinky, limp-wristed stereotype," as one said. It touched upon the factions within the bears between the fat versus muscular "A-list" bears.

At the center of the movie was an annual gathering of bears from all over the world in Chicago that has been going on for fifteen years. They take over an entire down town hotel. The caterers love them since they eat and drink a lot and tip well and clean up after themselves. They have bowls and bowls of condoms and lube all about the hotel. This was well done and a fascinating study of people who had found themselves that I didn't mind having seen at all.

"Keep Surfing" was a German documentary on another odd-ball subculture--surfers who surf rivers. The sub-culture was launched in Munich in the '60s when it was discovered that a standing wave on a river through the city could be surfed. It is especially thrilling when the river is at flood stage and the police try to keep the surfers out of the water. Munich remains the center of river surfing, but it has spread around the world. River surfers are perpetually in search of more rivers that are surfable. One doesn't need to live near an ocean to surf.

"Mammuth" made a good companion piece to "Bear Nation." The mammoth Gerard Depardieu goes off on a vintage Mammuth motorcycle to track down places he has worked that failed to file the correct papers for his retirement benefits--bars, cemeteries, circuses, factories, churches. He has just retired from a meat-packing company and discovers that the government does not have records of all his employment. This dark comedy played at the Berlin Film Festival and is presently in commercial release in France. It has been a hit, but is looking for more distribution world wide.

This was one of two movies for the day that I had to stand to the side for until the last moment giving buyers priority. The other was the American film "The Company Men." I had no problem getting into "Mammuth," but the buyers kept pouring in to "The Company Men" drawn by the stellar cast of Ben Afflect, Tommie Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, and Kevin Kostner. The guardians of the door didn't let me and a dozen other non-buyers in until five minutes after the film had started.

We had to sit in the aisle for this tale of a huge ship building firm in Boston that is facing dire economic difficulties. Life-long employees are being laid off left and right and find it nearly impossible to find another job, even at half the pay they are accustomed to. Executives have to give up their Porshes and country-club memberships and even move in with their parents and take construction jobs. Try and guess who is going to commit suicide.

This was a very solid, well-crafted tale, but may have bit off more than it could chew. With such a cast it will have commercial appeal, but I wouldn't want to have been a buyer in the audience trying to estimate how many people would want to sit through a movie depicting the grim reality of what all too many people are suffering. It is most certainly a movie of our times, but maybe not a movie that people will want to sit through.

Those who like costume dramas and conflicted lovers will like Bertrand Tavernier's Competition entry "The Princess of Montpensier." It starts off as if it is going to be a war story with the Catholics and Huegenots in battle in 16th century France going at each other with swords and on horseback. I was counting on Tavernier to give a bit of a French history lesson, but he pretty much forgoes that to concentrate on a young woman given in marriage against her will to a man she doesn't know. She is so beautiful that any male who comes within her circle wants her. The self-destructive behavior by all parties concerned is all too predictable. Tavernier is such a beloved veteran French director though, he might possibly be given another best director award here if the quality of the Competition films is as thin as predicted.

For once there was no suspense in getting into the Debussy for its final screening of the night, the inconsequential Dutch "R U There" about a young professional video game player competing in a tournament in Taiwan. His arm goes sore, giving him the excuse to get involved with a young lovely who he thinks might be a prostitute. When they end up in the hotel's elevator alone he asks her for a massage. Initially she refuses, but then agrees to. He's a nerdy guy and she is older and much more worldly. He becomes infatuated with her, so much so that he pays her a hunk of money so he can accompany her when she goes to visit her family out in the country just to be with her though she gives him no encouragement whatsoever. Nothing much happens in this understated, but well-shot film.

There was more Sean Penn news today. He will be starring in Paolo Sorrentino's next film, "This Must Be the Place." Penn will play a wealthy former rock star who sets out to track down his father's prosecutor, an ex-Nazi war criminal now camped out in the US. Penn and Sorrentino met here at Cannes two years ago, when Penn's jury gave Sorrentino's "Il Divo" an award, a film that also received an Oscar nomination this past year.

Michael Haneke was also in the news. The Austrian director, who hasn't ridden a bicycle since his youth, was inducted into the French Legion of Honor here yesterday. It is France's highest arts honor.

Later, George

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Cannes, Day Four

Friends: Mike Leigh strikes again with a potent study of a handful of friends, some whole and some quite fractured, told over four seasons--Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. "Another Year" is probably not Palm d'Or material, but it could well earn Leslie Manville a best actress award for her unrestrained portrayal of a 50-year old alcoholic, lonely secretary with enough manic energy to fuel a small city.

She initially seems lively and buoyant, but time reveals her many demons. She thinks her life might be saved when she buys a car, but it proves her final undoing. "I'm fed up with the car," she says after it breaks down once again and after collecting innumerable tickets, adding, "It's been a disaster."

She's not the only lonely alcoholic in the cast. They are somewhat balanced out by the stable and happily married couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen. As usual, Leigh solicits deep, fully-realized performances from everyone in the cast, who all seem to relish their roles.

It ought to earn Leigh another trip to Telluride this fall. I'll be eager to ask him if he's much of a bicyclist, as I asked Michael Hanake last year, as both of them include more than passing allusions to the bicycle in their movies. Broadbent's 30-year old lawyer son shows up at his house one weekend on his bicycle, riding some thirty miles to get there. Broadbent suggests to a grotesquely overweight friend that they ought to take a bike ride together. He declines saying he hasn't been on a bike since 1896. Bicycles zip by in the background on occasion. And in his last movie, "Happy-Go-Lucky," the lead character begins the movie with a rollicking bike ride.

I left the theater thoroughly drained, but exhilarated, not wishing to talk or even resume reading any of the trade papers, as I stood in line for my next feature, another Competition entry, "The Housemaid" from South Korea. A beautiful young woman goes to work as a live-in maid for a very wealthy couple who have a young daughter and twins on the way. The husband can't resist seducing her. There are a number of fresh twists to the intrigue that follows. It was most watchable, but nothing of enduring significance.

I was able to catch a much needed nap during "Paris Express," a silly comedy about a motor-bike courier in Paris sucked into the most outlandish delivery of all time. Paris has no concentrated business district, so it is not conducive to bicycle messengers. This movie conveyed some of the courier mentality--always in a rush, not paid much respect nor enough money, battling cops and dispatchers and fellow couriers.

A courier in "Paris Express" is called upon for an emergency delivery on his day off when he and his girl friend are on the way to a family wedding that they are taking the cake to. The delivery requires picking up an envelope from a rooftop parking lot and taking it to a bar. No one is at the bar to receive it. A phone in the envelope starts ringing. When the courier opens the envelope to answer it a wad of 500 euro bills fall out. They are in exchange for a suitcase of diamonds that are payment for a stolen Rembrandt. The courier is chased by several sets of bad guys and all sorts of irrelevant mayhem ensues that allowed me to catch up on my sleep.

Australian director Bruce Beresford, who goes all the way back to "Breaker Morant," found an excellent true story for a movie--a Chinese ballet dancer who defects to the US in 1981 while dancing with the Houston Ballet. "Mao's Last Dancer" is by-the-numbers directing, but still a heart-warming and inspiring tale with flashbacks of his growing up in China.

The young man falls in love with a young aspiring dancer and the US. When he requests to extend his three-month stay, the Chinese government refuses. An immigration lawyer tells him that if he marries, he can stay. He and the young girl are very much in love, so they marry. They and the lawyer and representatives of the Houston Ballet go to the Chinese Consulate in Houston to plead his case. While there the dancer is taken hostage. The lawyer says according to US law it is "kidnapping," the second of the day with the other in "Paris Express." The news media learns of the story and the publicity forces the Chinese to relent and let him stay, though he isn't allowed to return to China for years.

As I walked out of this theater in the Arcades, I was caught up in a mob filing in to see "Robert Mitchum Is Dead" in an adjoining theater. That was one of my next options so I just slipped in with them. There were so many people involved with this French comedy in the audience that it took 20 minutes to introduce them all, preventing me from getting in to the next movie I wished to see.

This comedy was droll enough to have been concocted by Jim Jarmusch or one of the Kaurasmakis. Appropriately enough this road movie ended up in Finland at a clone of the Midnight Sun Film Festival that I have attended north of the Arctic Circle. An agent steals a car and whisks an actor client to the festival to meet an American director who he hopes will hire him. He doesn't speak much English, so along the way they stop at a Polish film school and at gun point force the students to make a short with him to prove his talents. Along the way they pick up a big black hitch hiker with very tall hair.

Charles of Facets had noticed the throngs trying to get in to see the movie. He asked if he ought to see it. I wasn't sure whether to recommend this madcap farce or not, as it needed the final polish of Jarmusch or Kaurasmaki to make it fully watchable despite its many pleasing moments.

I fell 20 people short of getting in to the 10:15 screening of "Heartbeats," a French Canadian feature I greatly wanted to see as it was by the director of "I Killed My Mother," one of my favorite films from last year, a comedy so dark it has never made it to Chicago. At least I'll have a couple more opportunities.

So instead I saw "Bendi Bilili," a French documentary on a group of Congolese street musicians that was the opening night film for the Director's Fortnight a few nights ago. It is the remarkable story of handicapped, very poor street people who hone their talents and cut a record and play for audiences all over the world.

The festival has been star-starved since Russell Crowe and Kate Blancette walked up the red carpet Wednesday night. Expectations were high for the arrival of Naomi Watts and Sean Penn in a few nights. But Penn canceled out so he could attend Congressional hearings on Haiti. He was here two years ago as president of the jury. He may not wish to answer to criticism that he insisted his jury give extra consideration to films of a political nature, surprising everyone by giving awards to two different Italian films on the mafia. Sharon Stone has also elected not to attend the festival, concerned about flying through volcanic dust. For years she has hosted an AIDS fundraiser at the end of the festival.

Later, George

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Cannes, Day Three

Friends: Today was the day of the first screening of the lone movie of the festival with the mention of bicycling in its description. Unlike last year's bonanza of four movies fully devoted to the bicycle, this is it for 2010, back to normal.

It was an Italian horror movie that I otherwise wouldn't have gone near, but I was at least rewarded with a healthy dose of mountain biking for the first twenty minutes until the bikers are taken hostage (kidnapped) along with several others and tortured by some ex-Nazi. The movie commences with the voice-over of an American soldier in Iraq writing a letter to his mother telling her how much he is looking forward to "getting out of this shit-hole and getting back on my bike." Someone has told him about some fantastic biking in the Italian Alps that he wants to try. As is the entire movie, the dialogue is in English.

Then there is an aerial view of him zooming along a dirt track through some stunning mountain scenery, my third straight day of such scenery. After he defends a woman mountain biker in a bar from a couple of thugs, the two of them are chased through the mountains by the pair in their car and also by their dog, as they shoot at them and try to run them down. The four of them fall into the lair of a Nazi who performs experiments on them. Unlike the virtual private screening I had of most of the bicycling films I saw last year, there was considerable interest in this. Horror continues to be popular.

I had forty minutes to spare between this screening and the next so I ducked into the Short Film Forum to search out the bicycling short "PediLove" recommended by Yonder Vittles. It was one of some 1,700 shorts submitted to the festival. The top ten will be screened. The rest are available to watch on computer. There was a mob of young film-makers hobnobbing in the short film quarters. It was a several minute wait before one of the forty computers was available.

Less than half of this eighteen minute short was a pedicab ride in New York's Central Park by a recent college graduate who is visiting Manhattan for the first time to meet her banker boy friend. While she waits for him to get off work she is pedaled around by a long-haired Nigerian. They hit it off. When her boy friend doesn't pay her enough attention when they meet, she goes back in search of the pedicab driver.

There was at least one other short featuring the bicycle--a young girl being given a ride on her father's bike. There was nothing out of the ordinary in it either.

I've been whittling my daily dose of documentaries down from three on day one to two yesterday and just one today--"Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel." The daily trades had full page ads in yesterday's editions advertising today's 9:15 a.m. screening. There was a huge throng outside the theater waiting to get in, but most of them were there to see a 30-minute promo of a John Landis film, with Landis introducing it. Only 13 in the crowd were there for the Hef doc.

Much of the doc is Hef sitting around his mansion in an array of silk pajamas recounting his life's story, though there was a full arsenal of others commenting on his extraordinary life. Of the many commentators (James Caan, Tony Bennett, Dr. Ruth, David Steinberg, Dick Cavet, Jesse Jackson, Pat Boone, Dick Gregory, Joan Baez, Jim Brown, George Lucas, Mike Wallace, his daughter, many former editors) the film-maker chose Gene Simmons of Kiss to lead off the parade saying, "There is not a man who wouldn't want to have lived Hef's life."

As most Hef profiles, this was dominated by bosoms, but there was also considerable time devoted to how he championed racial equality and free speech as well as sexual freedom, while building an empire along the way. This film makes a strong case for him being a seminal figure in the last half of the 20th century.

I passed on Oliver Stone's "Wall Street--Money Never Sleeps" in the Palais knowing it will be easily accessible when it opens in the States come fall, even though it would have been nice to get a four-month jump on the masses.

My lone Competition film for the day was "On Tour" directed and starring Mathieu Amalric, a French Steve Buscemi who won a slew of best-actor awards for his performance in "The Butterfly and the Bell Jar" a couple of years ago. Those on tour are several semi-washed up 30-year old American burlesque dancers. Amalric is leading them around France, alternately speaking English and French.

This seemed like a premise that would curry favor with jury president Tim Burton, a man whose first film was the bicycling film "Pee Wee's Big Adventure." But this was a surprisingly bland and pedestrian effort that just plods along. We learn nothing about the strippers. Too much of the film is devoted to Amalric's character with just random droplets of undigested biography dispensed. All of a sudden his two young sons join the tour. He occasionally leaves for no apparent reason. If he had concentrated on these aging women and their response to France it could have been a helluva movie.

Kevin Kline and Paul Dano share an apartment in "The Extra Man." One of their neighbors is a bicycle-riding John C. Reilly with a flourishing beard half way to his waist. This movie had wackiness to spare. Kline is "an extra man," someone who is on call to accompany wealthy Manhattan widows to their art openings and dinners. He's a full-fledged eccentric just barely scraping by. Dano comes to Manhattan after being fired from the Princeton prep school where is was teaching for being caught trying on a bra. He pursues his cross-dressing in New York. This is one of those movies in the market hoping to stir up some interest, but probably won't find much. I'll be among the few to have ever seen it, even though it wasn't half-bad.

I'll also probably be one of the few non-Taiwanese to see "Rail Truck." I had no intention of seeing it myself, but two other movies I wished to see in its time slot were sold out. But it wasn't a total disappointment. I learned that Japan occupied Taiwan during WWII and that those Taiwanese who supported the Japanese war efforts received better rations than those who didn't.

A young Japanese mother living in Tokyo visits her in-laws on Taiwan for the first time with her two young sons after her Taiwanese husband dies. Her father-in-law resents that even though he served in the Japanese army, he hasn't been able to collect a pension or even had a word of thanks in 60 years.

It was a day of mobs fighting to get into movies. My third and final for the day was the 10:30 pm screening of "Chatroom." The mob was extra impatient as the Debussy staff didn't begin seating us until 10:30, delaying the start until nearly eleven. There was great interest, especially among the young, to see this UK thriller based on the play of the same name about teens and Internet chatrooms.

The set designer is one of the stars of this production, bringing chatrooms most-stylishly to life as if they were an extra dimension in the universe. Teens contemplating suicide is the dominant theme. The parents of one who had slit his wrists, but survived, are in joint therapy with their son. They thought he had overcome his suicidal impulses, but he hasn't. There is much fast-paced commotion of teens in disarray.

Tomorrow I have a Parisian motor-cycle courier film to check out.

Later, George

Friday, May 14, 2010

Cannes, Day Two

Friends: As Julie and I sat in a tiny Palais screening room awaiting our next movie discussing the one we had just seen, a well-dressed Frenchman stooped in the aisle next to us and said, "I represent the film you're talking about and this one too. If you have any interest in them, here's my card."

Both his films were documentaries starring breathtaking mountains--the Himalayas in one and the Alps in the other. Before I could ask him if he had seen "180 Degrees South," yesterday's exceptional doc with a good dose of Patagonian peaks, the lights went out and the film started.

Almost from the start of "Beyond the Summit," a tribute to 46-year old climbing legend, Catherine Destivelle of France, the greatest woman climber of all time, my palms were sweating watching her scale sheer walls around Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe. The film comprises three climbs with friends and mentors. The first was with a long-time woman friend. The second with her 31-year old kid sister. The final climb is up a glacier with her 72-year old ex-husband and an equally old buddy of his.

All three climbs are intimately and spectacularly photographed from the air and from over their shoulders and into their faces. How I can't imagine. Only in the snow can there be seen footsteps of the crew ahead. The terrain was so perilous this had my heart palpitating as if it were a horror movie. Any slip and it would have been instant death. Catherine and her mates are miked and comment and reflect all the way up. At one point she assures us, "I am not suicidal, but I do like danger."

The earlier mountain doc, "Himalaya, A Path to the Sky," had its harrowing moments as well, as an eight-year old monk walks on a narrow snow-packed trail with a thousand foot drop to one side. He's on his way to an isolated monastery. This French production was shot over three months. It portrays the daily life of the monks and the families in the region.

Among the five features I squeezed in today along with these two documentaries was the first of the Competition films, "Chongquing Blues," by Wang Xiaoshuai, director of "Beijing Bicycle." As I walked up the steep aisle in the 2300 seat Palais before the 8:30 a.m. screening I was looking for Charles of Facets. He called out my name before I could spot him in the second row from the top. He had gotten in yesterday and said he would be sleeping on someone's couch his first week here.

After yesterday's Market fare, "Chongqing Blues" looked extra magisterial on the giant Palais screen. From the opening scene of a tram crossing high above the wide Yangzi River I was fully absorbed in this poignant tale of a father just returned from six months at sea trying to learn more about the death of his 25-year old son while he was away. It doesn't help that he had left his wife 14 years before and hadn't seen her since. She slams the door of her apartment in his face, but not before throwing a wad of newspapers at him that tell the story of his son being shot by a cop after taking a woman hostage in a supermarket.

Slowly we learn all the details of his son's life and his as well. I was particularly enamored by the film having recently spent two months in China. I was continually reminded of the many kindly and hospitable people I met there and relating to the spot-on detail.

That was one of two films I saw on Day Two with a kidnapping element. The other was "happythankyoumoreplease" (yes there are no spaces in the title), audience favorite from Sundance this year. One of the twenty-somethings in this sweet romantic comedy that takes place in Manhattan is a writer who takes in a 10-year old black kid who has fled his foster parents and doesn't want to return. His friends are all horrified that he hasn't returned him, saying that it constitutes kidnapping. That is just one of a multitude of story lines in this film of multiple love affairs, all with happy endings. Audience favorites are generally feel-good movies, and this fits that category. Oprah would fully endorse its philosophy. The title refers to expressing gratitude for good things that happen to one, asking for more.

I declined the second film showing in Competition, saving it for tomorrow, so I could see the lone screening of "Big Fan," a rare sports fan movie. The fan in this movie is a 36-year old New Yorker who lives for the New York Giants football team. He lives with his mother, works as a parking lot attendant and is a regular on a sports talk show. His mother and lawyer brother and dentist brother-in-law are continually nagging him to get a real job. He carefully rehearse his radio harangues. After he delivers them his best friend calls and congratulates him, "You were on fire." He and his buddy can't afford tickets to the games, so they sit in the parking lot of Giants Stadium and watch the game on a TV on the trunk of their beat-up car.

This film could have been partially inspired by Cubs fan Paul Bartman, as the fan of this film inadvertently becomes involved with the team's destiny, to an almost outlandish, but plausible extent. This was well-conceived and rings true from start to finish.

I ended the day with the first two films in Uncertain Regard playing in the 1068 seat Debussy theater, the other grand venue of the festival. The opening film was by Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira. He walked up to the stage with the aid of a cane to a standing ovation.

His "Strange Case of Angelica" is the rather flimsy story of a handsome photographer who sees visions of a beautiful wealthy young woman who he is summoned to photograph at two in the morning shortly after her death. As he photographs her he sees her smile at him through his lens. He quickly drops his camera and looks around at the family seated around him. None of them noticed. He is haunted throughout the film by her. This was light-weight fare with none of the emotional depth of "Chongqing Blues." It looked good but amounted to little more than "so-what."

"Tuesday, after Christmas" more than made up for it. It was another solid film from Romania portraying life as it is. Rather than political or social as a recent spate of Romanian films, this one is about a man having an affair. It opens with a prolonged nude scene of a couple in post-coitus. They are too enamored with one another to be husband and wife. The man has a wife, and the younger woman is his mistress of five months. He is seemingly happily married with a young daughter. He is a nice guy, just slightly tormented by what to do. As with the fan movie, there is not a false note in this script.

Later, George

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Cannes, Day One

Friends: In 1968 outdoor equipment company legends Yvon Chouinard and Douglas Tompkins, who went on to found Patagonia and North Face, were a couple of surfing and climbing bums who had accomplished quite a few significant climbing feats in Yosemite and elsewhere. Looking for greater adventure they drove a van, lashed with surfboards on its roof, ten thousand miles from California to Chile, surfing and climbing all the way. For both of them it was the "best trip" of their lives.

They traveled with a 16-millimeter camera. A few years ago a young climber/surfer, Jeff Johnson, stumbled upon their footage and decided to duplicate their trip taking along a film-maker to document it. They won the favor of Chouinard and Tompkins, who appear in the film. They also allow them to intersperse footage of their 1968 trip in their film "180 Degrees South."

Johnson reminds them of themselves in their younger days. Chouinard calls him, "the real thing, a total dirt bag." Johnson sails some of them way. At one point the 70 foot mast on the boat he's hitched a ride on breaks and it has to limp to Easter Island for repairs. As Chouinard says, "When everything goes wrong, that's when the adventure starts."

One of Easter Island's remaining 110 residents is a woman surfer. During the several weeks the crew is stranded on Easter Island Johnson wins her favor. She continues on with the crew to Chile where they meet up with Chouinard and Tompkins and try to climb Corcovado, a virtually unclimbable peak usually covered in snow. The 70-year old Chouinard decides at the last minute to join them on the climb.

He is still a strong advocate of independent, do-it-yourself climbs. He decries "all the plastic surgeons and CEOs who pay $80,000 to climb Everest and are led the way up with Sherpas carrying their packs who set up their tents and put chocolate mints on their pillows." Such adventures should test one's fortitude and not be made easy, that's how one raises one's soul, he says, adding, such people are "an asshole when they start out and an asshole when they come back."

This was a sensational film in many ways that more than made my day. Chouinard and Tompkins have long been heroes. They are presently devoting much of their time to maintaining a national park they established in Chile that is larger than Yellowstone.

"Rejoice and Shout," a documentary on gospel music, was also full of exceptional archival footage of early day gospel singers and the plantation culture they grew out of showing field hands picking cotton and ministers giving river baptisms. Among the footage was a duel between two five-somes of male blind singers, one known as The Blind Boys of Alabama and the other The Blind Boys of Jackson. Mahalia Jackson is also profiled. She was initially a hair dresser in Chicago promoted by Studs Turkel. One of her clients says she "did hair so good it lasted three weeks."

Half my first day's films were documentaries. The third was "Weapons of Mass Addiction," a Spanish/Mexican production about the evil automobile and how it is causing the ruination of the planet. It opens in Los Angeles, "the city of the automobile," and largely is focused on the US. It has a Spanish narration, though most of the people interviewed are Americans speaking English.

It ably documents the automobile as a destroyer, but rather than proposing to phase the automobile out, it just encourages limiting its use. It discovers two people in Los Angeles who manage to get along without a car and bicycle all over. They find a similar person in New York, who speaks of the "freedom and magic of riding a bicycle." Rather than concentrating on getting people on bikes though, it expresses hope that electric and bio-diesel cars will come to the planet's rescue and save the air and that people will try car-sharing programs and use more mass transit. No matter what fuel a car runs on, it is still a dangerous weapon that needs to be greatly limited, if not eliminated.

Two of my feature films were about kidnappings, something that looks like it could be the theme of the festival. Having read through the entire program now, at least 20films mention kidnapping. "Life Wire" from Germany is even described as "a day in the life of an innocent kidnapper." Usually there are a slew of serial killer movies. There are only a couple this year, but still the usual glut of horror films.

"Bitter Feast" was a kidnapping/horror film. I thought this tale of a chef who kidnaps a food critic who cost him his job might be a comedy, but it was anything but. Both the chef and critic are such unlikeable characters I hoped neither of them would survive their ordeal in the woods. It was too much for Julie. She walked out with half an hour to go. Horror in the forest is another predominant theme. Quite a few of the horror films seem to take place there. When I'm camping I always seek out forests and regard them as a place of refuge, not terror, as filmmakers like to portray them.

Gerard Depardieu becomes a kidnapper in "My Afternoons with Margueritte," rescuing 95-year old Margueritte from an undesirable nursing home, when she can no longer afford a nicer one. He had befriended her in the park, as they both like feeding its pigeons. He is a working class man who was a very poor student, not even mastering reading. She reads him Camus' "The Stranger" and inspires him to read on his own. This was the lone screening of the day that was packed with people sitting in the aisles.

There was some archival commentary from Jimmy Carter in "Night Catches Us," a film that takes place in Philadelphia in the summer of 1976 when he was running for president and the Black Panthers were killing cops. A former Black Panther, recently released from prison for selling guns, returns to the wife of a Panther who was gunned down in his house by the cops for having killed a cop himself. His wife and the ex-con get back together. There is still simmering rage in the community between blacks and whites and the cops.

The hoot for the day was the thirty minutes of "Suck" I saw, a Canadian rock and roll vampire film with Malcolm MacDowell as a vampire wearing an eye patch. Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop have small roles. This oddity attracted a near full house too. I would have gladly watched it to the end if I didn't have the anti-car doc to see.

Looking forward to Day Two's beginning of the invited films playing in the competitive categories, but still not a bad start to the festival.

Later, George

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Cannes, France

Friends: As so often happens, the road fulfills a need I might have. I found a pair of brand new quite stylish pants with price tag still attached just before I arrived at Julie's house twelve days ago. They were a tad tight in the waist, but I knew I'd be slimmed down for them to fit by the time I arrived in Cannes.

I had brought along only one pair of long pants this year, somewhat of a risk if it was rainy and cold, preventing me from using my shorts as a backup if my long pants got wet or soiled. For just the second time in my seven years of attending Cannes, I had to bike the three-and-a-half miles from the campground to the theaters in the rain this morning. The weather continues to be topsy-turvy, perhaps thanks to all the volcanic ash in the air. Both Milos Stehlik and Patrick McGavin, friends from Chicago and festival regulars, said their flights were delayed, though they have arrived in ample time before the movies begin tomorrow.

Snow has fallen on southern cities in France that sometimes don't even get snow in the winter. But the most perverse meteorological event was a ten-meter tsunami-type wave that hit Cannes eight days ago, closing the thirty mile stretch of road between Nice and Cannes and wiping out restaurants along the beach. Never before has Cannes been hit by such a wave.

Bull-dozers are still regrooming the sand. The festival puts up dozens of tents along the beach. It would have been a "catastrophe" of the first order if the wave had hit during the festival. A large screen is erected right at the water's edge for night-time screenings, the lone movie venue of the festival the public has access to. That would have been plowed up onto the Croisette, the mile long road that runs along the beach and has French historical landmark status.

With the inclement weather I've had to spend most of today inside perusing the festival schedule that I picked up at eight this morning rather than out along the Croisette as I'd prefer. I'm just a little over half way through the brief summaries of the 1400 films on tap, and have yet to find a bicycling film. The closest thing to it is an Italian comedy with a picture of a man straddling a bike. How much he rides it remains to be seen. But there is a Spanish-Mexican documentary, "Weapons of Mass Addiction," tracing the doom the automobile has inflicted on mankind--over one million deaths a year, and pollution that creates even more deaths. It plays just once, tomorrow. I will be there.

With the festival just gearing up tomorrow and none of the four competitive categories playing films there are just 60 films to choose from, less than a quarter of what it will be like starting Thursday. So Julie and I have a relatively easy time of lining up our films. Julie intends to tag along with me at first before she gets her bearings. She is agreeable to starting out with a documentary on gospel singing followed by a documentary retracing an epic drive in 1968 from California to the tip of South American by a couple of surfing and climbing bums who went on to found North Face and Patagonia. Then it will be a Depardieu film, one of at least three in the program.

It is impossible to resist at least the start of "Suck," a Canadian horror comedy with Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and Malcolm McDowell. The anti-car documentary plays in the theater next door half an hour after it starts. Then we have the option of a movie about an ex-black panther or Kristin Scott Thomas as a vengeful French business woman. We'll end the night with "Bitter Feast," one of quite a few kidnapping movies. The victim in this movie is a "notoriously snarky food critic." He is held by a TV chef who makes him cook seemingly easy items to perfection. Larry Fesendon is among the cast.

We'll pass on a Jim Belushi suburban comedy about an all-boy escort service and a Michael Madsen thriller.

Later, George