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Monday, May 28, 2007 - 09:48:53
Judd Apatow, director of the upcoming "Knocked Up" is featured in Sunday's New York Times magazine.
"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The Romanian film topped the Coen Brothers popular film "No Country for Old Men," David Fincher's "Zodiac" and Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." This isn't much of a surprise. Many at the festival predicted that "4 Months" would be one of the top contenders for the big prize.
"Going strictly by the critics' polls here, the top-rated pictures on the Croisette in 2007 are "No Country for Old Men," "4 Months" and "Zodiac"; reaction to "Zodiac" confirms the view of some industryites that Paramount should have waited to premiere the film in Cannes and waited until September to release it," notes Todd McCarthy of Variety.
Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott host a final podcast where they both agree that it was the strongest field in more than a decade. Dargis, in a wrap-up piece in the Times notes, "Whether because of happenstance or hard work, the 60th Cannes Film Festival has presented attendees with an embarrassment of riches. The competition lineup has been notably strong, on occasion galvanizing, resulting in more cheers from the international press than jeers (a beloved tradition) than I’ve heard in the past decade."
Thursday, May 24, 2007 - 13:10:05
In case you missed the first live-action go-round of "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe" starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella, Warner Bros. Pictures and producer Joel Silver are bringing it back.
The boys are back in "Ocean's Thirteen" which screened out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Variety's Todd McCarthy writes, "As smooth as a good mojito, as stylish as an Armani suit and as meaningful in the grand scheme of things as yesterday's Las Vegas betting odds, "Ocean's Thirteen" continues the breezy good times of the first two series entries without missing a beat."
In the year of third installments, it's a pleasant surprise if this film is decent considering what's happened thus far. "Spider-man 3" was awful. "Shrek the third" was tired by most accounts (and outpaced at the box office by "Once" if you look at per-screen averages) and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" is getting cooked by critics (it currently has a 45% Cream of the Crop rating at rottentomatoes.com). Peter Travers of Rolling Stone writes, "Producer Jerry Bruckheimer does deserve a shoutout: It takes a kind of genius to sucker audiences into repeatedly buying the same party tricks. Know what? There really is no legit way to review Pirates 3. It's not a movie at all, it's a business proposition."
Lots of enthusiasm on webs for the french language film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" which screeened yesterday in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, an adaptation of the best-selling memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was editor in chief of Elle magazine in France before suffering a stroke at 42. After the stroke Mr. Bauby had to endure full consciousness and complete immobility, apart from the ability to open and close one eye.
Manohla Dargis of The New York Times describes the film as "exuberant as well as poignant, and remarkably unsentimental given the subject" and declares it to be "moving and gorgeously shot." Anne Thompson of Variety writes that the film is "achingly sad and beautiful," and notes "there wasn't a dry eye in the house." Glenn Kenny of Premiere says the film is a "pretty solid contender for this year's Palme d'Or."
North American rights to the film were sold to Miramax yesterday for $3 million. A Best Foreign Film Oscar campaign is sure to follow. Here's the 1997 New York Times review of the book.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 - 11:08:27
Director Martin Scorsese announced a foundation to find and restore neglected treasures of world cinema during an appearance Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival. . .The idea stemmed from the work of The Film Foundation in the United States, which Scorsese founded in 1990 along with Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg. . .The goal is to get restored pictures from around the world more exposure, whether on DVD, in cinemas or on the Internet. 
"POTC:AWE is a lukewarm maelstrom of secret agendas, double crossings, tricky alliances, back stabbings, familial complications, romantic entanglements, political conspiracies, warring factions, hidden gods, cheeky monkeys, and excessive eyeliner—some of which is linked to events from the previous installments, some of which is freshly pulled out of the collective ass of director Gore Verbinski and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, and none of which is the least bit captivating or, by and large, comprehensible" - - Nathan Lee of Village Voice on "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."
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