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Friday, May 16, 2008
Our Man in Cannes: Mark Cuban, movie maverick
2929, owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, is having a high-profile year here in Cannes.
It wasn’t too long ago that the duo behind broadcast.com were newbies along the Croisette, ready to spend some of the billions of dollars they made by selling their Dallas-based company to Yahoo.
This week, 2929 picked up the international sales rights to John Waters’ new movie, “Fruitcake,” starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey. They’re selling rights to the film in the market section of the festival.
The movie focuses on a kid who gets separated from his Waters-weird parents on Christmas Eve.
The Cuban/Wagner team also is handling international sales for Barry Levinson’s “What Just Happened?”; James Gray’s “Two Lovers” and Guillermo Arriaga’s “The Burning Plain.”
Variety broke the story about the Waters deal Thursday.
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Our Man in Cannes: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s best film ever
CANNES, France — Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan of Turkey has been a critical favorite in Cannes ever since “Climates” premiered here a few years ago.
He has been so well-regarded among film snobs that Joel and Ethan Coen last year showed a short film about a cowboy (Josh Brolin) who goes to an L.A. theater and asks the ticket seller to describe “Climates.”
The result was hilarious, in a Coen brothers kind of way. (Ceylan typically focuses on moods, not events, so “Climates” is quite hard to describe.)
So it was interesting to see Ceylan’s latest, “The Three Monkeys,” on Thursday night. I’ve never been a big Ceylan fan. I respect his work, especially the cinematography. But I’ve usually been faced with watching his movies at 10 p.m. here in Cannes, and if there’s not much going on up on the big screen, I tend to nod. (That’s a horrible admission, but it happens all the time. I sat next to a critic who slept last night.)
Remarkably enough, I was engrossed by “The Three Monkeys” from the very beginning. It’s the best Ceylan film ever, not that such a comment will mean much to most people.
It focuses on a politician who is involved in a hit-and-run on a dark, lonely road. He gets out of the car, but hides when another vehicle shows up. The driver doesn’t stop to help, but calls police with the license plate number of the abandoned politician’s car.
The politician, knowing he’s in trouble, pays a man who occasionally works as his driver to confess to the hit-and-run and go to prison. Regular paychecks will be sent to his family, and a big payday will come when he is freed, should he remain silent.
To say any more would give away too much of the plot. But one deception leads to another, and another, and another.
Ceylan’s cinematography is wonderful, once again.
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Our Man in Cannes: Emerging stars
CANNES, France — New stars emerge in Cannes each year, and a few months later, the rest of the world begins to take notice.
At the 61st annual festival, the first new star has to be Michael Fassbender, who plays an IRA rebel who goes on a hunger strike in a British prison in the early 1980s. The movie is director Steve McQueen’s “Hunger,” and no, this McQueen is not related to the late actor Steve McQueen. Fassbender leads a group of imprisoned men against a series of brutalities, and by the end of the movie, he’s an emaciated shell of a man, his body covered with bedsores.
Even though “Hunger” will have a hard time drawing large audiences in the States, it has a raw power, much of it derived from Fassbender’s performance.
It was announced Friday that Fassbender has been named to play Heathcliff in Ecosse Films’ upcoming “Wurthering Heights.”
Tim Haslam of Hanway films, which is handling international sales, told the trade publication Screen International that Fassbender is “brooding, wild and dangerous. He could be a Brando for Britain.”
The other emergent star is Martina Gusman of “The Lion’s Den,” or “Leonera” in Spanish. In the Argentine flick, Gusman transforms herself from a sniveling victim into an empowered woman. For most of the film, she’s trapped in prison, where she gives birth to a baby boy. But it’s fascinating to watch her face, her slow-evolving physicality and her ultimate bravery as she stands up for her rights as a mother.
She could easily win the best-actress award here, but such predictions usually come to naught in quirky Cannes.
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Our Man in Cannes: ‘Indiana Jones’ buzz
CANNES, France — The Daily Variety headline says it all: “Indy braves the Palais of Doom.”
When “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” premieres Sunday, the notoriously picky pack of Cannes critics will undoubtedly be ready with sharpened knives. In the past, they’ve been known to boo, throw things at the screen, slam their seats up and walk out in droves.
In short, it’s not pretty when movies fall flat.
Snootiness, in fact, comes as easily here as the early-summer rains, and a summer Hollywood blockbuster like the new Indy movie is bound to get drenched.
But it’s not as if critical reaction in Cannes will be of any import in terms of box office, especially in America. “The Da Vinci Code” was justifiably savaged here during its premiere a few years ago and went on to gross $758 million.
Paramount, the studio behind the new Indy flick, seems well aware that storms are brewing. After exhibitor screenings last week in the U.S., Variety reports, word went out on blogs that the new Indy was rather tired.
In a sign of Paramount’s edginess, the studio has invited some critics to attend a brief press conference Saturday with director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas and the stars. But unlike most press conferences, none of the critics will have seen the movie yet. That probably won’t stop some pointed questions, but it’s also unlikely to generate any early positive buzz.
So one has to wonder: Why is Paramount bothering?
Most of the invited critics say they plan to attend the early press conference Saturday, as well as go to the one right after the critics’ screening on Sunday. But few, if any, expect to write anything of substance about the new “Indy” until after the press screening at 3:30 p.m. Cannes time Sunday.
And who knows. Perhaps Indiana Jones can pull of another miracle escape.
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