The middle of dinner

I just finished dinner, and before that, I saw four films, more on that tomarrow. I'm goign to the fifth in about twenty minutes. More reviews in the morning.

Thursday morning: Singing in the Rain

It's pouring out there, and me without my umbrella. Fortunately, I've got some plastic bags so my computer doesn't get wet. In the meantime, here are some more reviews:

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang (USA)

Written and Directed
by Shane Black

The cool thing about this film is that it's fun to watch shiny, happy people shooting at each other for little reason. This is a murder mystery as well as a lessen in Story Structure®. We begin at one of those glitzy Hollywood parties that we never get invited to, when we hear the voice of one Harry Lockhart(Robert Downey Jr.) explaining the situation of how he got there and then…oh yeah, there's what appears to be a gratuitous flashback to a scene in 1980, it means something, but we aren't told till about a third of the picture is over.

Nonwithstanding, it seems that our Harry is a small time crook who somehow got a free trip to LaLaland while escaping the police, He's to play a private eye in Harlan Dexter's(Corbin Bernsen) latest action thriller and is to be given lessons from the aptly named Gay Perry(Val Kilmer), whom we first meet while saving our hero from being beaten up by some guy who was harassing the really beauteous Harmony Faith Lane(Michelle Monaghan), who we discover was Harry's best friend in childhood, thus explaining the opening flashback.

The next night, Harry and Perry are on a stakeout, when…an unidentified body is thrown in the river…This and other bodies are found and disposed of in the course of the picture, and as it turns out that one of these was at one point the sister of Ms. Lane, we've got all sorts of sexual hijinks, hence the title of the film.

This is one heck of a ride. Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. are, when they're sober and motivated, two of our best actors around and this is one of those times. I've never heard of Ms. Monaghan before, but she's sexy and georgious and can act just as good as the two leads. Black's script is fast and funny, which explains why this has all the great buzz.

This is one heck of a film and is gonna make a mint.

SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC

Directed by
Liam Lynch

So who the hell is Sarah Silverman? I didn't have a clue. She's famous enough to have a performance film made of her act, that's for sure. But is it good? That's a genuine puzzlement.

In these days of political correctness and hypersensitivity, Silverman's act is based on ethnic humor, not just commenting on the Jewish experience, but blasting away at everybody else as well.

For the most part she gets away with it, but a lot of her jokes fall flat. I guess you have to be there in the audience of a real performance to really get into it.

The musical numbers are for the most part lame. Instead of just going with the flow, Director Lynch has decided to edit in a bunch of music videos of the songs, and that might have worked if they were any good, which they're not.

On the positive side, Silverman is really hot looking, and is very easy on the eyes. If you're a fan, by all means go see her. If not don't.

The President's Last Bang (South Korea)

Written and Directed
by Im Sang-soo

If you're going to overthrow the government you've got to have a plan, especially if you're one of the top people in the government. It just won't do if you blow away the president and then hand it over to a nonplussed and ignorant VP. You have to get control after the actual act, because if you don't, you'll get sent to jail for life or worse, executed.

The year is 1979, and Park Chung-He(Song Jae-ho) has been President since he over- threw the nation's founder in 1961. At this point he's a corrupt old coot, who's minions are a bunch of violent thugs who don't really care how the nation feels about anything as long as they get their money and women.

This night the President has invited a few of his top aides to dinner and the Korean CIA safe-house including the KCIA director Kim (Baik Yoon-shik) and the bafoonish security chief Cha (Jeong Won-joong), who treats Kim and his top aide Ju-gwajang(Han Seokgyu) like dirt. Some time during the early part of the dinner, Kim gets fed up with everything and tells Ju, on the spur of the moment, that he's going to kill the president and Cha and bring democracy to South Korea.

Just there like that. Ju and Kim quickly get a few aides who just happened to be there, and within a few minutes everything is in place. President Park and his aides are listening to a popular singer(Kim Yoon-ah) and her ditzy best friend(Cho Eun-ji) who'd been dragooned into the gig when all of a sudden…BANG!!!!

What happens after the assassination is actually more interesting than the events leading up to it. This was an important bit of South Korean history and it was one of those stories that had to be told.

Needless to say, when this film came out in South Korea early this year, it had the same impact as Oliver Stone's “JFK,” and the version shown here is unexpurgated. That said, everything except the title is very, very good. The performances are wonderful Biak is mesmerizing as the conflicted patriot who despite years of being an oppressor decides to go for it. Han is even better showing a really nuanced performance, and the rest of the cast, most of whom I can't find the names of anywhere, show a range from slapstick to tragedy.

It would be nice to see this here in the States….

Day three, early evening

We got our official credentials and all that other stuff which will prove indespensable in the upcoming week and a half. So far everything is going as planned, and without further ado, here's our second batch of reviews:

LIE WITH ME

Directed by
Clément Virgo

Imagine the scandal! Some news organization discovers that the National Endowment for the Arts has financed a pornographic film in association with HBO, Showtime and Bravo and that it would have it’s world premier at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

The Republicans would be furious!!! Tom DeLay and Pat Robertson would be demanding that everyone in that organization not only be fired, but spend a few months in the pokey to boot! Right?

But Canada isn’t the United States and apparently, this sort of thing happens without anyone seeming to have noticed all that much. Well maybe it’s because this is a watered-down version of a very hard-core book.

But still, soft-core porn is porn.

Leila(Lauren Lee Smith) is an aging club kid living with her parents in a large house in one of the more expensive neighborhoods in Toronto. She likes to get laid, and sex is what’s almost always on her mind. She’s at one such club when she meets David(Eric Balfour)
Who’s already taken. So she gets someone else, takes him out to the club’s parking lot, and starts getting it on. David and his lady friend head out to his car, where they do much the same thing while watching Leila’s little show.

Next day, L&D meet again. He chases her into a playground and they start to do it in the jungle jim. They move in with each other, they fuck. Then they fuck some more. We see it all. Porn.

Sure there are some other plotlines, but so what? This is porn, plain and simple, the narration is about sex, most of the action is about sex, they watch hard-core porn on the telly…if you’re going to watch porn, go ahead, watch. But don’t go around saying that it’s art. That went out with the Johnson administration

THE PASSION OF JOSHUA, THE JEW

Written and Directed
by Pasquale Scimeca

In the year 1492, The Catholic Monarchs of what was to become Spain did three things for which they would be remembered forever. First: They overthrew the last remaining Moslem kingdom on the peninsula. Second: They sent Columbus to discover the western route to the Indies, and Third: they kicked out the Jews.

This film is about that third tragedy.

We begin some twenty years before the event, when Ferd and Bella’s Jewish minister Don Isaac(Toni Bertorelli) arrives at a humble synagogue to meet an old friend, who’s wife Sarah is at that moment giving birth to a son. When the blessed event occurs, Don Isaac begins to prophesy. The child is the King Messiah, who will lead the Jewish people back to the promised land.

Cut to 1492, and Joshua(Leonardo Cesare Abude) is now a brilliant scholar, and with the Isabella’s damnable decree signed, sealed and delivered, all Don Isaac can do is invite our hero, his sister widowed mother to the kingdom of Naples where it’s safe.

This is a sumptuous movie, the costumes!, the sets! They cross towering mountains and cross the vast Mediterranean. All the while we wonder exactly where this thing is going.

Apparently, the Italians to the famously anti-Semitic passion play every Easter, and Josh manages to get cast as Jesus, and the evil priests decide to make the play a bit more realistic than usual.

It’s entertaining in parts, Abude is really good as our hero, but for the most part is rather useless film leading to a real downer ending.

Oh well, can’t have everything.

A CONVERSATION WITH BASQUIAT

Way back in the middle 1980s, Tamra Davis filmed a long interview with
with legendary artist Jean Michel Basquiat, who was famous as a bisexual homeless guy who was adopted by Andy Worhol and his crowd.

The work shown isn’t all that good, and if Biasquait wasn’t dead, his work would have been a flash in the pan. Unless you’re a fan of the guy, this is entirely uninteresting.

TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA

Written and Directed
by Thomas Allen Harris

In 1960, some student members of the African National Congress decided to escape apartheid South Africa to work for the regime’s overthrow. Harris’ stepfather was one of these men, and Harris uses interviews, still photos and dramatic reconstructions to tell the story of these young freedom fighters, and how they interacted with is life.

It’s one of those things you would see on the History channel,and maybe it will. Harris has a future with this medium.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES: FROM THE MARGIN TO THE MAINSTREAM

Directed by
Stuart Samuels

The thesis of this TV documentary is that there were six films which changed everything. In 1970, the people at the Elgin theater in New York City began playing a film called “El Topo” every night at midnight, and sparked a phenomenon known as the midnight movie.

There are five others mentioned here: ”Night of the Living Dead,” “The Harder They Come,” “ Pink Flamingoes,” “Rocky Horror” and “Eraserhead.” The makers of each of these films comes out of retirement, or wherever they’re hiding [Okay, George Romero and John Waters is still out there making films, but still….] and discuss how these films managed to become what they eventually came. It’s all rather interesting.

Even if you’re not a fan of these films, it’s worth a look, even though they do show Divine eating poodle shit. (IK) Maybe it’ll wind up on cable in the ‘States sometime soon.

Sept 6th in the evening

As the usual embargo rules don't apply, and I'm up here anyway....why not? Here are the first reviews from the festival:

GABRIELLE

Written and Directed
by Patrice Chéreau

The date is about 1910, and M. Hervey(Pascal Greggory) is the extremely wealthy publisher of a Paris newspaper. He lives in what looks like a museum, and is attended by endless numbers of maids. He’s a cold man, an arrogant man, and it seems the only thing that makes him happy are his vast amount of ancient sculpture, and those Thursday evening soirées that everybody who is anybody wants to get invited to and are presided over by him and his lovely wife Gabrielle(Isabelle Huppert).

One Wednesday, our protagonist, for we can’t call him a hero by any means, comes home early one day to find that his wife is not there, she had left him a letter explaining that she’s left him for someone else, and she won’t say who. Hervey, of course is devastated, which is strange, since he hasn’t had sex with her in years and the two had fallen out of love ages ago. He’s about to begin the period of mourning that sometimes follows occasions like this, when suddenly, Gabrielle comes back.

Joseph Conrad, who’s “Heart of Darkness” became “Apocalypse Now” wrote the original short story and it seems that Auteur Chéreau has decided to stick all the endless monologues therein in the film. One of the problems with subtitles sometimes is that all the film is so wordy that we can’t really follow them all that well. What we get is talk and talk and talk and talk, and occasionally to show a change in mood, the director decides to switch from black and white to color and back again. That starts out with some sort of purpose, but by the end of the film, it becomes annoying. Why did she leave? For whom? Why did she come back? Will she try again? It starts out interesting, but all the mysteries are solved rather soon except for why the damn thing is so long.

This film is everything that’s bad about current French cinema. It’s long pretentious and rather boring in parts. Ugh.

ANGEL

Written and Directed
by Jim McKay

Nicole(Rachel Griffiths) is a social worker laboring away over at the Bridge Youth Center in Brooklyn, NY. She’s rather good at her job and everyone there seems to like her. Then one day she seems to make a mistake. One of her charges, a high school senior named Angel (Jonan Everett), has been kicked out of the house by his father, we’re not exactly sure why.

Angel has no where to go, Nicole she decides to take a chance and have him as a houseguest. At first, it seems to be going rather well. Her husband doesn’t seem to mind all that much, and the next day, he goes to school and they go to work. There’s a meeting with the father and it doesn’t actually seem to be going well. Something’s not right here, for Angel seems like a good intelligent kid. Or is he a bad intelligent kid.

The rest of the film is going back and forth between Nicole’s life and Angel’s during the day, an aimless wondering somewhat reminiscent of James Joyce “Ulysses” but without the sex or humor. Angel skips out, hangs out with friends, tries to murder someone, the usual stuff for a kid in an HBO movie-of-the-week. Nicole commiserates with her sister about life and what seems to be her failures at it.

The whole thing is rather pointless. We don’t care all that much about the two main characters, and Angel becomes even less sympathetic as the film goes on. Fortunately, the next time it’ll be seen is on cable, and then you can change the channel.

CITIZEN DOG

Written and Directed
by Wisit Sasanatieng

Somewhere in the World the genre known as magical realism is still in vogue. That somewhere is Thailand, where Wisit Sasanatieng, a filmmaker of some local note, has come to show his latest creation. A bizarre romance about love, politics and the redevelopment of the human tail, or something like that there.

We first met Pod(Mahasamut Boonyaruk) out in the boonies where his ancestors live. He yearns for something more, but his grandmother puts a curse on him. Should he go to Bangkok and find a job, he would grow a tail. But Pod goes anyway, and the curse doesn’t work. He does, however lose a finger in the sardine factory (no blood is spilt) and by the time the film is fifteen minutes old, he’s found it in a can in a store. Only it’s not really his, it belongs to Yod(Sawaswong Palkawong Na Ayutthaya), and the two become fast friends, them sharing body parts and all.

But as our narrator (Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) goes on about the nature of life, we discover that this film isn’t about Yod at all, but the beauteous
Jin (Saengthong Gate-Uthong), who’s working as a maid in the building where Pod is now working. Pod is smitten, and we learn that that Jin has an unreadable book, and that she has conversations with comic book characters. But so what? Everyone in this film is, as they used to say, pixilated.

While Pod’s attempt to get Jin to fall in love with him goes on and on, the narrative flow is interrupted by a whole bunch of random stories that seem to come out of nowhere. Each more silly than the next, and Bangkok becomes a dystopian fairyland with drunken teddy bears and piles of plastic going all the way to the moon.

But don’t dispair,there are giggles galore to be found. See it…that is if it ever gets here.

Day two, or rather one.

Travelling to the airport on the cheap takes a long time, taking the local bus, it's best to start three hours before flight time. I got there with about fifteen minutes to spare. It took forever to get OUT of the Toronto airport, too, although it's just about as cheap as it is in New York. The Exchange rates are weird, too. The US buck is worth far more up here than the exchange rate is down there. 1:1.5 up here, and 1:1.1 down there. I was able to pay my hotel bill in advance with no problems.

Later on, we get to go to the embassy and then start screening films. We've got three today, more on that later.

Day one: part one

Day one is well in advance of the actual festival. Here I am in New York packing my stuff before heading out to LaGuardia airport. I plan to be faithfu l to this thing for the next ten days at least. At least I hope I will. I've been going to what are called "pre-screenings" for a couple of weeks now,and so have pretty much everyone else in the critic business in New York. Up in Toronto, they've been having them since the 21st of last month, at the Canadian Film board screening room down on King street....At least I hope it's on King Street. I'm going to attend the last two days of them and I don't want to get lost.

tomorrow, we stop at the American consulate to get new pages added to my passport, which is supposed to be a free service, unless you're physically in the US and need it quickly,in which case it costs sixty bucks. This was a shock, and it's soooo much easier doing it up there. Five minutes and that's it. Probably a little more as there are lines and such. But sixty bucks for a free service? Sounds like Morocco....Hopefully, the people up here will be nicer and more efficient.

But while we're pondering that, Bushie has decided to promote Justice-designate Roberts to Chief. This is the quickest that someone this has happened to in like...ever. The last two associates who were promoted to Chief, Stone in 1943 and Rehnquist in 1986, had each been on the court more than a decade. Stevens is now the only person left on the court who's either served with or replaced a Roosevelt appointee.

Here's a cute bit of trivia: Since they've started taking pictures of the supreme court in 1865, there have been four-and a half justices who've been in every annual photograph. Steven Field, who was appointed by Lincoln, Harlan, Sr. who was appointed by Hayes, Hughes, who counts as half because he left the court after twelve years (Teddy Roosevelt) to run for president in 1916 and came back in 1930(Hoover), Douglas who was appointed by FDR, and Rehnquist, who was appointed by Nixon. So in those five photographs, you can see the continuity from Jackson to Clinton.

I'll stick to movies from here on out for the next couple of weeks...unless some other calamity happens.

The Chief Justice is dead

Bill Rehnquist, who was first appointed to the Supreme Court by Tricky Dickie back in 1971 has bit the dust at the age of 80. He lived a long and mostly useful life, although his anti-constitution stand on some issues was for the most part quite obnoxious.

So now Bushie has a second seat to fill. He might give the Chief's job to that evil genius Antonin Scalia and give Scalia's old seat to someone else, or just give the Chief's job to some new guy. But all we know is that it's going to be some anti-rights troglodyte. That should make the Republicans even less popular in the red states.

Still there?

It looks like FEMA has finally begun to get it's act together, and just in time, too. the media was about to declare revolution, which may have been a good thing.

This could just lose the Republicans the South. They say that it's possible the unemployment rate in Mississippi may shoot up to 25%, which is back there in the Great Depression. Totally sucky.

Welcome!

My regular venue, the Greenwich village Gazette has just linked to this blog, so if anyone is actually OUT there welcome.

We're going to try to actually update this thing once or twice a day for the next month, exercising discipline, something I'm not very good at. Cyberspace has been focusing at the disaster in Louisiana, was in only right, and there in the middle of the things everybody was talking about was where a CNN guy took Sen. Mary Landru to task for not being caring enough for the people she represented. She should have torn his head off.

But you can't actually do that on TV and get reelected. I'm not very good at outrage at this time of day over the big things of universal importance, it's the small personal things that bug the hell out of me.

I checked out the Toronto press screening schedule yesterday, and quite a few of the major films were screening at the same time. I know that it's nothing compared with the stampede in Baghdad and the misery in the former Big Easy, but there it is.

The reason that what happened down there happened was because the Repubicans in the congress thought that since N'Orleans' was run by Democrats, the necessary repairs to the levee system were mere pork and could be ignored. That's the only reason.

Nothing much is going on in Canada this year, and that's probably just as well. IT looks like the election will take place early next year, so people up there are taking it easy. I'm going to see if I can get an absentee ballot today, and since it's Saturday and part of a three day weekend, I probably won't get one.

The friday before

A few weeks back, A major airline was having a fare sale to New Orleans. I almost bought ticket. There's nothing more going on this weekend and most of the people in the city are going off for the Labor day weekend. It's going to be very slow indeed.

Just the standard stuff for fridays. Today's the day the links go up on the GV gazette, so if there's anyone out there new. Hi!

please leave a note to see if I'm alone out there or not.

the wednesday before.

For all those five people who're actually reading this: Greeting! Today we begin the Toronto blog, even though we're not going there for the betterpart of a week.

In defference to the film companies, I'm not goingto put up any reviews until tuesday, in the meantime, I'm just going to rambleon about not much of anything.

But I've got to get in practice. So there you are

Here we go again....

I've been getting a few visiters, even though there's usually nothing new here, but the Toronto film festival is in a couple of weeks and we're going to do a major blog of that. In the meantime, there's not much to report, except that I just got back from the Bahamas, where it's nice and wet.

Four days on a windjammer cruise ship, which is a great way to get away from it all.
But that's a while ago and I forgot to blog Comicon as there wasn't time and the place where I was staying was at the wrong side of town.

Doesn't matter as there wasn't anything you haven't heard of anyway....

The saturday before

For any of those very few people who actually read this thing, welcome!

The day after tomarrow, I'm flying out to sunny California to attend the San Diego comics festival, also known as Comic Con. It used to be just for comics, and when I was doing that sort of thing professionally, it was just for comics and the comics industry, but then the movie companies took over and it's attendance went from ten thousand, which would be huge even now, to over ten times that.

As my thing is movies nowadays, I'm going to concentrate on all the pre-release promotions. I'm not sure how many comic companies are going to show up. I remember that the first couple of times I was there, there were parties for cartoonists and much art was produced.

Also, I remember at the height of the PC craze, some advocates for freedom of the press were celebrating censorship in thier booth. I hope they don't do that any more.

June is busting out all over!!!

So it's in the upper eighties outside my little apartment and the air conditioning isn 't working all that great. We've just missed the end of the Brooklyn film festival, I've had too much else to do as this was a very big week for screenings and then there was a thing called "pitchfest" where for twenty five bucks a pop, you can pitch that awful movie idea you've got to a genuine producer.

I got the five pack and was given one email address to send a bigger synopsis. I'll do that and not expect anything to happen.

My nephew's bar mitzva is on saturday. We're taking a break after the ceremony to go to his sister's graduation ceremoney. I guess it's cheaper to have everything on the same day, but I'm not sure that she's going to go to the party afterwards.

I myself would be ticked off about something like that.

Brooklyn has a film festival too...

The opening at the Brooklyn museum was a thing called "Steal Me" about a teenaged thief who moves in with a family in Montana and changes their lives.

Then there was a party with mediocre h'orderves.

Just another manic monday...

I've spent the last week recovering from my latest trip and it seems that nothing much is going on except that I found out that my bad colesterol is back down to where it should be. So I've given up my diet for a while and will start again soon.

This week is the ABA book fair, which is going to have lots of schmoozing and also the Brooklyn International Film Festival, which is somthing I'll check out.

The Dutch are going to vote on the EU constitution and that's probably going to kill it. Just as well, it was 300 pages long and was basically a beaurocratic protection plan. The Dutch don't like giving all their money to Slovakia and Portugual and that would probably make the whole thing permenant.

I've got anywhere from one to three screenings today...I'm bushed and it's only nine in the morning. I think I should have some red bull...

Saturday morning

So here I am at the Monaco grand prix, I got into the nosebleed section and managed to get all the way down to the expensive area near the media center, who won't let me in with only my NYC press credentials, the question is why anyone would get a thrill out of watching misshapen cars go around a track, even if it's around the Quay at Monte Carlo. Boring!

What makes everything worse is that the nosebleed seats cost forty euros, and the bleachers cost almost two hundred. I know people who pay more in rent every month than what the regular tickets cost.

Tomarrow is all sold out, so there must be something to this...

So while we're waiting to sneak into one of the expensive seats, here's the last batch of reviews from Cannes:

This is the last batch of reviews from Cannes. We've got the Monte Carlo Grand Prix auto race this morning, and no films to see. So here they are:

Operetta Tanukigoten (Princess Raccoon) Japan

Written and Directed
by Seijun Suzuk

So what is the weirdest movie of the year? A trippy multicultural musical romp done in front of a blue screen to have a very strange and artistic background where characters in traditional kabuki dress sing calypso music and rap?

You can't get weirder than that!

According to the opening expostion, it's a terrible idea for people and raccoons [biological note: Japanese raccoons are not related to American raccoons, one is a species of dog and one is, well a raccoon] to fall in love. But it's the thirteenth month of the year, and anything could happen.

The evil and vain Lord Azuchi Momoyama(Mikijiro Hira) is the most narcissistic man in all Japan. He thinks he's the fairest of them all, that is until his devout Catholic witch, the Old Maid Virgen(Saori Yuki) says that his son Amechiyo (Odagiri Jô) is actually better looking, so he Azuchi sends his son into the forest with a ninja to…yeah, they probably stole it from “Snow White” but there are no seven dwarves….here he meets Princess Tanuki (Zhang Ziyi) a Chinese princess of the raccoon dogs who's generally disguised as a human.

They fall in love. They sing and dance. There's a quest for the frog of heaven. We don't know what's going on half the time. The plot is thin and the music generally inappropriate. It's hilarious! The melodrama is insane and the choreography is actually pretty good, as is the acting and the singing.

I don't think that this'll ever see release in the North American market as no one will know what to do with this thing. It's the most inscrutable of films. Weird.

The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (USA)

Directed by
Tommy Lee Jones

Guillermo Arriaga, who penned the screenplays for “Amores Perros” and “24 Grams” is a Mexican who doesn't like the US border patrol. In fact, he thinks the idea that the US has a right to defend it's own borders is offensive, and he wrote a script about it. Then he gave it to Tommy Lee Jones who's starring and directing.

Melquiades Estrada(Julio César Cedillo) is an illegal immigrant who works on a cattle ranch in Southwest Texas. He's made friends with his boss, Pete Perkins(Tommy Lee Jones), a bit of a nutcase who likes to commit adultery with some of the local married ladies, mostly Rachel(Melissa Leo), who 's a waitress at the local bistro.

Into this area come Mike(Barry Pepper) and Lou Ann Norton(January Jones), a young couple who's moving there involuntarily. He's with the border patrol and has to go catch illegal aliens trying to run the border. He's good at his job, and that makes some of his coworkers mad, them being Hispanic and all. We then start going back and forth in time between the time Mike and Lu Ann arrive and the time Malquiades' body is found, and we learn in the meantime that Mike had accidentally done it. After all, he had no choice, Malquiades was shooting at coyotes in his direction. Pete wants justice, but since there's no real evidence to convict or even indict Mike, Sheriff Belmont(Dwight Yoakam) says there's nothing to be done, so he buries the body in a local cemetery and that, it seems is that…but no.

Pete decided to kidnap Mike, tie up Lou Ann, and force Mike to dig the body up and accompany him to Mexico, to the place where Malquiedes asked to be put in the ground.

This is a nasty film. One of the most brutal I've seen this year, and we've had some real buisers. The body is shown in an advanced state of decay, Mike gets bitten by a rattle snake and gets the crap beat out of him, and the whole thing goes overlong on the quest through the exotic western desert.

This, despite the brutality and diversions [two of the most boring sex scenes this year], this is well worth a look. It seems that Mr. Jones knows how to direct himself.

Chromophobia (UK)

Written and Directed
by Martha Fiennes

Just because you're rich doesn't mean you're happy. This is true for pretty much everywhere in the world. What appears to be an extremely expensive ranch house in Southern California is, in fact in the suburbs of London, and Marcus(Damian Lewis) and Iona Aylesbury(Kristin Scott Thomas) live here with their son Orlando in upper class splender. These aren't the famous upper-class twits from the Monty Python sketches, no, these are intelligent people of the kind you meet in Woody Allen films.

Marcus is a lawyer, and when we meet him he's just being made partner. This, is great financially, but he has to work longer hours than ever, making Iona suspect that he's having an affair with his secretary, which he's not.

While walking to lunch our hero meets up with his old band-mate Trent(Ben Chaplin), who works for the London tabloids and can't get his exposé on he environment published. What they want is dirt about celebrities, the British being madder about then we in the states are. That or a political scandal, which is what Mark is going to inadvertently provide. So Trent begins to stick to Mark like glue, going to visit Marks parents(Ian Holm and Harriet Walter) and the like, and secretly taping Mark's rantings…

They have other problems too. Their best friend Stephen the gay art dealer (Ralph Fiennes) was beaten nearly to death in his own apartement by some kids he befreiended and the cops discovered a quicktime movie of Orlando stripping off his shirt and dancing….is this innocent?

Then there's the question as to where the relationship between social worker Colin(Rhys Ifans) and prostitute Gloria Ramiriz de Arroyo (Penélope Cruz) fits into all this. She's got cancer and a kid, and she doesn't want to give it up until the very last minute.

The acting is really good and the story is compelling. We aren't sure who to root for, as every one of the main character is actually rather nice and we don't want to see them hurt, but they do, and badly.

This is a compelling film. Funny and smart, it's well worth a look.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

So here we are not exactly the last day of the festival, but the last day for me. There were three films viewd today, Chromophobia, Princess Racoon and The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada .

I'll get to the reviews later, for Princess Racoon is one of the weirdest films I've seen in years and definately the weirdest I've seen here at Cannes. Melquiades Estrada is as brutal a film as you can get and still be an 'R" and I'm not sure about Chromophobia yet.

Tomarrow, they're repeating all the films from one of the sidebars tomarrow and the official films on Sunday, but I'm going to fly home then and that'll be just fine with me. I'll try to get the reviews up either tomarrow or at the airport on Sunday. This has been one hell of an experience.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

I missed it again! I discovered that there was an extra screening of this movie I missed twice today and when I got there the line was halfway down the hall. Most of the people didn't get in and by the time they said that it was full I had missed the other screening. I thought I was getting lucky as I managed three other films I'd missed.

That's life, I guess. After all this time I've finally got the blog thing to work perfectly. The outside temperature's back where it should be after going down into the low fifties. This is supposed to be the subtropics in MAY for crissake!

So here are two of the reviews I was going to put up in the morning:

Free Zone (Israel)

Written and Directed
by Amos Gitai


Just west of the border with Iraq is the area of Jordan known as the “Free Zone.” This piece of desert is sparcely inhabited and is tax free, hence the name. The special status is thus perfect to sell used cars for use all over the middle east.

Rebecca(Nathalie Portman) has just left her husband and grabs a taxi for the airport. She wants to leave Israel in order to forget the wreck of her marriage, but she gets into the wrong cab, for Hanna(Hanna Laslo), has a mission. To cross from Israel to the Free Zone and get thirty grand from “the American” who’s her husband’s business partner.

So Hanna offers to take Rebecca with her, why we don’t know. First there’s a slight amount of trouble at the Israeli/Jordanian border, then they get lost, but this is a good place for some interesting flashback action where we see the two protagonist’s back-stories. While the relationship between Rebecca and her husband(Markram Khoury) doesn’t ring exactly true, the one between Hanna and her husband Moshe(Uri Klauzner) most certainly does and is quite moving.

Finally getting to where they’re going, quite late, in fact, the pair meets up with
Leila(Hiam Abbass), who’s supposed to be the American’s assistant. She and Hanna argue about the money owed, and finally she agrees to take them to see the American.

What happens next is unexpected and actually quite interesting. This is not a geat film, but an extremely good one and the whole thing is quite moving in parts.

Why Portman is brilliant in everything she does except “Star Wars” isn’t exactly a mystery. I blame George Lucas. In the meantime, check this out if it ever gets to America.

Don't Come Knockin' (USA/Germany)

Directed by
Wim Wenders

Back in the ’60s, a young man named Sam Shepherd wanted to be a movie star, but no one would hire him as he wasn’t that good an actor. So he decided to start writing his own plays in order to give himself a showcase.

Well, he could indeed write. Very well, in fact. Stuff like “True West” are today considered classics. Then after getting confirmed as one of the best playwrights of his time, he got his big acting break in “The Right Stuff” back in 1983. Following that he made a few movie appearances, but his “Marlborough Man” persona wore out rather quickly and his career as a matinee idol quickly fizzled.

This was, in a perverse way, a really good thing, as it forced him back to his typewriter and go back to what he’s doing best, Writing.

So a few plays and years later, he and his friend, director Wim Wenders, got together and talked. Wenders’ last couple of films had been flops [his last one was really lousy], and he was in great need of a comeback before his reputation as a genius would begin to fade. A Shepherd-Wenders collaboration would be just the thing to get the two back on top.

The ploy seems to have worked.

In this thing Shepherd has cast himself as one Howard Spence, a Clint Eastwood-type, whose off-screen life has been one screw-up after another. Sex, drug busts, walking off the set, beating up fellow jet passengers. It’s surprising that he even gets work any more. But when we meet him, he has, and he’s just fled the on-location set on a horse into the great southwestern desert.

The Director(George Kennedy) is livid, as are the rest of the cast and crew, not to mention the insurance company, which has guaranteed the completion of the film for $35 million. With all that money on the line, it’s clear to see that they’re going to try to bring him back to work. This job goes to their number one tracker, The mysterious Mr. Sutter (Tim Roth).

But our hero doesn’t want to be found, and he makes his way to Salt Lake City, where he contacts Howard's Mother(Eva Marie Saint) in Nevada. Howard and Mom haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but she’s glad to see him anyway, despite the fact that he’s acting like an ass.

She asks him about his son in Butte, Montana and he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He hadn’t a clue that he had impregnated anyone. But he thinks about it for a bit and remembers. Curious, he takes his late father’s very old ’57 Chevy and heads northeast to the Big Sky Country. Meanwhile…

Sky’s(Sarah Polley) mother has just died. She has apparently some connection with our hero, probably she’s the love child that Mom had been talking about. Maybe she’s another one. We don’t figure that out until near the end. So she heads over to Butte too, impelled by an unknown force.

In Butte, the chase, if that’s what it is, begins to change direction, so to speak, for our hero has found Doreen(Jessica Lange), the child’s mother, extremely quickly, and she points out the son he never knew. But Earl (Gabriel Mann) doesn’t want to hear about it and although his Amber (Fairuza Balk) thinks it’s a hoot.

Family relationships is a Shepherd specialty, and this shows his genius to it’s full extent. Gabriel Mann is a wonder. He comes out of nowhere and takes over the screen. The scenes between him and Shepard are full of the emotional electricity that made Shepard famous in the first place.

This is something to see. A perfect independent film to be sure.

Thursday morning, between screenings.

One of the more pathetic phenomenon that I've noticed here in Cannes is the begging. They don't sell tickets here, they give people "cinephile" cards that permit them to beg for extra tickets and then get into the theaters. For this privilage, you have to write an essay. Trading tickets can get a bit dicey, as I mentioned yesterday when someone tried to grab my ticket to a certain screening.

We also had the shorts program where the master's theses of a number of student filmmakers were on display. Some of them were actually quite good.

Starting today the market begins to wind down, and it ends tomarrow. The day after the screenings will end and all that is left is the ceremony, which I won't be attending asI don't own a tux and I've got a doctor's appointment in New York on monday. In the meantime, I've got two and a half more days of this stuff....here are three more reviews:

Peindre Or Faire L'Amour (France)

Written and Directed by Arnaud
and Jean-Marie Larrieu

To translate to the English: To Paint or Make Love? Ah that's a question. Of course the choice is a false one, as the painting we're talking about is a picture on a canvas and not with a roller and latex. This doesn't matter as you're not going to get a chance to see it anyway.

The reason is that it stinks, and stinky French cinema almost never goes over to the left side of the Atlantic. Be grateful about that when munching on your freedom fries.

Madeleine (Sabine Azema) is a retired real estate agent living somewhere in rural France with her equally retired husband William (Daniel Auteuil). She's outside painting a pasture when all of a sudden Adam (Sergi Lopez) shows up. Now this guy is a blind philosopher, as well as the town's mayor, and he worms his way into Madeline's good graces, and she invites him to dinner, so he and his wife
Eva(Amira Casar) come over, the foursome hit it off, and then the two guests return the favor. So far it's cute.

Then Adam and Eva's house burns down and so does the whole movie. Madeleine and William are soon jealous that their guests don't really want to spend all their time with them. A&E realize this and soon they do some wife swapping and then everyone's even more bummed out as the guests decide on the spur of the moment to flee to the South Pacific.

There's a happy ending, but this is sooooooo bloody dumb that even fans of French cinema will wretch. How this got into the Cannes Competition is a mystery. I guess that something had to come in last and they wanted to be nice to the other competitors.

La Petite Jerusalem (France)

Written and Directed
by Karin Albou

Laura(Fanny Valette) is a college student in France and she's studying philosophy. Her hero seems to be Immanuel Kant, and she strives to master herself. Her family are ultraorthodox Jews and don't really like anything as secular as that. What her mother(Sonia Tahar) really wants is for her to drop out and marry a nice Jewish doctor. Some things are universal, but Laura's mom is a bit on the witchy side, casting spells and putting talismans under Laura's bed.

Our heroine also lives with her older sister Mathilde(Elsa Zylberstein) and brother in law Ariel( Bruno Todeschini) and their many children. Even after being very fertile, she doesn't know much about sex, and this drives Ariel to have an affair with an unseen blonde. This drives Laura further away from religion, a move that finally leads her to have a fling with Djamel(Hédi Tillette de Clermont Tonnerre), an Algerian writer who's there illegally and is also Muslim.

What's interesting here is the disdain for Jewish tradition on the part of auteur Albou, and the scenes of synagogues getting burned to the ground and Ariel getting beaten up because of his yalmika.

It's also interesting that when we get to meet Djamel's family, they're even more backward and prejudiced than Laura's! I guess the fact that it's “evenhanded” in this way got it into one of the major sidebars here at Cannes.

Not worth it at all.

The President's Last Bang (South Korea)

Written and Directed
by Im Sang-soo

If you're going to overthrow the government you've got to have a plan, especially if you're one of the top people in the government. It just won't do if you blow away the president and then hand it over to a nonplussed and ignorant VP. You have to get control after the actual act, because if you don't, you'll get sent to jail for life or worse, executed.

The year is 1979, and Park Chung-He(Song Jae-ho) has been President since he over threw the nation's founder in 1961. At this point he's a corrupt old coot, who's minions are a bunch of violent thugs who don't really care how the nation feels about anything as long as they get their money and women.

This night the President has invited a few of his top aides to dinner and the Korean CIA safe-house including the KCIA director Kim (Baik Yoon-shik) and the bafoonish security chief Cha (Jeong Won-joong), who treats Kim and his top aide Ju-gwajang(Han Seokgyu) like dirt. Some time during the early part of the dinner, Kim gets fed up with everything and tells Ju, on the spur of the moment, that he's going to kill the president and Cha and bring democracy to South Korea.

Just there like that. Ju and Kim quickly get a few aides who just happened to be there, and within a few minutes everything is in place. President Park and his aides are listening to a popular singer(Kim Yoon-ah) and her ditzy best friend(Cho Eun-ji) who'd been dragooned into the gig when all of a sudden…BANG!!!!

What happens after the assassination is actually more interesting than the events leading up to it. This was an important bit of South Korean history and it was one of those stories that had to be told.

Needless to say, when this film came out in South Korea early this year, it had the same impact as Oliver Stone's “JFK,” and the version shown here is unexpurgiated. That said, everything except the title is very, very good. The performances are wonderful Biak is mesmerizing as the conflicted patriot who despite years of being an oppressor decides to go for it. Han is even better showing a really nuanced performance, and the rest of the cast, most of whom I can't find the names of anywhere, show a range from slapstick to tragedy.

It would be nice to see this here in the States….