Cannes gloom and doom: The inside story

       Covering a film festival is a lot less glamorous than it sounds. You're up all night, running from screenings to interviews and press conferences to noisy parties that you can't really enjoy because you're trying to get the scoop on what film bombed that afternoon or which specialty division put in a new offer on the movie that got a standing ovation early that evening--and of course, you still have to carve out a few hours to actually write your stories. The first time I covered the Toronto Film Festival I almost passed out walking back to my hotel before realizing that I was dizzy largely because I'd forgotten to eat all day.

    Our intrepid Calendar reporter John Horn just returned from Cannes, a little worse for the wear, but with just enough juice left in his engine to answer a few questions about the festival, which was something of a downer for indy movie sales, with very few deals being made--and nearly all of them for much less money than in years past. John's story about an increasingly unreceptive market for indy movies had some great nuggets, notably the startling observation that Paramount Vantage--which had a piece of "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country For Old Men," two awards season standbys--has yet to make a profit.

    Here's a little Q&A we had about Vantage's stormy response to his story and a look at the Cannes gloom and doom situation:

   

   

Co-pilots Soderbergh + Cusack: Your left wing is burning!

     This has been one of those weeks when you could hardly deny that Hollywood is a giant fleshpot of liberal zealotry. HBO is debuting "Recount," Danny Strong's vivid account of how the nasty turmoil in Florida during the 2000 presidential election allowed the Republican forces supporting George W. Bush to make off with the state's key electoral votes. The HBO drama has earned largely favorable notices--see Mary McNamera's especially perceptive review here. But the buzz has not been so kind--in fact, it's been downright awful--for a couple of other lefty offerings, notably John Cusack's "War, Inc." which arrived in theaters Friday and Steven Soderbergh's "Che," which debuted earlier in the week as a four-hour plus work-in-progress at the Cannes FIlm Festival.

    Cusack's film, a blistering satire of war profiteers and political corruption, has taken it on the chin nearly everywhere, with the Wall Street Journal's respected Joe Morgenstern calling it a "sorry excuse for political satire." Landing with a thud on Metacritic, where it's 34 rating actually put it a lower state of critical hell than "Alvin and the Chipmunks" or "Speed Racer," it took a withering ding from the usually reliably liberal LA Weekly, which called the film "not half as funny as the 'Harold and Kumar' sequel." Soderbergh's "Che," which stars Benicio Del Toro in what was intended as a two-film portrait of the much-lionized Cuban revolutionary, took such flack at Cannes that it will probably need a big overhaul and re-edit before it surfaces again. The critics were not kind.

As Variety's Todd McCarthy put it: "If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he’s portrayed here."

Fox News columnist Roger Friedman called the film "a mess," with no real storyline, no close-ups and no context adding, "We haven't seen so much genius and tedium in one place since "Heaven's Gate." 

What went wrong?

Shocking revelations about movie marketers

    No, we're not really shocked. Or surprised. According to a story in Broadcasting and Cable magazine, Paramount has been airing ads for "Iron Man" and other PG-13 films during Nickelodeon shows targeted toward kids under-12. (You can take a wild guess about who owns Nickelodeon, the right guess being Viacom, which also owns Paramount.) The Better Business Bureau blew the whistle on the studio, passing the ads along to the MPAA, which is supposed to oversee studio marketing practices, but largely acts like a paper tiger, except in the months following well-publicized Congressional investigations into movie marketing practices. The BBB's advertising review unit also referred another Paramount film, "Drillbit Taylor," to the MPAA for similar offenses, noting that the promos had aired during such kid-friendly Nickelodeon shows as "Zoey 101'" and "Drake and Josh."

  Does Paramount have any qualms about showing ads on shows that pre-schoolers regularly watch? Or this just an example of the Better Business Bureau trying to get some publicity for itself, using an easy target--a Hollywood studio--to attract some media attention?

Spike Lee vs. Clint Eastwood

    When it comes to Clint Eastwood, perhaps the most revered of our living American filmmakers, most of the stories out of Cannes have been valentines about his upcoming film, "Changeling," which stars Angelina Jolie as a defiant single mother in 1920s Los Angeles. But leave it to Spike Lee, who's at the festival as a judge of online shorts, to toss some black roses Eastwood's way. According to reports from the festival, Lee--who has a film coming this fall about an all-black U.S. division fighting in Italy during World War II--is ticked off that Eastwood's celebrated pair of  war films from 2006 ("Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima") are missing something: any sign of African American fighting men.

As Lee put it: "He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films. Many veterans, African Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version."

So far, no one's managed to get a response from Eastwood. One reporter who tried to raise the issue at a festival press conference was cut off by a moderator, which is pretty par for the course at film festivals, which these days seem to generate far more worshipful celebrity features than any hard news. Of course, I couldn't help but wonder: How would Mr. Dirty Harry respond? Knowing Eastwood's dry-as-mesquite humor, I think he could've easily defused the situation by answering: "Spike who?"

The Big Picture Goes to Lunch

     Irwin Winkler is a producer's producer, having made so many groundbreaking movies (from "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" to "Rocky" to "Raging Bull" to "GoodFellas"') that you almost feel guilty talking to him about what's going in the business today, since you're really dying to hear another Stallone or Scorsese story. We had lunch at the Hillcrest Country Club (his choice, he's a longtime member), which is sort of a trip in itself, being a getaway for generations of Hollywood princes, starting with virtually all the original studio moguls, generations of William Morris agents and a host of venerable comics. It was the first place I ever laid eyes on Groucho Marx, who was of course speaking of Hillcrest when he said, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member." He joined anyway.