May
26
Cannes Actresses; We Own the Night
The NYT's Tony Scott praises this year's Cannes selection and the great actresses performing in the movies.
Here's the NYT's Cannes coverage.
I'm back home after flying West all day, from Nice to JFK with a long stopover, and finally, to L.A. I caught up with many back issues of Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker. I finally saw The Bridge to Tarabithea, which wasn't bad at all. I cried over the ending of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, a powerful book which proved a perfect match of material and filmmakers. In retrospect, Joel and Ethan Coens' movie is their best ever: taut, lean, and deeply moving. I'll be pleased if either the Coens or Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) take home the Palme d'Or on Sunday.
Before I left I saw We Own the Night, James Gray's first movie in seven years, since The Yards. The set-up is great--it's a brother vs. brother story about high-rolling nightclub manager Joaquin Phoenix, who is madly in love with Puerto Rican firecracker Eva Mendes, and uptight cop-on-the-rise Mark Wahlberg, who's chasing a Russian mafioso who's running drugs through the nightclub. Robert Duvall is the father, another cop. Gray has a strong no-nonsense unpretentious style. But the story goes wrong, somehow, in the second half, despite a terrific rain-drenched car chase. It may come down to one thing: we like Phoenix so much as a rebellious party boy who isn't a cop, that we don't buy him wanting to become one. The sellers did the right thing showing the film to buyers only before the press got to it. (Columbia picked it up for $11.5 million.) There were boos. But it seems to be playing well with the public and mainstream press.
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