David Poland lets Film Independent get away with this surprising announcement. I go along with the need to give the likes of George Clooney and Clint Eastwood Indie Awards--ok, they do deserve it, even if they function in big-studio land--although I had some trouble with last year's Harrison Ford, who has never experienced an indie moment in his life, in fact, he runs away from it every chance he gets--but what in hell does Transformers have to do with an indie film festival? It's oxymoronic!

It's now possible to order the DVD in France of the Cannes collection of 33 shorts, Chacun Son Cinema, although Filmbrain didn't get the one by the Coens for some reason (which is particularly funny, starring No Country For Old Men's Josh Brolin). He ordered his from FNAC.

UPDATE: According to Variety's Todd McCarthy, who couldn't score a DVD in Cannes, David Lynch handed his short in too late to make the official unveiling, so it was shown in front of Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, and will be included, along with a second Walter Salles short, on a deluxe pre-holiday DVD in October.

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell "tried mightily to buy one in person at the FNAC store in Cannes," he writes."They sold out of all their copies on the first day of release."

I have always liked Joss Whedon. He gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Serenity and Angel and has always been a mensch in my dealings with him. The first time I interviewed him, around the time of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, I told him that I had known his mother, Emma Whedon. (His dad was a TV writer.) She wasn't just the best English teacher I ever had (at St. Hilda's and St. Hughes on Manhattan's Upper West Side), but the formative significant inspiring English teacher that we all hope we get at least once in our lives. In a school run by uptight Canadian Episcopal nuns, she wore short skirts, and was incredibly smart, even hip. She cared deeply about what she was teaching, which was infectious. (She died young, of cancer.) Anyway, she's probably part of the reason why Joss writes such great roles for women. And launched this passionate blog plea on behalf of women everywhere.

As the sort of person who engages in trivia contests with my fellow airplane passengers, I am happy to inform you that I got 9 out of 10 on this artists in movies quiz.

The Cannes Film Festival offered Woody Allen's new film Cassandra's Dream the closing night slot, which Allen refused, hoping for a better offer. None came. The film was selling in the market, quietly, and word on the Croisette was that The Weinstein Co., which went after Match Point a few years ago and released Mighty Aphrodite and Bullets Over Broadway at Miramax, was interested. Dark Horizons wonders what's up?

Meanwhile, Allen is prepping his fourth film to be shot outside the United States, this time in Spain, starring his current muse, Scarlett Johansson, who is the first actress since Mia Farrow to star in more than two Allen films. She stars opposite the very hot Javier Bardem, who scored in Cannes in the Coens' No Country for Old Men. UPDATE: The Weinstein Co. has picked up the movie, which they will release by year's end.

The LAT's Patrick Goldstein tackles the different outcomes of two script auctions, for director Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, which sold for $70 million to DreamWorks, and director Michael Mann's untitled Leonardo DiCaprio project, which has yet to sell with a $120-million pricetag. It's simple. Jackson knows how to create commercial genre material that will appeal to the public, and is doing so at a reasonable price. Mann doesn't seem to care whether his costly films, excellent though they usually are, strike a nerve with audiences, or not. He wants to work on an A-list level, at A-list prices, on his own terms. Those prices may need to come down. Or he may need to play commercial ball to earn that freedom. Mann probably thought he was doing that with Miami Vice, is the problem. And that didn't connect either.

Interestingly, Goldstein actually publishes some of the Lovely Bones script, which is not usually accepted practice in our field, when the movie hasn't been made yet. He wouldn't have done it if someone close to the script hadn't told him that it was OK checked with DreamWorks and CAA and got full resistance from both not only for having the scripts in the first place, but for even considering publishing excerpts. He proceeded anyway, figuring that "I had a compelling reason to go ahead," he says. "I wanted to advance the story. Everybody had written about the deals. I wanted to write about the script, and show how Peter Jackson was imagining the story. I don't think running a two-inch excerpt of a 100-page script is going to have any remotely damaging impact on a movie, especially since I am clearly a fan."

Thus Goldstein figured he would not brook the wrath of Jackson going forward. And the story cites content in Mann's John Logan script, but doesn't actually quote it. That camp won't be happy in any case to have their high-end project tainted by its failure to sell.

So far Julian Schnabel's movies have remained in the rarified art-film realm. Will his Cannes hit The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which nabbed Schnabel the director's prize, change all that? London's The Independent delves into a portrait of the visual artist.

The world has a new fairy tale couple. Silicon Valley is abuzz over the unorthodox wedding of Google cofounder Sergey Brin (who is worth some $14 billion) and his 33-year-old bride, Anne Wojcicki, a brainy Yale grad who recently founded 23and Me—a biotech company in which Google has invested $3.9 million. According to the NYT the couple not only flew their guests on a private jet to an unknown destination in the Bahamas, but wore bathing suits and swam to a sandbar where they gave their vows:

Google has declined to disclose any details of the wedding, but according to various news reports, the location was such a closely guarded secret that wedding guests boarded the jet owned by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page unaware of their exact destination until they arrived on a private island in the Bahamas.

Guests who attended said the bride wore a white swimsuit, the groom a black one. Some guests took a boat while others — including the bride and groom — swam to a nearby sandbar, where the couple exchanged vows.

Ms. Wojcicki is known for her high energy and approachable, easygoing, personal style. People who knew her in high school in Palo Alto said that she was studious but far from isolated. While at Yale, her mother said, Ms. Wojcicki was a competitive ice skater and played on the varsity ice hockey team. She also had a job as an activities coordinator in her dormitory.

Esther Wojcicki, who has worked at Google as an educational consultant, described her daughter as “an idea factory.” In the past, she said, her daughter has had various health care related business ideas, and 23andMe is the first to come to fruition. Ms. Avey, her partner, has been involved with several start-ups in the past.

Ms. Wojcicki said that she was surprised when her daughter told her of the unusual wedding she had planned.

“She said, ‘Mom, I’m going to swim to my wedding,’ ” said Ms. Wojcicki. “And she pulled it off.”

Critics' favorite 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a hard-hitting Romanian film about an illegal abortion directed by Cristian Mungiu, took home the big prize in Cannes Sunday, while American artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel nabbed the director's prize for his French-language The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Other fave rave No Country for Old Men, from the Coen brothers, won nothing; they had taken home the Palme for Barton Fink in 1991. The animated French film Persepolis shared the jury prize with Mexican director Carlos Reygadas's Stellet Licht. There's more at Indiewire.

UPDATE: Here's Variety's Todd McCarthy, the NYT's Manohla Dargis, the LAT's Kenneth Turan and Time's Richard and Mary Corliss.

COMPETITION

Palme d'Or: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," directed by Cristian Mungiu
Grand Prix (runner-up): "The Mourning Forest" (Mogari No Mori), directed by Naomi Kawase
Prix de la Mise en Scene (Best Director): Julian Schnabel for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon)
Prix du 60th Anniversaire: Gus Van Sant, director of "Paranoid Park"
Prix du Scenario (Best Screenplay Award): Fatih Akin for "The Edge of Heaven" (Auf Der Anderen Siete)
Camera d'Or (For best first feature): "Meduzot" (Jellyfish), directed by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen
Camera d'Or Special Mention: "Control," directed by Anton Corbijn
Prix du Jury (Jury Prize) (tie): "Persepolis," directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud; and "Stellet Licht," directed by Carlos Reygadas
Prix d'interpretation feminine (Best Actress): Jeon Do-yeon for "Secret Sunshine" directed by Lee Chang-dong
Prix d'interpretation masculine (Best Actor): Constantine Lavronenko for "Izgnanie," directed by Andrei Zviaguintsev
Palme d'Or (short film): "Ver Llover," directed by Elisa Miller
Special Mention (short): "Run," directed by Mark Albiston
Special Mention (short): "Ah Ma," directed by Anthony Chen

Wow.

This vintage Washington Post Magazine story generated huge response last April. I'm just catching up with it. Classical violinist Joshua Bell played in the metro in Washingon D.C. and was largely ignored.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

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.

Entourage appears to be obsessed with Variety. Not only did the HBO show shoot several recent episodes at our offices in L.A., but they've followed us here to Cannes. Various Entourage sitings are being emailed to me. One person saw Jeremy Piven getting into a limo. Another saw Adrian Grenier exiting La Pizza. They threw a press conference this morning --opposite my surprisingly well-attended Am Pav screenwriting panel.

Ramin Bahrini talked about his second film, written in Persian and translated into English, Chop Shop, set in the mammoth junkyards of Queens, which is in director's fortnight. He was thrilled that Abbas Kiarostami came to see his film. (Born in North Carolina, Bahrini has both U.S. and Iranian citizenship.) John Sloss is selling Chop Shop in North America.

Juan Antonio Bayona discussed his Spanish-language feature debut The Orphanage which is in Critic's Week and will be released by Picturehouse. Guillermo del Toro, who is presenting and publicizing his protege's film, carried the pint-sized Spaniard on his shoulders at the screening. Antonio Bayona has made many shorts and commercials.

Raised in Italy and college-educated in America, Cecilia Miniucchi talked about writing and shooting Expired, her sexually frank English-language film that debuted at Sundance and closes Critics Week. Her two stars, Jason Patric and Samantha Morton, were both shooting films and couldn't make Cannes.

Blake Nelson was hilarious talking about being a Portland writer who has long known local hero Gus Van Sant and always knew his skateboarding novel Paranoid Park would make a good Van Sant film. It turns out he was right. UPDATE: IFC picked up the film at fest's end.

Raucous laughter hit the Palais during the morning screening of Oceans Thirteen, which was followed by an equally entertaining press conference as Steven Soderbergh and his Oceans Thirteen gang goofed on themselves and the assembled press corps.

When asked about the quality of scripts today, master quipster George Clooney replied that Oceans Thirteen is one for the history books. "This film is a cry for peace," he said with a straight face. "We thought we were in competition."

While the fate of a fourth Oceans is in the air, the ensemble seemed good to go. But Damon won't do a fourth Bourne, he said: "We have ridden that horse as far as we can." He admitted to feeling like "a bit of a prostitute for putting out two number threes in one year."

"That's better than three number twos," added Clooney.

When asked about one of the film's running gags involving Oprah Winfrey, Andy Garcia confessed, "I had to sleep with Oprah in order to do the show."

"That's the headline," sighed Clooney.

Brad Pitt, while insisting that The Assassination of Jesse James missed its first fall deadline but will make its second, noted that the absent Al Pacino, who stayed in Los Angeles to attend his American Film Institute tribute. "took notes from each of us, and settled in after a few weeks. He raised our respectability and we brought his down."

"We try to bring the classy guys down," added Clooney.

On a more serious note, continuing one of the themes of this year's globally-conscious festival, Clooney admitted that he used Cannes as "an international platform to raise awareness of something that's important to all of us," the crisis in Darfur, he said. The Oceans gang also turned up at Wednesday night's AMFAR event, which raised a record $7.5 million and sold a Clooney kiss for $350,000.

Soderbergh, who won the Palme d'Or for sex, lies and videotape 18 years ago, insisted that making a romp like Oceans 13 is nonetheless hard to do. "There's an assumption that if we're making an entertaining film we're not as engaged, interested or passionate about it," he said. "I don't think any of the people here feel that way. The Oceans films are more difficult, more tricky than the films I've gotten attention for."

UPDATE: I showed up at the Baoli Oceans Thirteen party Thursday night too late to see the gang, who had already fled the glassed-in VIP room for something more private. By the time I got in they were gone. Offering $1000 chips for roulette and black jack was a nice touch, but the lines were too long.

Miramax Films has nabbed Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for about $3 million for North America. A major Oscar campaign is in the offing, and it didn't hurt that Miramax topper Daniel Battsek is just coming off his rousing success with The Queen. He also knows the Pathe UK folks who were selling the film quite well.

The Manchester music movie Control is another sale in the works, but being shot in black and white has proved a detriment to homevideo sales. DVD drives everything. I know I'm supposed to already know this, but it really drives it home when you hear the would-be buyers discussing the way they put these deals together. They do crunch the numbers and when video doesn't crunch for a black and white or foreign title, it doesn't make people comfortable, no matter how much they love a movie.

I was sure I wasn't going to make the 7:30 PM Palais screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I had about an hour to walk all the way from the Sofitel on the point to the Variety office behind the Grand to get my ticket and rush to my apartment behind the Carlton, put on my black tie duds and makeup and hustle down the crowded Croisette on high heels to the Lumiere. But I really wanted to see this film and wasn't going to give up. Luckily I had an orchestra ticket, which gives you more breathing room and lets you walk up the red steps. I scooted behind Sharon Stone as she posed for photogs and found my place and tried to cool off as we all watched the big-screen monitor showing the last arrivals--they string the cast in one long line as they make their way up the steps.

It was a good night for bear-like Julian Schnabel, surrounded by gorgeous French actresses. The movie is achingly sad. Max Von Sydow as the father of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French editor of Elle whose mind is trapped inside his paralyzed body, is heartbreaking. So is Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, who is astonishingly expressive. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. I want to read the book that Bauby painstakingly spelled out, one blink at a time.

Ronald Harwood, Schnabel and Janusz Kaminski's cinematic adaptation is elegantly imaginative and quite beautiful. Afterwards the applause went on for a good twenty minutes (not unusual). Schnabel looked embarrassed as he took his shades on and off. He tripped and saved himself as he brought Before Night Falls star Javier Bardem over to stand with the cast. (At a roundtable today Schnabel admitted he was so nervous, he popped half a xanax.)

I applaud the filmmakers for not taking the Hollywood route that was originally contemplated (with DreamWorks and Johnny Depp) and instead making the film in its native setting and language. Producer Jon Kilik felt strongly about this. The end result is quite accessible. Some distribs are put off by its "smallness." This is not a film whose language should be a barrier (except on DVD, where arty foreign language movies don't usually sell, with the occasional exception of such genre films as Pan's Labyrinth and House of Flying Daggers.)

The great thing about small dinner parties like Paramount Vantage and Miramax's evening by the beach for No Country for Old Men is that everyone is accessible. You're all in the same swim. When you go to a jumbo-sized cluster-fuck, basically, the trick is to get into the VIP room where many of the principal players are. On my way out of last night's Deathproof party at the Palm Beach Casino, the site of many massive events in the past, I noticed producer-partners Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy hovering by the entrance door, as Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell made their way through the red carpet press.

The two couples greeted each other enthusiastically and made a bee line for the VIP room. I followed in their wake, my date in tow, and talked to Kennedy about her two films here, Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and SPC's animated Persepolis. "You're becoming an indie filmmaker!" I said.

When we got to the VIP section on a white balcony overlooking the dark water, we talked our way in on her coattails. The two couples sat on a white sofa for the entire night, enjoying each other and sending the signal, don't approach us. Harvey Weinstein made his way over, and introduced Wong Kar Wai, wearing his trademark shades, but as of 2 AM, no Quentin Tarantino. "He's tired," one Weinstein Co. staffer said.

Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan were bearing down on the VIP velvet rope as we left. (Word is the fest, which adored Tarantino's 114-minute Death Proof, would have nothing to do with Planet Terror. It wasn't for them. His recut version with trailers will go to Venice instead.)

At the packed and noisy Screen International party, also by the beach, they screened a mind-numbing 12-minute music-video plea for peace, Nassiri, featuring a lip-synching guru with a fake blissed-out smile surrounded by a chorus of fresh-faced children. The horror.

Cannes always offers fleeting moments to remember: Today at the American Pavilion, Faye Dunaway sat alone on the deck facing the water, booking a flight on her cell phone on Iberia.

Yesterday at the Majestic Hotel, Peter Bart, Tim Gray and I waited for an elevator with the very tall Mischa Barton, wearing form-fitting rust-colored silk.

The other night as I walked back from the Palais along the Croisette, the open air cinema on the beach was screening The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. An impossibly young Catherine Deneuve was singing.

New Line Cinema's Golden Compass, which put on a big dog and pony show in Cannes, has a nifty website where you can find your inner daemon. Yes, I confess, I was a mouse.

During a SuicideGirls.com interview with Robert Epstein on Angel-A, French filmmaker Luc Besson trashes The Weinstein Company:

DRE: Arthur and the Invisibles did very well all over the world except in America. Why do you think it didn’t connect here? Luc: I’ve worked in the movie business for 30 years now and for each film I work 40 different distributors around the world. The American distributor on Arthur [The Weinstein Company] was the worst I have worked with in my entire life, in any country. I think this is the essence of all the problems. Why the critics didn’t like Arthur was because they changed so much of the film and tried to pretend the film was American. The critics aren’t stupid. They watched the film, they vaguely smell American but they can feel the film is forced for an American audience. The film is European. It’s made by a Frenchman. This was the only country where the film was changed. The rest of the world has the same film as France.

[Posted by Shalini Dore] Helmer Paul Freedman confessed that it was a little strange to be partying at a Goldie Hawn yacht party in Cannes when the subjects of his Sand and Sorrow docu were still suffering in the Sudan.

The doc may have some Hollywood heavy-hitters behind it, including George Clooney who narrated, but Freedman said few people realized what was happening in Darfur.

Just calling it “genocide” was insufficient, he said passionately.“We missed what happened in Rwanda, couldn’t bring ourselves to use the word. And now we think that just regurgitating the word is enough.”

As the fest winds down, here’s an update:

Julian Schnabel’s intense tearjerker The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is being chased by distributors after its debut press screening this morning. It’s a French art film, so it will be interesting to see if any distrib comes up with the $5 million asking price for North America that Harvey Weinstein would have had to pay in order to take the film off the table in Paris pre-fest. I hear Pathe would have made that deal, but the filmmakers agreed to wait and see how the film played in Cannes.

A Mighty Heart: A modest success here, Michael Winterbottom’s well-paced, intense ensemble docu-style drama could be a marketing challenge stateside despite one of Angelina Jolie’s best performances to date. While the movie is a tough story well-told, it lacks a deeper resonance.

Paranoid Park: Gorgeously shot by Chris Doyle, Gus Van Sant delivers another small installment of his teenage trilogy. It should sell to a small distrib. After the screening last night, Geoff Gilmore, Steve Gaydos and our dates debated whether as parents we would want our child to tell us that they had killed someone accidentally. (In the movie, the teen skateboarder can't tell anyone.) What if they went to jail? I argued that I would want to know, in any case.

The Coens' No Country for Old Men: the best received movie of the fest on all fronts is the top contender for the Palme d’Or and a likely Oscar contender as well.

The fabulous-looking U23D marks the launch of a new motion picture genre: the 3D live concert film. Numbers of imitators will follow.

Leo DiCaprio’s earnest The 11th Hour is only one of the inevitable rash of coming environmental consciousness-raisers, but I hope I don’t have to sit through too many more of them.

Sicko: Michael Moore delivers a whiz-bang entertaining political call to arms. I can only hope it scores big time and does some good and gives Weinstein Co. some much-needed breathing room.

My Blueberry Nights: Modest but unassuming Wong Kar Wai, which I bet will play to women back in the States. It’s languorous, yummy fun.

Still to come: Oceans Thirteen and We Own the Night, which interestingly, sold to Columbia Pictures for $11.5 million before the press here had a chance to see it.

It was fun taking a breather at the Hotel du Cap Saturday to interview Leo DiCaprio. Warner Independent shuttled various journos from the Palais along the Mediterranean coast to the Cap d'Antibes. We walked through the sun-dappled woods to a series of cabanas by the water, where we hung out until Leo arrived. He was wearing Prada shades, a blue shirt and jeans, but eventually took the shades off; he was smart and charming. Here's the story I filed on the web. And here's Variety's review.

Personally, I found the movie informative and terrifiying. It offered a wider perspective than An Inconvenient Truth and some alternatives to the way we live now. Back in town I filed some stories and reported to our Variety party at the Majestic hotel, blackberrying madly with Elizabeth Guider, as the We Own the Night sale to Columbia story was closing.

I stalked up the Croisette to the Carlton to say hi to Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who were celebrating their Cha Cha Cha deal with Universal. Alfonso Cuaron was also there; his younger brother Carlos will make the first film; Alfonso Cuaron, Gonzalez Inarritu and Del Toro's films will be farther down the line. Alejandro looked tan, clear-eyed and healthy after an extended Spanish hiking tour. He and Del Toro are excited about the freedom they'll have to make their films without interference. Alejandro is developing some material, and isn't sure what he'll do.

Alejandro was also in town to be part of the Chacun Son Cinema program of 32 three-minute films assembled to celebrate the festival's 60th which has its public screening tonight. I'll be putting on my evening duds. Meanwhile Del Toro is here in Cannes with the horror flick The Orphanage screens tomorrow; Picturehouse is releasing stateside. He is presenting the film and helped get it made; he believes passionately in young Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona, whose shorts and music videos he had admired. When he saw the script by Sergio Sanchez he loved it and helped put the project together and assemble a cast, including Belen Rueda (The Sea Inside, Savage Grace) and Geraldine Chaplin.

After dinner with some pals at La Mere Besson, I went over to the gala dinner at the Noga Hilton for the Coens' No Country for Old Men. We go back a long way; I visited the set of Raising Arizona. Ethan admitted that while there's hardly any music in the movie, there is a little. Diane Lane was grinning, proud in the knowledge that her husband Josh Brolin has finally broken through--his taciturn performance as a young Vietnam vet is a star-making role. Javier Bardem admitted that he tried to eliminate all traces of his Spanish accent as the villain who is relentlessly stalking Moss. He wanted to not be Mexican, not be anything traceable, to be No Man from Nowhere. He's gotten skinnier than he was in the film for his role in Love in the Time of Cholera, which just wrapped production.

I got so caught up in conversation and dinner that I forgot to rush down the Croisette to see U2 perform three songs on the red carpeted steps of the Palais. Messed up priorities, I know. But I was having fun, the DJ was excellent and there was dancing to the likes of vintage Michael Jackson and Prince on the beach. What can I say? Finally, I dragged my tail to the Sicko party at another plage but the folks hadn't arrived from the premiere and I was just too tired and went home to bed.

UPDATE: I took these photos at the No Country for Old Men roundtables the next day. Joel Coen, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin look real happy, if you ask me.

Word on the Croisette is Wild Bunch is selling Woody Allen's new Spanish film starring Javier Bardem, and CAA is selling director Larry Charles' follow-up to Borat, starring ace interviewer Bill Maher. The movie challenges the religious beliefs of a range of clerics and experts of every religious persuasion. There was a private screening in the Riviera of some footage yesterday, which was "hilarious," according to one interested indie buyer who hopes that the movie is too provocative to be scooped up by a major studio. In one exchange, apparently, Maher grills a Republican U.S. Senator who believes in the end of days. When challenged about being an appropriate decision-maker for the American people, the guy responds, " You don't have to take an IQ test to get this job."

How could I resist the lure of 32 film directors assembled in the Salle Bunuel? (35 directors made 32 films, because there are two sets of brothers, the Dardennes and the Coens.) With a canny sense of how to dominate all the news coverage, Roman Polanski walked out in a huff because the journos were asking stupid questions. Before he left, he and Atom Egoyan tangled on the issue of how movies will be seen in future; Polasnki (whose short was a neat joke) thinks cinemas and the communal experience will continue; Egoyan was riffing on the digital future. (His film bridges the PDA present with the silent past, complete with clips from Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie and Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.) That was the main discussion among several of the filmmakers, but many were ignored, which seemed a waste. Polanski should have been angry at the festival for not organizing the thing better so that each filmmaker made some kind of introductory remarks about their films. (Here's the review.)

There was both a press conference and round tables, yet some people were confused about who they were talking to, and what film each director had made."The Cinema isn't the cinema anymore," said David Cronenberg, whose mordant short took a dim view of cinema's future. "The form of the cinema as we know it and love it is already a thing of the past." Walter Salles insisted that cinema must be "a collective adventure. I don't look forward to seeing a movie on a phone in 30 years time." He may not have to wait that long!

Jane Campion, with a mane of silver hair and bare legs, stood out as the only woman in the throng, and her comic short featuring a full-figured green fly scampering inside a projector stood out as well. "My film is an hommage to Bunuel," she said. "It's Dadaist and feminist. I'm sure the men too wish there were more women amongst us. It's strange to be here with a great big football team, like this. I'm making the best of it. It is sad. All of us would like to see more movies about how women see the world."

Gus Van Sant, whose short was an hommage to Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., was succinct: "When asked, we deliver."

I talked to Michael Cimino afterwards, whose off-the-mark offering was one of two set at Santa Monica's Aero Theatre. He looked scrawny and unhealthy, with a bad shag haircut, aviator shades, smooth plastic skin on his face and bad teeth. He lives in L.A. and N.Y. and has been publishing novels in other languages, not English; his current first book in a trilogy is already over 500 pages. He's through with cinema unless he can direct Andre Malraux's Man's Fate, he said: "A film of consequence. I'm writing it. To make a movie just to make a movie doesn't interest me."

I loved watching the shorts, trying to guess who did what. The trick was to stand out from the pack and figure out a way to avoid cliche. Oddly, three films feature blind people (Gonzalez Inarritu's is the best) and several involve sex in cinema, literally. Along with the two Canadians, the Asians did particularly well, as a group: Zhang Yimou's was one of my faves. Magical. I hope the Cannes fest circulates the films in some form, whether to other festivals, as individual shorts on the theatrical circuit or AtomFilms.com or through a distributor as one film. They should be seen. Kudos to Gilles Jacob for putting this monumental effort together.

UPDATE: After Chacun's debut, the competition film screenings started off with one short; the ones I saw held up wonderfully on second viewing, including the Polanski, Van Sant, Coens and Takeshi.

[Posted by Adam Dawtrey] When the titles roll for Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, the screenwriter credit will read, “Written by John Orloff.”

Which just goes to show, you can’t always believe everything you read.

It’s no secret around London that Winterbottom and his regular collaborator Laurence Coriat wrote their own adaptation of Marianne Pearl’s book about her husband’s abducation and execution by Al-Queda from scratch, discarding Orloff’s draft that was developed by production shingle Plan B before Winterbottom came aboard.

Indeed, when the producers submitted the script to arbitration by the Writers Guild of America, the only question in their mind was whether Coriat and Winterbottom would have to share their credit with Orloff at all. The ruling that Orloff should get the sole credit, and that Coriat could not even be given “special thanks,” was a complete shock.

So when those titles roll today, and the screenwriter credit comes up, please don’t upset the filmmakers by applauding too loud.

The fabled Hotel du Cap is supposed to be the ne-plus-ultra place for the highest of rollers to stay during the Cannes Film Festival. So imagine the horror one burly Oscar-winning producer felt when he was attacked by a band of robbers who were ransacking his Hotel du Cap villa, across the road from the hotel. They fell upon him with pepper spray, and got away with his cash and passport. The producer has moved across the street into the hotel proper.

Last night's unveiling of No Country for Old Men lived up to all my expectations and more. It's one of the Coen brothers' most assured films, on a par with their Oscar-winning Fargo or Miller's Crossing, with a touch of the southwestern twang of Raising Arizona. The movie, which stars veterans Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem at their best and break-out hunk Josh Brolin, belongs with the Coens' bleaker films, but adds their trademark comic tone to Cormac McCarthy's tragic book. It's a faithful adaptation, a lean and spare cinematic rendering of McCarthy's western of inexorably doomed characters. The movie also touches the zeitgeist as it expresses a loss of innocence in our culture, a turn to the dark side. The ending is heart-tugging. It's going to be hard to beat for the Palme d'Or. Unless Miramax messes up the movie's fall release (it will need delicate handling, although it will earn rave reviews, because it is not overtly commercial), I see a strong Oscar run. (Luckily 42West's Cynthia Swarz is on board.) Here's Variety's review.

In a typical moment of hi-low Cannes disjunction, after the screening I walked out to the Budweiser yacht, in the marina, to catch a sighting of the babelicious Jessica Simpson, who was announcing her new movie A Major Movie Star, which sounds like a knock-off of Private Benjamin, basically. I took off my shoes. I blackberried on the pending James Gray We Own the Night deal. I hung out with my PR buds Michele Robertson and Elizabeth Wolfe. I met Simpson's Dad. And her producer. I saw backer Avi Lerner, and his colleague Henry Winterstern. I gave up. I had to go to a movie. Dana Harris took over the Jessica Simpson Watch. I never went on the yacht, never drank, never ate. UPDATE: Here's Bill Booth's account.

I restrapped my sandals and went off to get in line at the Noga Hilton for Savage Grace, produced by Christine Vachon, directed by Tom Kalin and written by Howard Rodman. It's one warped sexy decadent sophisticated movie. Julianne Moore is a Bad Mom, basically, who gets a little too intimate with her devoted son. Needless to say, it does not end well. After a standing ovation, the film entourage wound up celebrating their success at the Carlton Bar. UPDATE: At festival's end no North American distrib had bought the film, but several smaller distribs were circling. Here's an interview by Manohla Dargis with Rodman.

This morning I saw Michael Moore's Sicko, which was tough, fast-moving, funny and brought me to tears at its conclusion. The whole point of the Cuba thing was that he took 9/11 rescue workers who are damaged by their experience and having a toough time getting taken care of by our fucked up medical system. After a stunt on boats in Guantanamo Bay trying to get into the Naval Station, which he argues takes better care of its detainees than our heath care system does, Moore takes the ailing folks to Cuba, which welcomes them into its hospital and gives them care. It is very moving.

Our own country feels bureaucratic and harshly unforgiving, even merciless, to its most needy, while Canada, France, the U.K. and Cuba embrace their citizens with the nurturing they need. Tough stuff. It will play like gangbusters all over the world. But will it be enough to bail out the Weinsteins? It will certainly help. Moore was aces at the packed press conference, although the criticism that he painted a too-rosy a picture of the other countries' health care systems is fair. He should have covered himself on that. Here's Variety's review.

[Photo by Getty Images]

There could be a big North American sale tonight, as distribs piled into a noon screening today of James Gray's We Own the Night, which doesn't screen until the fest's end. The LAT's Patrick Goldstein managed to get a gander at a print this week in L.A. and loved it. Starring Mark Wahlberg, the movie offers a more accessibly commercial prospect than many of the films unspooling here.

This morning there was a screening of the hour-long U2 3D at 8 AM!!! But anyone who likes U2 will enjoy this live concert movie; the 3d visuals and graphics were very cool. In one shot Bono reaches his hand right through the screen and almost touches your face. The glasses are Real D Rayban-like frames; even at an industry screening the movie played well--it would be much better in a large loud venue full of rocking fans. I felt constrained from doing more than modest foot-tapping and head-bobbing.

Tonight, at last, the press screening of the Coens' No Country for Old Men.

Tomorrow is jampacked with action: Leo DiCaprio's eco-activist 11th hour, Michael Moore's Sicko, Bono's press conference, and the Coens.

In Cannes you often get the sense that everyone else is doing something that you're not. God forbid you should choose badly. So this morning I skipped the Jerry Seinfeld Bee Movie stunt at the Carlton (Dade Hayes got to see him fly on a cable from the top of the hotel to the Carlton Beach in a bee suit; apparently he likes bungee jumping) to see Triangle, a Hong Kong action flick directed by not one but three directors: Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnny To. How could I resist?

I rush down the Croisette to the small Bazin screening room convinced I'll be shut out but there are plenty of seats. Hmmm. The movie starts out fine, but I have trouble figuring out its POV on the characters. None of them are likeable. What is their motivation? It keeps changing. The woman of the piece morphs from slightly jealous and anxious about her philandering husband to some kind of angel/devil. The final setpiece is fantastic. Finally you see three friends united, and a man who loves his troubled wife. But people keep getting seriously injured and then walking away, like a Roadrunner cartoon.

So I went to the press conference to see what was going on. It turns out that Tsui directed the first part, Lam the second, and To the third. They had no script. They couldn't interfere with the others. They passed the baton, and changed their points of view as they went along. Actor Simon Lam kept saying--their Mandarin was translated by an interpreter into French, and by another interpreter into English on headsets--"I had to be tolerant." Then he admitted he was lost half the time. It reminded me of Steven Soderbergh's The Good German. The directors were having a fine time with this experiment. But they weren't thinking about the audience. They've been friends for 30 years and nobody had to take responsibility for this fine mess.

The high point of the day was an AMC video interview at the Noga Beach with Jude Law and Norah Jones for AMC's Inside Cannes video reports. Jones was tiny, open-faced and tres gentile. Nothing she has ever done in the music world prepared her for the work she had to do in Cannes, the red carpet paparazzi madness, the endless press. (Harvey Weinstein was on hand.) Law was shrewdly charming; he knows what he's doing. Their love for Wong Kar Wai was palpable. This was the first time in Cannes for both. Law said he was saving it for the 60th. "We're Cannes virgins!" they chimed. The kissing scene took an entire day to shoot.

I talked to Wong Kar Wai, too, who is tall, elegant and articulate. Sound is as important to him as image and he actually went back to each of the cities (NY, Las Vegas, Memphis) after principal photography to record sound there to add to the mix. Both Norah and Jude supplied music ideas for the soundtrack. The reason he believed Jones could carry the movie was the timbre and quality of her voice. (The reaction to the movie has been decidedly mixed. I suspect that it's a chick flick, and will do modest smart-house business in the States. Jones has a following, and women like Law.)

I stopped by the Grand on my way out and saw Toronto Fest director Noah Cowan meeting with a bevy of agents from Endeavor. I met a woman from Pathe International who continued to fan the buzz on Julian Schnabel's French The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is apparently very moving. Distribs are eagerly circling. There will be a bidding war on that one. Are audiences willing to go to an accessiblly marketed foreign language film? Some think so. According to Picturehouse, the just-released Pan's Labyrinth DVD, which was heavily marketed and supplied to retailers as a possible crossover, is flying off the shelves.

I flitted through Odd Lot Entertainment and Lionsgate's Carlton Cote party to celebrate Frank Miller's directing debut on his film adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit. I hung out with Miller Wednesday night at the Grand after I finished my Michael Moore column. He's in good fettle (what's not to like?) post-300 and was eager to get to work on The Spirit. He's going to find a happy medium between the style of 300 and Sin City, he said, black and white with color for emotion. There will be Red. He's designing a very 40s world. And he has some great casting ideas for the women of the piece, and is hoping to convince Samuel Jackson and Bob Hoskins to get on board. The Spirit will be an unknown. Like the comic book artist he is, Miller plans to storyboard and plan very carefully--and will call his Sin City co-director Bob Rodriguez for answers if need be.

Then I went down to the Carlton Beach for the Focus Features party. I paid my respects to Focus execs James Schamus and John Lyons, who was talking to WMA agent Mike Simpson, said hi to Christine Vachon and director Tom Kalin (Savage Grace) and high-tailed it down the Rue d'Antibes (stopping into a pharmacie to buy bandaids for my poor feet) to check out an early press screening of something the rest of the fest will see on Saturday. En route I ran into my fellow blogger Glenn Kenny (Premiere.com) waiting patiently in a huge line at the Ian Stuart Curtis movie Control, the opening night film for Directors Fortnight (The Quinzaine).

I took a pleasant twilight walk up the quiet back streets of Cannes to the restaurant La Cave for a yummy French meal with some industry pals. Word is good on the Roumanian film Four Months, Three weeks and Two Days, a heart-rending abortion drama that critics and festiival programmers love but which is compared in grimness to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Thus it might not get a proper stateside release. (UPDATE: It as picked up by IFC FIlms.) The buzz on the Coens' No Country for Old Men (Scott Rudin's Paramount Vantage/Miramax co-production) is building to a roar off the high praise it got from an early screening for New York Film Fest programmers. It's in the league of Miller's Crossing, folks say. Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park has some interest but will likely play young.

My gang ended up at the Majestic terrace, where Moore was having a confab with PR advisor Chris Lehane and a bevy of Weinstein Co. marketing and PR people. He's in for it.

Wong Kar Wai's widescreen My Blueberry Nights is a delicious mood poem, a visually stunning ode to the lips of Norah Jones and Jude Law, who deliver the film's highlight: a soft, sumptuous, slow kiss.

At the packed press conference following the movie Wednesday morning, Wong and his co-stars agreed that even when they were making the film, they knew the kiss was the film's key moment. For Jones, an acting neophyte who agreed to place her trust in Wong after she finished a concert tour and watched In the Mood for Love, Wong's idiosyncratic directing methods were all she knew. Law and the other actors, Rachel Weisz, David Straithairn and Natalie Portman, made the adjustment to constant improvising and last-minute changes. "The notes Kar Wai did give were more about the timing and the mood," Jones said. "We had most of our conversations about rhythm and pace," said Law. "It was almost as if you were tuning an instrument, we were different voices in a duet. I felt we were getting a sense of physicality of character."

The scenes between Law and Jones, who are falling in love at the start of the film, are magical, and closely resemble a six-minute short film Wong made at the same time as In the Mood for Love, which is set in a diner. After Jones agreed to star in My Blueberry Nights (but not sing), Wong and writer Lawrence Block explanded the script into a three-episode cross-country saga. Wong not only worked with composer Ry Cooder but also borrowed some Japanese music from the short. Much of the film's music was suggested by Jones after she read the script, with different moods for each city, L.A., Memphis, Las Vegas and New York.

The kiss itself took days. "A kiss means different things to Chinese characters or to western characters," said Wong, who closely choreographed his actors' moves. "There's a subtle undertone, you have to make sure you do justice to the characters. We have to make sure it's something we can all share, even though we're all different races and cultures." "It was clear that this tiny moment in these people's lives was a huge turning point in the story," said Law. "Everyone's lives turn and change in a moment."

For the pie that Law feeds to Jones night after night, Wong asked Jones which pie she hated most. "Blueberry," she said. "It was like torture for her," Wong said.

After I got through security at JFK, I did my weekly five-minute Sunday KNX radiocast from a quiet corner. ("What are you looking forward to?" "The Coens' No Country For Old Men, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, Tom Kalin's Savage Grace, and Michael Moore's Sicko.") Then I settled down in the Air France waiting room to blog Michael Moore, who I had just interviewed on the phone at a friend's apartment.

It was intense to file from a BlackBerry with my thumbs, tuning out all the extraneous noise and announcements and focusing on filing before I got on the plane. My stomach sank when the signal wasn't strong enough to send. Luckily, a walk down the terminal yielded a stronger feed and sitting on the plane, I got an email back that Don in our online department in L.A. had not only got it, but had already grabbed a photo, entered the links and put it up. I was relieved when the taxi driver in Nice waited for me to report that one of my bags never arrived from Paris (a messenger finally delivered it around midnight). The driver ferried me through the hills to Cannes, dropping me off at the Le Pavillion Riviera, a small residence behind the famed blue-gabled Carlton Hotel.

After settling into my apartment (Air conditioning! Spotless bathtub with La Douche! Laundry! Green tea!), I checked out the Variety offices behind the Grand Hotel (the site of my favorite late-night terrace bar ever since my days staying at my digs at the Residences Grand; Bingham Ray and I called the green-and-orange studio with orange shag rug the Pedro Almodovar Suite.) The Variety staff is lined up along seven long white tables at their portable computers and local phone lines, buzzing Blackberries on the side. John speaks elegant Spanish; Alison and Patrick speak French, while Ali speaks French and Arabic. Adam is the English-speaking U.K. bureau chief. Stateside editors Elizabeth and Dade are tracking North American sales, while Dana and I are blogging. Critics Todd and Justin marshall the various critics who tomorrow will start screening and reviewing three or four films a day for the duration. A skeleton staff puts out a daily newspaper here ten days in a row. Tuesday afternoon was the first of those ten deadlines. Nine more to go.
Before their long grueling haul, Monday night the Variety staff enjoyed a relaxing meal at le Pizza, a favorite American Cannes hangout overlooking the bobbing boats on the marina.

Dana (below right) and I walked back along the Croisette to the office; the fabled red carpet steps were naked and deserted, surrounded by stacked metal stanchions. We both love the 60th anniversary photos that are plastered everywhere of stars and auteurs who have attended Cannes over the years. One enormous black-and-white new group photo looms over the Palais.

Today Alison (left, with Katja and Dade) was chasing a story about the possible sale of the famed Hotel du Cap, which could really change the scene for the Hollywood high-rollers who like to hang out with each other sipping Bellinis by the choppy Mediterranean. Leonardo DiCaprio will be doing his press out there for his eco-alert 11th Hour, as many stars have before him. I always loved the story about Charlie Sheen spending a few hours using the rocks in the sea below as target practice for large numbers of hotel glass ash trays, for which he was duly charged at the end of his stay. The post-Pulp Fiction celebration at the Du Cap with Bruce Willis, Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender is the stuff of legend.

Meanwhile Patrick was disturbed to hear that Bollywood star Ashwarya Rai might not make her planned appearance on the Croisette. "Elle est arrivee?" he said into the phone, relieved.

Tomorrow's opening night is Wong Kar Wai's much-anticipated My Blueberry Nights, one of three Weinstein Co. films at the fest. (Sicko and Tarantino's two-hour version of Death Proof are the others.) Will Harvey and Bob make a comeback here? That proof will be in the boxoffice pudding.

I'm horrified by this story about the producer of 1979's My Brilliant Career, Margaret Fink, who clearly has not had one herself, begrudging Gillian Armstrong credit for her debut film. Armstrong obviously had the right stuff, and moved on to a strong directing career. The director of a movie is the director, no matter how well it is produced. A good producer's job is to make sure everyone come together to make a great film. She should be proud of Armstrong, not jealous of her.

Armstrong is putting the finishing touches on her latest film, Death Defying Acts, starring Guy Pearce as escape artist Harry Houdini and Catherine Zeta Jones as his love interest. The Weinstein Co. plans to take the film to the fall film circuit.

On the one hand, I wonder when the studios will adopt a long tail strategy and put all their content on websites for audiences to find them. On the other, it drives me crazy when I can't just go to you Tube to find the clips I want to see, easily, effortlessly, and grab the code and put the clip on my blog if I want to. Otherwise you have to go hunting around on these cluttered web sites with lousy search engines and then the code isn't available (that's how you get the nice box) and even if it is it doesn't work. Comedy Central is one such site.

So CBS may be on the right track by abandoning the strategy of distributing their own videos on one site.

I remember well a few days of mad postings and passing along candidates for the Hollywood's Hottest Assistants website; Borys Kit blogged about it at the time. I caught up with this LAT story from Nick Confalone, the guy who created it, while reading a stack of papers on the airplane. Amusing:

THE SITE went live on Friday, March 24, 2006. A few days later, we posted a "grand opening" announcement in Craigslist's classified ads. We hoped an assistant would see it and post it to his "tracking board," an e-mail list made by assistants to share information about new scripts, new jobs and, apparently, new websites. With the infrastructure already in place, news of our site spread like malaria.

Within hours, I was pounded by e-mails from every assistant I knew. They didn't know I was behind it; they just wanted to share the hilarity, and gossip about the Top 25. Apparently, the news spread all over town, because by the next morning, we had more than 1 million hits. Visitors kept coming, and we exceeded our monthly bandwidth in four days.

For one week, chaos reigned over a 20-mile radius in Los Angeles. Hollywood gossip blogs declared it "an online beauty pageant for the industry's desk slaves." CAA went so far as to block our IP address, but it was too late; we were unstoppable. I scrambled to keep up with the site's exponential growth.

I'm in rainy New York City en route to Cannes. I worked out of the Variety offices on Park Avenue South yesterday, trying to get a handle on the new platform I'll be using to blog from the Festival de Cannes. I fly to France Sunday, where Variety.com editor Dana Harris and I will both be blogging the fest, for special Cannes versions of Fest Central and Thompsononhollywood, respectively. Our blogs will be accessible from Variety's Cannes Shootout page, where all things Cannes reside. I'll post non-Cannes-related items here intermittently.

Congrats to Cynthia Littleton who launched her new TV blog, Littleton on Air, on Saturday.

Friday night I saw Frost/Nixon, the excellent, riveting Peter Morgan play which won raves in London and now New York, as well. He does it again! He makes two people fighting for power oddly sympathetic. Thank God the director of the movie version, Ron Howard, has recognized that casting the play's Michael Sheen (who played Tony Blair in Morgan and Stephen Frears' The Deal and The Queen) as David Frost and Frank Langella as Richard Nixon in the film was the way to go. Putting stars in the movie would have been a mistake anyway; you want to to believe that you are watching Nixon and Frost, not some big name actor.

We went to the reprise of Stephen Sondheim's Company Saturday night, because the unthinkable happened: Lovemusik, the love story of Bertold Brecht and Lotte Lenya, cancelled the show at the last minute when Michael Cerveris Donna Murphy called in sick, the theater said. (The next day, the theater said that his co-star Murphy, who has a rep for not showing up for shows, called in sick, along with her understudy.) Company's director John Doyle did the routine of having the actors doing double duty as musicians, which worked so well in his Tony Award-winning restaging of Sweeney Todd, but was distracting here. I love the music--the songs themselves stand the test of time--but was underwhelmed by the uneven cast and clunky staging. (Heather Laws nailed the "Getting Married Today" showstopper.) The show was originally set in the 70s and belongs in that era. Some things update better than others.

Here's the trailer for the Angelina Jolie starrer A Mighty Heart. Michael Winterbottom's film based on the 2003 book by Mariane Pearl, wife of slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl, debuts at Cannes.

One of the hottest projects up for sale in Cannes is director Julian Schnabel's follow-up to Before Night Falls, Ronald Harwood’s French-language adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s harrowing 1997 memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A lot of distributors are chasing this one, which is being sold by Pathe International, and opens in France right after its debut in Cannes.

The movie stars Mathieu Amalric as the editor of Elle who is rendered speechless by a paralyzing stroke, as well as Marie-Josée Croze, who also starred in Steven Spielberg's Munich. The filmmakers are refusing all bids until the movie screens in Cannes, and Schnabel won't talk to press until after the movie premieres. Only a few key French press have seen it so far.

Time Warner wasted no time in giving HBO czar Christ Albrecht the boot Wednesday after his arrest in Las Vegas after an alleged violent altercation with a woman friend. At first the company put Albrecht on leave to cope with what he termed an alcohol problem. But today Warners acted more decisively, after the media revealed that a prior alleged abuse of a female coworker that had been swept under the rug in 1991.

Kudos here to the LAT's Claudia Eller. I am quite sure that if Warners had been willing to hide the first incident, they would have cast a blind eye again. But Eller made that impossible. With both Time Warner execs Jeff Bewkes and Richard Parsons harboring lofty career ambitions, there was no way they could afford to be lenient this time.

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy posts clips of some of the most famous long takes of all time. Touch of Evil does it for me. Along with Hardboiled. Goodfellas. Children of Men. The Player. Snake Eyes. And probably the greatest single take of all time: The Passenger, when the camera swings out the window...

What are we missing?

Kasi Lemmons' Talk To Me will launch the Film Independent 2007 L.A. Film Fest, with Danny Boyle's Sunshine as the closer, reports Indiewire:

Eight films will screen in the festival's narrative competition and eleven films will show in the documentary competition, with seven films in each section having a world premiere. 230 features, shorts, and music videos are on tap for the 2007 fest.

Michael Moore's health care documentary Sicko, which debuts in Cannes, will be released in North America by Lionsgate and the Weinstein Co. on June 29, reports Ian Mohr. It feels like a bit of a rush.

I always got the sense that ex-Variety reporter Claude Brodesser-Akner wasn't exactly comfortable being paid to blog by the likes of AOL-owned gossip site TMZ.com. He says they enjoyed a good run. But Alan Citron and Harvey Levin's brainchild proved so successful at celebrity-mongering that breaking showbiz news on blogs became a sideline issue. "Claude was like a professor sitting next to a stripper," said one TMZ exec.

The TMZ blogs are over now, even if it did change the way the trades do business, adding further pressure to break stories on-line. For that Brodesser-Akner deserves a footnote in showbiz history, as he returns to established print journalism as AdAge's L.A. bureau chief.

Patrick Goldstein makes some good points about why it's depressing that some of Hollywood's best filmmakers are stuck in commercial sequel mode.

One. I would add that while I don't have to watch them all, sequels are one way to buy one's freedom. Steven Soderbergh takes plenty of other chances--and grows as a filmmmaker-- when he isn't making Oceans movies.

Two. Not all sequels are created equal. I want to see Harrison Ford pass the torch in Indy 4 to the next generation, Shia LeBeuof. I am enjoying watching the Harry Potter cast grow up and face darker obstacles on their road to maturity. And I am definitely on board with Paul Greengrass and The Bourne Ultimatum. As long as he is setting challenges for himself as a filmmaker, I have no beef with that. And looking at the fabulous--if slightly ridiculous--shot of Bruce Willis on the cover of Vanity Fair, I sense that whether the movie turns out to be any good or not, the public does want to revisit that character. John McClane still resonates with us, especially as the world out there remains threatening and unsafe. There's good reason why movie audiences crave comfort food right now. It's something that they need.

One of the inflated numbers surrounding the mega-release of Spider-Man 3 is the cost of releasing the movie to over 4000 theaters. Apparently the cost of producing and shipping some 11,000 prints--the widest release ever--- cost Sony a cool $22 million.

Producing partners Stacey Sher and Michael Shamberg not only enjoyed attending Roger Ebert's recent Overlooked Film Festival with their film Gattaca, but were delighted to be awarded by the ailing critic their very own Golden Thumbs, cast in gold by the same company that makes Oscar. Having attended to the release of two films in the past year, Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and Richard LaGravenese's Freedom Writers, Sher and Shamberg are now casting Italian director Gabriele Mucchino's follow-up to The Pursuit of Happyness, Man and Wife. The drama about an immigrant's POV on our culture is scheduled to start filming this summer in Brooklyn for 2008 release by Universal Pictures.

The Alliance of Women Film Journalists, which posts many stories about women in film, is rallying around film critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, who is being replaced after almost 30 years at the Atlanta Journal Constitution-- by a wire service. So the AWFJ website has posted a hot topic: do film critics have a future? Gillespie will continue to write for other outlets, including the AWFJ.

Rottentomatoes.com crunched their movie reviews for comic book movies and found out that American Splendor and Spider-Man 2 made the top of the list as the best-reviewed comic book movies, while Spidey 3 came in at number 35.

Son of the Mask, ranked number 94 at the bottom of the list, has the honor of being the worst-reviewed comic book movie.

The list includes movies based on traditional comic books, graphic novels, manga and newspaper comic strips as well as feature films without traditional superheroes. Thus films such as A History of Violence, Garfield and 300 were assessed in the final tally.

The full list is on the jump:

Matt Dentler reports on Francis Ford Coppola's interview with the University of Texas at Austin film professor Thomas Schatz (The Genius of the System), who screened Eleanor Coppola's latest docu about her husband at work:

Based on the scenes shown in the documentary, we can gather that Youth Without Youth will be a dense and complicated epic. Based on a novella by Mircea Eliade, the film stars Tim Roth and Alexandra Maria Lara as lovers in what appears to be a rumination on time, love, and consciousness. We saw scenes about eternal youth, the Nazis, and Matt Damon. In short, Youth Without Youth seems like heady stuff to come (Sony Pictures Classics is due to release it later this year), all the more emphasized by Coppola's Q&A following the screening of CODA.

UPDATE: And he gives a long interview to aint-it-cool-news' Harry Knowles, who admits his neophyte journo status by not knowing how to use his tape recorder. Given that Coppola isn't introducing audiences to Youth without Youth via the usual film festival circuit (certainly Cannes would have selected the film), he seems to be adopting an alternative approach, by going direct to cinephiles through the internet. But is Harry's target demo (young male fanboys) the group that will go see his film? Youth Without Youth sounds resolutely adult art house to me. I have to imagine that if Telluride or New York requests this film, Coppola will relent.

I'm getting tired of going to the movies and imagining the indie version of the crap studio picture I'm seeing. I watch a bloated twee glossy concoction with a treacly sweet twangy soundtrack and stars made up to a faretheewell in countless perfect outfits and I fantasize about the pared down, authentic, realistic, well-acted smart-house movie I really want to see. All the actors in Georgia Rule were capable of doing that--truth be told, the talented Lindsay Lohan and Felicity Huffman seemed lost--but that's the fault of the director Garry Marshall, who was so wrong for this movie. (I will defend Pretty Woman, always.) Granted, Georgia Rule is probably more commercial than what I want to see. Mark Andrus is a strong writer--the bones for this movie were solid. Jane Fonda was terrific; so was Dermot Mulroney. Damn.

UPDATE: John Anderson agrees with me overall, though I like Fonda better.

Cannes is beckoning. Thank God.

I've been wanting to write a Scott Rudin story. That's because the New York-based producer is on a roll. This is the year that the guy--a prolific filmmaker, with fabulous taste, a theater producer as well as a film producer--will probably finally make it to the Oscar derby. He missed, with The Hours. He deserves to get there. But Rudin won't go to Cannes to share the kudos for the Coens' No Country for Old Men, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. Rudin doesn't like publicity. He hates it because so often it's negative. That's because he's a diva and a control freak--along with being a brilliant producer of excellent movies.

I've been prepping a column about all his promising projects coming up. The Paul Thomas Anderson movie There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis, wasn't finished in time for Cannes. Rudin also produced Noah Baumbach's Margot's Wedding, starring Nicole Kidman, and the Kimberly Peirce movie, Stop Loss, starring Ryan Philippe. And there's more in the works, from Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay to Jonathan Frazen's The Corrections. And what's going on with Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking?

I know Scott. I've talked to him many times. And I'm the idiot. Because when I said, "I'm going to do it with you or without you," and he bit my head off, I thought he wanted to time the story. He had his PR rep call and promise to work something out. And then went ahead and played ball with the NYT.

So it goes.

As tempting as it would be for any distributor to land a package of five films from five filmmakers who include the so-called three amigos-- Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), plus Carlos Cuaron (who co-wrote Y Tu Mama Tambien with his brother Alfonso) and Rodrigo Garcia (Six Feet Under), son of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez--the company that lands the deal will be the one that needs it the most. That's obvious.

But the downside of such a deal—reported in today's LAT-- is that the five filmmakers are working in cahoots, buttressing their clout by functioning as a team. And while Del Toro is a reasonable fellow, and Garcia and Carlos Cuaron are still up-and-comers, both Alfonso Cuaron and Gonzalez Inarritu are demanding artists at the top of their game. They have every reason to feel that having fought hard to make movies with artistic integrity, they do not want to give that up:

Over the last several weeks, the directors' respective agents have been talking up the "five-pack" proposal to a select group of equity funds and studios where the directors have strong ties, including Universal Pictures, Paramount Vantage and Warner Bros.

As of last weekend, Universal was the front-runner; the other studios had concluded that the asking price was too onerous.

Studio executives and agents involved in the deal, who declined to comment for confidentiality reasons, cautioned that the proposed transaction was complex, with a lot of moving parts that were still being coordinated.

David Yates, director of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will do the sixth installment as well, reports scifiwire:

"I am doing Half-Blood Prince, and I'm doing it because I love the world, I love the characters," the BAFTA-winning director said in an interview. "I think I have more business with this world and these characters."