March Break hasn’t been on my radar since I left school. I have no kids; I’m not a teacher and I don’t feel the need to let it all hang out at keg parties in Daytona Beach with people a third my age. So it came as quite a surprise to me when I had to book a flight to Los Angeles for March 18 that all the flights were full with rowdy March Breakers except the 8:15 pm, which had only limited seating.
You know what you get when you book last minute for March Break? Row 31. Yup, the toilet row. Not only are you at the desolate end of the plane, but you will be the first to get on, the last to get off and spend the whole flight listening to shrieking flight attendants dropping glasses and smelling wafts of toxic waste from the loos. That’s how I spent March Break this year. Hope you had more fun.
Got into LA late, checked into the Four Seasons—no bad smells or noisy staff there—and went to bed.
SATURDAY, MARCH 19, 2005
The late, great Hunter S. Thompson used to say that “breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same traditonalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner.” He recommended starting the day with “four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon or corned beef hash with sliced chiles, a Spanish omelette or Eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert.” He also suggested eating outside and “preferably stone naked.” I bring this up because I too believe in the multi-course breakfast, but rather than brace me for the day, I think the four Bloody Marys might just send me back to bed. But, with Dr. Thompson in mind I order a substantial breakfast, the same one I have every time I stay at the Four Seasons—Huevos Rancheros, a Jet Lag smoothie and a giant urn of Earl Grey tea. It’s delicious and gives me the kick start I need to face the day, although I have to marvel that two eggs, a black bean quesadilla, some guacamole, a smoothie and some tea costs 47 US dollars.
I’m here to see the new Robert Rodriguez movie Sin City, a gritty translation of the Frank Miller graphic novels, and interview some of the cast. I don’t have to be at the screening until 6:30, and despite LA’s record rainfall in recent weeks—and a light drizzle today—I have a number of errands to run and I’m determined not to take cabs everywhere. I’m going to get around town the two ways that would make most Los Angelians wince—walking and the bus. I walk down to Fairfax and Third Street and just outside of the Farmer’s Market I catch the bus. For three dollars you can buy a day pass that’s good for the whole day.
My first stop—two busses later—is Astro Burger (7475 Santa Monica Boulevard) on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. You may have seen the place on the cover of the New York Post or in People recently. Photos of Million Dollar Baby star Hilary Swank, still dressed in her revealing backless gown, chowing down at the low-cost burger bar after partying at the Governors Ball and the Vanity Fair shindig on Oscar night were everywhere following her win. Accompanied by husband Chad Lowe and a group of friends, the actress ordered a vegetarian cheeseburger and fries and plunked her new Oscar down on the plastic tray next to her burger while she ate.
“She walked in with a big smile, raised the statue over her head and everybody burst into applause,” said Astro Burger owner Dino Andrianos. “It was a thrilling moment for everyone.”
Restaurant boss Andrianos says Swank is a regular visitor to the West Hollywood burger-bar—described by one LA food writer as “the kind of place where the cast of Happy Days would feel right at home”—which is also frequented by luminaries including Leonardo Di Caprio and the late Marlon Brando.
He added: “She doesn’t have the personality of a star. She’s just a regular person—and very low-key.”
I was going to have the Ostrich burger—I’ve had it before and it tastes like really lean beef or maybe like a cow and a chicken had a baby—but instead chose the Swank meal, a Santa Fe Veggie Burger with avocado and Swiss cheese, fries and a root beer ($9.85). It was delicious and I’m told the secret to a truly scrumptious veggie burger is in the cooking. It must, I was told, be grilled over charcoal and never, ever microwaved or fried.
From there I walked back to the bus stop in a light drizzle, stopping only to watch the police arrest someone who I thought was Dave Foley from The Kids in the Hall. It wasn’t Foley and standing there watching what I thought was a celebrity take-down made me miss the 217 bus on Fairfax and I had to sit for twenty minutes to wait for another one.
From there I took a series of busses that dropped me at Sunset and Vine. Not exactly where I wanted to go, but there was something disrupting traffic and my bus was detoured. As I walk toward Hollywood Boulevard I discover why my bus had to detour. The streets were blocked off to make way for a large scale peace rally. It was a sea of “Bush Lied-Thousands Died” placards and fists raised in defiance for as far as I could see. I walked with them for a while—I was going that way anyway—and soon found myself chanting their peace mantra.
“What do want?”
“Peace!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
I felt like I had stepped into time warp back to 1969. Beware the brown acid, man. For a peace rally many of these people seemed a little aggressive—madder than stranded Jets-Go passengers at March Break. Despite the hippy-dippy peace and love message of the crowd, I had the uneasy feeling that things could go wrong at any time. I later heard that there were 20,000 people there, and when you have that many fired-up people in one place, trouble can’t be far away.
I dropped by Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—the Hollywood landmark recently featured in The Aviator—and stood in its famous forecourt. Here Hollywood legends from Mary Pickford to Tom Cruise have left their footprints, handprints and more—John Barrymore left an impression of his famous profile and Marliyn Monroe left an earring—in the cement slabs outside the theatre. I hear some tourists talking as they look at the Peter Sellers autograph.
“Do you know who he is?” asks a mother to her daughter. “He did Three Men and A Baby.” Somewhere Steve Guttenberg chuckled and Sellers rolled over in his grave.
I’ve been to this theatre many times, but have never taken the daily tour, so I cut away from the protesters—I’m with you in spirit my brothers and sisters—and ducked into the theatre. It was a more appealing option than walking around LA in the rain, so $12 later I find myself standing in the ornate lobby with a tour guide in an ill fitting tuxedo. He was enthusiastic, but spoke just a little too loud and seemed like he was reading from cue cards that none of us in the tour could see.
He did, however, have lots of cool info on the theatre. The inside of the lobby has giant garden fairytale style murals on the walls which have been in place for over seventy years. They are quite beautiful, but the really cool thing about them is that they were painted by Keye Luke, an accomplished artist who also painted the theatre’s massive auditorium ceiling. Luke was also the actor who played Charlie Chan’s No. One Son in the movies, but even cooler than that, he was Kato on the original Green Hornet television series and was probably best known as Master Po—“Quickly as you can snatch this pebble from my hand”—on the Kung Fu series from 1972 to 75.
The theatre is tacky-beautiful, with every inch of wall space covered in murals and Asian themed paintings. The curtain, which measures more than 80 feet wide, is embossed with a palm tree pattern originally designed by Rumba King Xavier Cugat. Also still in place are large, hollow imported marble columns which are air cooled and have provided the theatre with air conditioning for over seventy years. Grauman’s Chinese was the first air conditioned theatre in America.
The fancy wooden and brass armrests on the end of each aisle are also originals, we’re told, having recently been rescued from storage, restored and re-installed.
From there the tour quickly denigrates into a sales pitch for the various amenities offered by the theatre. We’re shown the “VIP” room which is a glorified waiting room above the old theatre, but, our guide says, “you never know who you might see up here,” and relates stories of various celebrities who have frequented the place. From there we are taken to one of the newer, smaller theatres and shown a five minute documentary on the theatre. The place has a rich history, but you would never know it from this puffed up commercial, which rapidly skips through the Hollywood history of the place in favor of plugs for the corporation that owns the building.
The tour ends where so many of these kinds of things often end—in a gift shop. I leave the tour with buying a souvenir—no Grauman’s night light, trivet or polo shirt for me. I’ll be content with the memories.
By the time I bolt from the gift shop the screening is just an hour away. Not enough time to go back to the hotel—especially since Hollywood Boulevard is still closed down for the protest—so I decide to walk over to the screening room. LA is so massive that a walk that I thought would take fifteen or twenty minutes based on the number of the address, took almost an hour.
It was worth the long sweaty walk. Sin City may be the best movie of the year—and perhaps last year and very possibly next year. The movie is utterly unique, using legendary graphic novelist Frank Miller’s Sin City books as storyboards for the film’s trio of noirish blood-soaked stories, it is unlike anything I have seen before. Every frame is high black and white style with the occasional dollop of color thrown in for effect. Fans of hard-boiled ‘40s-era crime fiction will recognize many of the conventions of those films—low-key lighting, a bleak urban setting and corrupt, cynical characters—but while the film has a decidedly retro feel, it manages to feel absolutely current at the same time.
Viewers should be warned that this movie is not for everyone, and I think audiences will be split into two groups—people who love this movie and people who hate it. There won’t be any middle ground, and for a take-no-prisoners kind of movie like this that’s the way it should be. Directors (yes, there are three of them) Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino have made a movie that doesn’t compromise visually or thematically. It is violent, distasteful and pushes the “booze, broads, and bullets” (and adds at least one more “b” word in there in the form of Carla Guigino’s character) ethos of classic film noirs to the limit. In what are essentially three love stories, Sin City explores taboos that not even the most cynical, pessimistic noir director from yesteryear would have considered. It’s a muscular movie, which pulls no punches—although many punches are thrown during the course of its 100 minute running time—made with defiance, but also with grace.
(WARNING: Extremely clumsy metaphor ahead!) If Sin City was a cup of coffee to make it you’d first need to fill a Double Indemnity filter with finely ground Pulp Fiction and Dick Tracy, then pour liquefied Sam Peckinpah through it and let it brew until it is dark and so filled with caffeine that it makes your brain buzz.
For an extended review, tune into Reel to Real March 28.
I was scheduled to see another movie after Sin City, but bailed out. Anything would have been too much of a buzz kill after that one. Instead I headed back to the Four Seasons for a late night snack at the bar. Three Heinekens and some Kobe Beef Sliders with Bavarian Potatoes—which, in Canada we would call Hickory Sticks—a bill for $41 USD and it was sack time.
SUNDAY MARCH 20, 2005
Up early, packed and headed upstairs to do my Sin City interviews. While I’m waiting by the elevators a door opens behind me and a familiar face walks out of the room next to mine. Apparently Clive Owen was nearby. It’s about 8:15am when I see him, and he is wearing a finely tailored Saville Row black suit, a white shirt open at the collar and very shiny black shoes. Damned if he doesn’t look like James Bond. I have said for years that they should give this guy the license to kill and bring some grit back to the increasingly lame Bond franchise.
I said hello and told him how much I enjoyed Sin City. We chat about the look of the film and he is genuinely enthusiastic about it. I have been doing this long enough to know the difference between someone who really believes the movie is good verses those who are trying to convince you that the movie is worth watching. He told me that he saw the film for the first time on Friday and was blown away by the look of it. Remember it was shot in a small room, completely on green screen, so he had no idea what the finished product would look like. It sounds as if he was happy. He told me that after the screening he hugged Robert Rodriguez. “I was blown away,” he told me. “I told Robert afterwards that he was a genius.”
When the elevator comes we go out separate ways—he takes the down elevator to the lobby, I go up to the interview suites. These things rarely ever run on time, so I rustle up a plate of breakfast and dig in. I’m three mouthfuls in when my name is called to interview Robert Rodriguez.
Rodriguez is wearing his trademark oversize cowboy hat, a shirt with flames licking up the side and a large belt buckle with a real scorpion encased in plastic. We made small talk for a while before the cameras rolled. I told him that I have a plastic bolo tie with a real scorpion in it, much like his belt. He wanted to know where he could get one like it. He doesn’t like wearing ties, but he would wear a scorpion bolo tie from time to time. Here’s the transcript from our on-air interview.
Richard Crouse: Today I was looking at the EPK—the Electronic Press Kit—and I saw some footage of you and Tarantino sitting together and you both looked kind of like the cats that swallowed the canary, and I wonder: When you were on set, when you were making this thing, was there a sense that you were breaking the rules or redefining things a little bit? Because you’re working outside of Hollywood, you’re working in a much different thing, and it just looked like two guys having a great time—
Robert Rodriguez: That’s mainly what it was…
Richard Crouse: —and doing something really interesting.
Robert Rodriguez: I think it’s just that we were just having a great time together. And you don’t feel like you’re making a movie because you’re in Austin, you’re in this green stage, and uh, Francis Ford Coppola came and visited the stage and he said “This was my dream for Zoetrope.” To have all these artists come and, you know, it was very strange. I got two—three directors at one point and all these different actors coming in doing something very experimental. It felt like renaissance. I mean, we really were just beside ourselves that this was what we—beyond what we had dreamed of when we began, that we would have the kind of set-up where we could just make anything happen. And it’s really exciting, and just as friends, getting to work together in a way that’s not the norm. I mean it is against the rules to actually do that.
Richard Crouse: Yeah…
Robert Rodriguez: And when you realize you just made it happen yourself it’s like: “How fun this is! People should do this more often.” It’s actually a great collaboration.
Richard Crouse: Do you see yourself as kind of a rebel in terms of the way you make films and the way you work.You quit the DGA so that you could have three directors on your film because the rules…
Robert Rodriguez: It just felt right. It was a very new movie. You watch the movie and you can see the results. It just doesn’t look like a regular movie. but had I followed the rules, I’d be stuck with the same old thing, and audiences need something new. So in order to sometimes change things, you have to break the rules, and that’s always happened in the industry with the guilds (and they usually then change the rule afterwards), but it has to be stretched a little because art can’t be confined. You’ve got to be able to break out, otherwise nothing new ever gets invented.
Richard Crouse: Without breaking the rules there’s no way to advance.
Robert Rodriguez: You’re just driving the same two streets over and over. “Can’t go beyond that!”
Richard Crouse: Do you feel now, after seeing the film—See, by the time this airs, nobody much will have seen it yet, right.
Robert Rodriguez: Right…
Richard Crouse: So, I can’t really stress how different it is from most films you see in the theatres, and what I wonder is: Do you see yourself sort of on the vanguard of a new kind of filmmaking? You know, if you look through history you have, you know, from the breakdown of the studio system, you know, into the sixties where people started using hand-held cameras all of a sudden, and then you know, in the seventies you had—sort of more toward in the US—you had Scorsese and people like that making films. Do you see a new wave here? A new kind of filmmaking?
Robert Rodriguez: I mean I felt it was new filmmaking when I read these books, and I’ve been collecting the books twelve years—Took me ten to figure out that I needed to make a movie out or it…
[laughter]
Robert Rodriguez: …but when I did look at it again, I thought: “Oh, technologically I know how to do this now, with the way I know effects and my photography I can pull it off, but beyond that, when I read the books and started thinking about how to adapt it, I realized there weren’t—not that they were cinematic, they were almost beyond cinema. They do things that not even cinema would do: white silhouettes and imagery you just weren’t used to seeing. They worked on the page and the storytelling didn’t sound like screenplay dialogue so I thought: “Man, let’s not adapt it, let’s shoot it just like this and then it’ll really be different.” So in other words, to make movies different I really went to the comic book to help change it by using that format that Frank had really created, cause his comics are different from other comics even. And that’s why it feels so new, and I just thought it would work because visual storytelling should work on the page or on the screen. And if it worked on the page, I said “Let’s just shoot this. Just make it move, and people won’t believe what they’re seeing, yet they’ll still be able to follow it and it won’t be just totally weird. And they’ll just feel refreshed seeing something exciting and different.”
I enjoyed talking to him, but got the sense that he enjoys making movies a lot more than he talking about making movies.
Next was Jessica Alba. She plays Nancy in the film, and while she doesn’t have a great deal of screen time, her character is pivotal to the Bruce Willis story arc. We spent our time talking about her character and the challenge of bringing a cartoon character to life.
Then it was time for me to grab my tapes and head to the airport. I was sharing a cab with a friend of mine, and agreed to meet her in the lobby. While I waited I see Clive Owen again. This time he is surrounded by protective publicists, attached to his side like barnacles. He says hello when he passes me, I respond and for some reason one of his minders scowls at me.
The trip back to Toronto is much less traumatic than the flight to Los Angeles and for me, March Break is officially over.
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SUNDAY MAY 8 — MONDAY MAY 9 — TUESDAY MAY 10, 2005
I am a firm believer in the idea that if you are going somewhere you should already be there by ten pm. If you are just getting on the road at ten then you can be guaranteed of a forty-eight hour day with no sleep, dodgy airport bathrooms and the possibility of humorless German flight attendants. So began Reel to Real’s Cannes Film Festival trip 2005.
Here is my travel itinerary: Get to the airport at eight pm and try to get upgraded to business class. Explain to Canada Customs and then security why we are traveling with bags of electronic equipment. Board the plane and sit in a too-small seat for almost eight hours. Eat twice. Occasionally allow my eyes to dip to an almost closed position while Oceans Eleven and Nurse Betty play on screens around me.
Disembark in Frankfurt—is it the home of the hot dog? I’ll have to check—and wait. And wait. With typical German efficiency the Frankfurt airport is built to move people from one connecting flight to another with great ease, but not to keep them entertained. Bring a book. It is a very dull place. Then get on another airplane to Nice. Sit for an hour before trying to explain to the French Customs agent why we have bags of electronic equipment that we are trying to bring into his country. Once he begrudgingly lets us into the country we try and find a cab big enough for our luggage, bags of television equipment and three large tired men for the drive to Cannes. We find someone who is up for the task—it’s like playing Tetris trying to fit everything in the small car and we’re off. Imagine one of those little cars you see at the circus stuffed with dozens of circus clowns.
By the time we get into the cab I’m tired of sitting, and as much as I like my cameraman Dean, I very quickly grow bored of him almost sitting in my lap for the cramped drive to Cannes. We are going to our rented apartment on Avenue de Lerins, but unfortunately our cab driver feels compelled to take us somewhere else. Where, I’m not sure, and I don’t think he is either. Eventually, just seconds before I think I will go completely mad, we pull up in front of Maison de Reel to Real. We have stayed in the same place for the last few trips, but this time we wanted to try something different. The new place is a little more upscale than our last place—marble floors, a kitchen with a view of the ocean (I can already count ten yachts and the festival hasn’t even started yet), nice rooms and a big balcony overlooking a park. I’m so happy I could weep. I want to lie down on the nice cold marble floor and cool off my burning, tired skin, but decide it might give the wrong impression to my crew.
Even though I am tired to point of hallucinating I hold it together. I’m beginning to feel like feel like Toronto’s Oldest Living Man on vacation. It’s too early to go to sleep. I know if I do I’ll wake up at a strange hour and won’t get accustomed to the time change. I gather the crew and we walk the Croisette—the main drag of Cannes. It’s a long street, but for the purposes of the festival it is really only about a quarter mile centered on the Paliase. That’s where all the action is. For the next two weeks hundreds of movies, dozens of movie stars and more journalists than you could shake a pen at will be converged on this strip. Right now, however, it is relatively calm. Billboards for War of the Worlds, Elizabethtown and something called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang are being erected, staging is being set up and the famous red carpet in front of the grand theatre hasn’t even been laid yet. It’s the calm before the storm, the prelude to madness. As a nice cool ocean breeze blows over me I soak it in. There will be few of these relaxing moments in the days ahead.
Drained, I stagger back to the apartment around 9 pm, unpack and sleep the sleep of the dead.
On Tuesday morning I wake up at 8:45. I feel pretty good, but for an instant I can’t remember where I am, or why I am there. I look around and still can’t put it together. It’s nice, but almost completely unfamiliar to me. I give my head a shake and slowly the synapses start to click and I start to consider the day.
The festival actually starts on Wednesday, so today will be a light day of getting reacquainted with the lay of the land, meeting with whatever publicists are in town, and picking up our press passes and cell phones. All goes smoothly. I get a good press pass. There are different levels of passes ranging from limited access to one that apparently grants you the title of King of Cannes. I get one somewhere in between—the white and pink one.
At the publicity office of DDA at the Majestic Hotel I arrange to go to a photo-call with Paris Hilton and several other things. It is too early to confirm interviews but I leave feeling that we’ll get some good items out of them. Next I meet with a publicist who is repping several interesting foreign films. Are they still considered foreign if I’m in France and the movies are French? Either way I walk into the bar of the Grand Hotel and he is in an animated discussion—in North America we would call it a fight, over here it is the way of doing business—with a journalist who is trying to book interviews, but only wants the stars, not the directors.
“Who do you think makes the movies!!?” shouted the publicist. “I’ll try and do what I can, but I am too aggravated to talk to you now.” When the journalist leaves the publicist tears up his media request form. “He gets nothing, Philistine.”
He has interesting point. Years ago the directors where held in high regard here. They were the engine that drove the Cannes machine. Now, unless you are Woody Allen or David Cronenberg—two of the “name” directors here this year—most of the press doesn’t seem interested. Most of the media here is only interested in starlets and big names. Natalie Portman is a hot item here his year. Hiner Saleem, the Kurdish director of Kilometre Zero, one of the films in competition, is not.
I am intimidated to say the least. I have dealt with many publicists—some irate, some not—but this guy was in a class by himself. We negotiate and I agree to interview several of his directors and he agrees to give me time with one of his stars—the French actress Juliette Binoche. I’m happy, and he’s not yelling, so I assume he’s happy too.
Freaked out from my encounter with publicistzilla I spend the rest of the day working the phones and shooting a couple of stand-ups on the beach which will be used in the first show.
I spend the rest of the day with a friend who has just flown in from Toronto. Her bumpy ride into Cannes makes mine rip look like a luxury cruise on the Queen Elizabeth. She arrived late, without luggage and once she got here a myriad of problems arose—including no press mailbox and a rented cell phone that wouldn’t make outgoing calls. They were little things, but over here it is the little details that kill you. She is in for a living hello of standing in lines pleading with soulless paper pushers who will look at her quizzically when she tries to explain why she needs a press mailbox. Eventually they will give her one, but it will be a long, ugly process ripe with phrases like, “I’m sorry, it’s not possible,” and “You are standing in the wrong line, please move.”
After my visit with her I had back to Maison de Reel to Real, grab a bite to eat and make notes for Wednesday. It all really starts tomorrow and I have just two days to produce and shoot two shows before we have to send our first load of tapes back to Toronto for editing. I’m feeling a little anxious, but I think we can do it.
I went to bed late hoping that I would be tired enough to sleep and not lay there and think about the massive amount of work coming in the days ahead. I was wrong. After twisting and turning for several hours I finally fell into a light anxiety dream ridden sleep.
CANNES YOU HELP ME?
WEDNESDAY MAY 11, 2005
As son as the light hits my eyes I start to feel a sense of dread. I didn’t sleep well on Tuesday night—plagued by anxiety dreams and flop sweat I was up all night. The festival hasn’t even begun and already I am wound up tight as a spring.
My plan was to get up early and work on my notes before going downtown to try and scrounge up some interviews, but since I barely slept, there was no “early” just “later” than I went to bed. When I crawl out of bed I’m too agitated to sit still and write o I get on the road in hopes of catching the publicists before the crowds move in. Everyone is arriving today and as the day wears on it will get hellishly busy everywhere I go.
On my first stop I try to arrange some interviews for the Robert Downey Jr film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Not doing any Canadian press, I’m told. Then I try and confirm my interview with Atom Egoyan. Still no exact time. I feel the dark clouds of demoralization moving in. Several more negative phone calls later and I’m ready to call it a day, and it is only 9:15 am. I still haven’t booked anything and I beginning to think that the two shows I have to have ready for Friday at noon for shipping aren’t going to be ready.
There is a break in the bad karma weather when a Canadian publicist calls me back regarding an interview for the Midnight Movies, a documentary about 70s cult films. The director, Stuart Samuels is tired, and would prefer not to do any interviews today, but I convince him to meet me at the Canadian Pavilion and do the interview.
Samuels is an interesting guy. He was a film teacher for many years, and in 1983 he wrote a book titled Midnight Movies which profiled three seminal 70s cult films, El Topo, Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Eraserhead. Twenty years later he was commissioned to turn the book into a documentary for television but it turned out so well that it got picked up as an Official Selection Out of Competition in Cannes.
He shows up and is passionate about the movies, interesting and well spoken and gives me a terrific interview. When we are done I feel as though the wheels are starting to turn—slowly—but at least there is some motion. From there I head over to the market to check it out and scout any potential interviews. The market is for films that are looking for distributors. There are thousands of films and hundreds of companies represented in this massive convention space. Booth after booth is overflowing with movies that represent the true spirit of Cannes—everything from high art to low trash.
I usually come here with an eye towards locating the most outrageous movies the market has to offer, and today I wasn’t disappointed. Did you know that Wilmer Valderama—Fez on That 70s Show and the man who broke Lindsey Lohan’s heart—is starring in a film called El Muerto? Based on a comic book this film gives us Fez as a zombie mariachi, and looks like it cost about $0.25 to produce. Another real find was Disaster! a “funny as hell spoof of big-budget disaster films” featuring puppets with names like Harry Bottoms and VD Johnson. Possibly the only movie to try and cash-in on last year’s flop Team America. My favorite, however, is Ketchup vs. Mustard: The Ultimate Condiment Showdown. Here’s what the press bumpf says: “Eating competition—two men, two gallons of condiments, one hour to devour them! Doug Sakkman (Ketchup) and James Brown (Mustard) go head to head to see which the superior condiment is! With live color commentary, flashy graphics and lots of ed and yellow vomit, this competition is far more exciting than anything you’d see on ESPN or the Sports Channel.” I’ll just have to take their word on that last claim because I don’t think I’ll ever be seeing this movie.
From there I head over to the screening of Kilometer Zero, the first Kurdish film ever in competition at the Cannes Film Fest and the first movie I will see on this visit. I am interviewing the director, Hiner Saleem later in the week so I have to see the movie tonight. There are three or four lines to get into the theatre—one line for each different kind of pass. I stand in the line with the white and pink passes. I wait for twenty minutes or so before getting to the head of the line. A woman in front of me says, to no one in particular, “I hate Cannes…” I don’t really understand how she can be so negative when it is still the first day, but I nod and smile. Two minutes later when a security has turned me away because I don’t have a mysterious yellow dot on my pass and makes me go to the end of another very long line—with people like me who just have the pink and white pass with no yellow dot—I completely understand that woman’s pain. It made me wish I had gone to Grand and Toy before the festival and bought some yellow stickers…
The movie is interesting. Director Saleem has lived in Paris for the past ten years, but returned to Kurdistan to shoot this movie, and his love of the country shows. The film’s brutal landscapes have been beautifully shot and really help to bring the story to life. For more on the film check out Reel to Real’s review.
The screening ended around nine. It was too late to call any publicists and book any more interviews, so I headed off to the one party that I make sure to attend every year I come to Cannes-the annual TIFF party. It is thrown by the Toronto International Film Festival people and is a fun gathering of all the Canadians who are here. It features stimulating movie talk, great food and plenty of cold beer and wine. I got caught up with many of my colleagues, most of whom I will only see again in passing during the festival.
After some pasta and a spirited discussion with several film critics about the merits of Kilometer Zero I headed back to the apartment and my bed. Gotta get revved up for Thursday.
THURSDAY MAY 12, 2005
What is that ringing? It’s my phone. Not the best way to wake up, but that annoying noise can only mean one thing—someone has finally decided to call me back. I don’t even care who it is. Right about now with a two show deadline staring me in the face I am prepared to book almost anything. Last night as I was falling asleep I even considered called the Punk Rock Holocaust guy who has been handing me DVDs and press releases everyday.
I answer the phone. It’s a publicist that I have been trying to track down for days. For now, I am spared having to cover Punk Rock Holocaust, but I’m not out of the water yet.
I have sent the guys down to set up for a photo opportunity with the creator of Wallace and Gromit. Photo Ops are one of the great traditions here in Cannes. They have been doing them since the 1950s and basically what happens is that beautiful actors and actresses wear very little and pose on the beach while throngs of photographers try and grab a provocative shot. The actors get publicity and the photographers get paid for the photos—everyone walks away happy.
The Wallace and Gromit affair is much more family oriented. They are unveiling a massive 35-foot likeness of Gromit, the famous clay dog from the movies. Nick Park, the creator and director of the series and Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the big hoo-haws from Dreamworks will be on hand to answer questions. The guys have to go down early to get us a good spot to shoot from, and I’ll join them at 8:30 or so.
I felt badly about sending them ahead, until I arrived at the event. There they were, sitting at a table on the beach, drinking fresh squeezed juices and noshing from the huge breakfast buffet. I wrestle a slice of ham away from one of them and before pushing my way into the scrum to interview Parks and Katzenberg. Parks is a nice fellow who I have interviewed before. One gets the impression that he would much rather be in his studio working with his clay creations than standing on the beach at Cannes in front of a crazed group of international journalists, but he is game and gives nice answers. Katzenberg, however, is a little more used to the spotlight. In that way that only big shot Hollywood producers have, he is controlling the event with arm gestures, nods and a few quietly whispered words to his aides. It’s nothing flashy, but you can feel the power oozing off of him. I get a couple of questions in, stay for the unveiling of the big Gromit, eat another slice of cheese and rush over to the beach behind British Pavilion. I have sent a cameraman over there to cover another photo op—this one with Kiera Chaplin, the grand daughter of legendary comic Charlie Chaplin. When I arrive it is already in full swing. This one amps up the sex appeal—it’s a regular glitzkrieg compared to the Wallace and Gromit event as she is poses and blows kisses to the assembled crowd.
The story here is that she is promoting a movie that isn’t even made yet. It is an updated Lady Godiva story, and the planned stunt today was to have her ride onto the beach on a white stallion. Apparently the Cannes officials got wind of this, and since the film isn’t even a film yet, hey pulled the plug and refused to allow it to happen during the festival. It would have made a nice picture, but Chaplin is very beautiful and I didn’t hear any of the photogs complaining about the lack of a horse.
Inside they staged a brief press conference before I grabbed the soon-to-be movie’s two stars Chaplin and actor Nick “the Big Dollop” Holder. He tells me that he is a sensation in Britain as the result of a series of Hellman’s Mayonaise commercials in which he appears as The Big Dollop. He’s very funny and very British. He sprinkles the interview with jokes about Coventry that I don’t really understand, but he seems to find hilarious. He explains the plot of the as yet unmade movie—the story revolves around the controversial building of an American style gambling Casino on hallowed ground in Coventry, England where the original Lady Godiva famously rode naked through the streets in 1048 in a protest over taxes. Chaos ensues when an Indian tribe of Billionaire Casino operators from Arizona shows up to run the place. He also tells me it will be the funniest British comedy since A Fish Called Wanda.
Next up is Kiera Chaplin—the granddaughter of Oona Chaplin (nee O’Neill), fourth wife of Charles Chaplin and great-granddaughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill. She is lovely, with long blonde hair and a California girl complexion, and a smile that echoes her famous grandfather’s. We chat about the film and she tells me that she won the role when one of the producers saw her photo on the cover of a magazine. Since the film hasn’t even started production yet, our conversation drifts into other topics. She tells me that although she never met her legendary grandfather she is very proud of her last name and her family connection to him. She grew up in Switzerland, but now makes her home in Los Angeles, a city filled with images and statues of her famous relative.
I rush from there to a screening of a film called Crossing the Bridge. I don’t know anything about this movie, other than I have already booked an interview with its director Fatih Akin. I am less than enthusiastic when I arrive and am told it is a film about pop music in Istanbul, but decide to stay. I’m glad I did. I often find music travelogues a little dicey, but this one boasts such great music—everything from traditional Turkish music to hip-hop and gypsy music. Much of this music doesn’t sound like anything I have ever heard before, and as I sit listening, I wonder if people felt this way the first time they heard Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane. By the end of the screening I’m excited to meet the director.
After the movie I wander the Market searching for a story idea. I don’t find anything I can turn into a story for the show, but I do come across the best poster, so far, in the festival. It is an ad for Saw Two, the sequel to the cheapo horror flick of last year. That one made $100,000,000 worldwide, so it was inevitable that part two would come along sooner rather than later. The poster is really eye catching with the word Saw in black against a white background, and two severed fingers for the “2.”
Today we have to figure out what will be on the first two shows, shoot the intros and extros and package up the tapes to be sent back to Canada. The shooting part is easy—I have recruited Jason Anderson of eye Magazine to do the reviews with me—the trouble is that I don’t think I have enough content for both shows. One interview that I was counting on fell through at the last minute and now I am short one segment.
My camera guys agree to meet me at the Grand Hotel on the Croisette and start shooting. While I am waiting for the whole crew to show up I wander into the bar and see Richard E. Grant sitting at a table in the corner. He’s instantly recognizable from the leading role as an unemployed actor in the chamber comedy Withnail and I and as the two headed executive in How to Get Ahead in Advertising. He was paired with Sandra Bernhard in the megabomb Hudson Hawk and was very funny in L.A. Story and The Player. He also appeared as Dr. Seward in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and played a society gadfly in The Age of Innocence among other roles.
I wonder what he is doing here and if he would like to talk about whatever project he is involved in. I need another segment, and hopefully he needs publicity. It all works out nicely and I get a nice five minute interview with him about a film he wrote and directed, but does not appear in, called Wah-Wah which was filmed in his home country of Swaziland.
Now I have a show!
We quickly shoot the intros and extros on the streets surrounding the Grand Hotel. I nearly get hit by speeding cars and motorcycles several times as we try and do some tricky shots of me crossing the street.
I emerged unscathed and made it on time to the screening of Gus Van Sant’s new film Last Days. It’s gettinga lot of buzz over here because it is Van Sant’s first film since the Palm d’Or winning Elephant of a couple of years ago. I get in, find a good seat and settle in. Twenty minutes into the film I feel like running out of the theatre. Last Days follows the nontraditional, elliptical kind of filmmaking that Van Sant has been experimenting with in his last two films, but takes it to another level in this one. The opening shots of this film show Michael Pitt, the talented young actor from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and The Dreamers in a pastoral setting—walking through a forest, swimming in a stream, sitting by a campfire—with virtually no dialogue… for almost twenty minutes. I don’t know whether it is beautiful or just self indulgent, but I’m leaning toward the latter.
The film details—without ever naming—the last days of Kurt Cobain before he committed suicide. One reviewer over here noted that he wished instead of Last Days this would have been only the last hours. It seems a little slow, a little long but is strangely hypnotic. Ultimately though, when you know how it ends—badly for Cobain—some of the drama gets sucked away and replaced with tension as the viewer waits for the guitarist to pull the trigger and end not only his life, but the film. It may not be Van Sant’s best film but it is a movie that will inspire conversation.
Near the end of the movie I can hear my stomach growling and I’m pretty sure that everyone else can as well. I think back and realize that I haven’t eaten since my slices of cheese in the early morning. I find a restaurant; eat a sandwich named after comedian Roberto Begnigni before going back to Maison de Reel to Real and collapsing.
FRIDAY MAY 13, 2005
Up early to make an 8:30 screening of the new Atom Egoyan film Where the Truth Lies. Based on a Rupert Holmes novel in which a female journalist tries to uncover the truth behind the breakup, years earlier, of a celebrated comedy team after the duo found a girl dead in their hotel room. The movie stars Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as the Martin and Lewisesque comedy team and Alison Lohman as the young writer. Novelist Holmes is also known as the writer and performer of the hit song, Escape/ The Pina Coloda Song.
The theatre, which seats 1900 people, is jammed. I get a seat on an aisle and spend half and hour getting knocked around by people who try and squeeze past, sit for a moment and then decide to move to another seat, so they squeeze by again. It’s annoying, but apparently seat position is very important to these people.
The movie is a departure of sorts for Egoyan, although it contains many of his signature motifs—a search for the truth, obsessive behavior, voyeurism and commodified sexuality, but the form of the story telling is much different than in the past. This is a sumptuous looking murder mystery—sort of like a high brow episode of Murder She Wrote. There are plenty of twists and turns and it will keep you guessing until the end. The reaction in Cannes has been mixed—up and down the scale from enthusiastic to indifferent. Watch Reel to Real to find out what we think.
My first interview of the day is at 11 am with Toby Rose, the co-creator and jury chairman (with his dog Mutley) of The Palm Dog Awards. The prize, for best canine performance in a film, has become a regular feature at the festival as a humorous antidote to the festival’s big prize, Palm d’Or which some call the Palme Bore or Palm Snore.
Last year the coveted prize, voted on by five British and French journalists, went to the bulldogs owned by renowned American wine critic Robert Parker, as seen in the documentary Mondovino. “The winners were two flatulent bulldogs called Edgar and Hoover,” said Rose. “It is very amusing as Parker is the world’s leading nose. Does it have an effect on the sensitivity of his nostrils one wonders?”
The year before the prize had been awarded to the chalk outline of the dog in the Lars Von Trier film Dogville. The award itself is a black leather Palm Dog collar with gold lettering, which Rose tells me is being manufactured as we speak, ready to grace the neck of the lucky winner.
Later I see a movie poster for something called Rakinshka, which has the greatest tag line ever: “What could be more hermetic than a shell, which once opened and before the enigma is solved is already dead!” Clearly the translator needs to be fired.
I grab a bit of food and hen head over to a television satellite station located on the Croisette across from the press office, I’m scheduled to do a live broadcast for my other TV gig, Canada AM. They set up the shot so we get a good look at me, the ocean and the Palaise building, unfortunately that means the midday sun is shining directly in my eyes and while we do the spot—four or five minutes about the hot movies at the festival—I do my best Clint Eastwood impression, squinting to avoid having my corneas burned away by the sun. I wear an earpiece so I can hear what the hosts, Bev Thompson and Seamus O’Regan are saying, and I realize that it is the first time I have heard any news from Canada in days. When you are covering a festival it’s almost like being in a submarine—you feel completely closed off from the rest of the world. The only thing that anyone is talking about is what interviews they are doing, how tired they are or what they have been seeing. Giant lizards could have invaded Canada and I probably wouldn’t have heard about it.
After the satellite the day gets a little more complicated. I have several interviews scheduled back to back, but in different parts of town. It will all work out if everyone is on time, but if just one of them is off schedule then I run the risk of being late for, and possibly losing, the subsequent interviews.
I’m on time for Terence Stamp who is here promoting a film called These Foolish Things. We are shooting the interview in a beautiful restaurant that fronts on to the beach. It is all white with huge—6 foot by 6 foot—pillows, overstuffed sofas and elegant lighting. I could get very comfortable here, but there is no time.
I am told that we are only to talk about that movie, and that Mr. Stamp doesn’t wish to discuss his other films. Often over here journalists will ask only one or two questions about the current film and then try and get quotes and info about the star’s personal life or older movies that they can use after the festival is over in profiles. Publicists, who are paid to get stories published and aired about the current movies, generally frown on this practice. Occasionally though, there isn’t much to talk about regarding the new picture. In this case I haven’t seen the film—it isn’t part of the festival per se, it is in the Market and the filmmakers are trying to find a buyer for it. His is common over here, but it can make it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about a movie that you know little about.
Stamp, however, makes it easy. I tell him that we met once before, in an elevator at The Four Seasons in Toronto. I was drinking a Chai Tea Latte from Starbucks and he commented on how good it smelled and asked what it was. I told him, and he asked if it could be made with soy milk—he doesn’t eat dairy and has written a lactose free cookbook—and I tell him that it could. Today he tells me that he has been drinking them ever since that day.
When I ask him a question about the film, in which he plays the all-knowing butler to a family that is falling apart, he gives me a great answer that mentions William Wyler, the great director of Roman Holiday, Ben-Hur and the film that won Stamp a best actor award in Cannes in 1965, The Collector. This is a great film about a man who kidnaps a woman and holds her hostage just for the pleasure of having her there. It’s creepy and Stamp is terrific. Since he opened the door, as they say on Court TV, I felt it was OK to ask him about Wyler and that film. It made him famous, and brought him awards, he said, but it might have been the worst thing to ever happen to him because after that he was typecast as a heavy.
From that point on we talked generally about his career, the highs and lows in an interview that may have broken the publicists rule, but was one of the most honest and charming chats I have ever had with an actor.
As I am leaving Stamp asks me if I will see Atom Egoyan any time soon. I tell him that I’ll be interviewing the director in the next few days. Stamp said, “Tell him I’m mad at him because he doesn’t use me in any of his films…” We laugh, but as I walked away I can’t help but think how perfect Stamp would have been in the role of Rueben, the shady butler in Where the Truth Lies.
Next up I speak with Julia Taylor-Stanley, the former composer and music arranger—she’s worked with everyone from Meatloaf to Diana Ross—who is now the first time director of These Foolish Things. We discuss the long process of adapting the story from its source material and raising the money to make the film and how she as a newbie was able to gather a cast of heavy weights like Lauren Bacall, Angelica Huston and Terrence Stamp.
The interview goes on a bit long and I am now late for my next one, which is a ten minute walk away at the Grand Hotel. I run over there and meet my second cameraman who is already set up and ready to go. I’m literally panting as I run to the location—it’s hot and I haven’t actually run anywhere since the mid-1980s—only to discover that the interview has been moved by twenty minutes. This is good in the short term—I can catch my breath and have a drink—but bad in the long term as it will throw off the rest of the day.
We have been told that Hineer Saleem, the director of Kilometer Zero and my next interview doesn’t speak English and will be using a translator. Usually that’s fine, but we are shooting on location and only have enough jacks on the camera for two microphones. My techies consult and decide that the best thing to do is put mics on me and the translator and not one on the director since we will not be using his voice when we air the interview. We put a wireless microphone on him, but don’t hook it up. When we start to talk it becomes plain that he is going to answer in English and the translator isn’t going to say a word. I lean in close in hopes that my microphone will pick him up, and we’ll just have to hope for the best.
We talk about the statue of Saddam that is seen through out the movie. The statue is crucial to capturing the right atmosphere about 1980’s Iraq. He spent weeks trying to find a sculptor who would make the statue. He finally found someone, but they had to work in private, hidden in a walled garden to make the giant piece. When a security guard caught a glimpse of the Butcher of Baghdad’s effigy, the statue was confiscated and the sculptor was arrested. Saleem told me he had to spend a full day explaining why he commissioned the statue before the sculptor was released.
Next, at the same location, is the director of Crossing the Bridge, a young filmmaker named Fatih Akin. Born in 1973 in Hamburg to Turkish parents he wrote and directed his first short feature, Sensin – You’re The One! in 1995 which received the Audience Award at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival. He made headlines at Cannes a couple of years ago when it was revealed that the lead actress in his movie Head-On had been a porno actress. I’m short on time so I make a deal with a Russian crew to allow me to go before them in return for shortening my interview time and letting them use my extra minutes. The film is about discovering the wealth of pop music in Istanbul, so I ask if he has ever heard of American folklorist Alan Lomax who recorded hundreds of hours of America’s indigenous music for the Smithsonian. He hasn’t heard of Lomax, but tells me that he isn’t trying to create a historical document with this film, but simply make a film that will expose the world to the great music of Istanbul.
By the time the Russian crew is setting their camera for their interview with Akin I’m already on the run to the next location, the British Pavilion, to chat with the stars of the movie Stoned. It is the story of Brian Jones the doomed founder and guitar player of The Rolling Stones. I saw an ad for the film in The Hollywood Reporter with photos that I thought were old publicity stills of Jones, but actually turned out to be of lead actor Leo Gregory.
Jones was one of the founders of the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” cliché—on one hand a talented and sensitive musician, on the other a lout who got five different women pregnant while spiraling into a drug and alcohol induced haze. By June 1969 Jones had become such a liability that he was fired by the band he helped create. Just weeks later on July 3rd, 1969 Brian was found by his girlfriend Anna Wolen and friend Frank Thourogood dead at the bottom of his own swimming pool. Speculation swirled that the guitarist had been accidentally murdered by Thourogood in an alcohol induced argument but nothing was ever proven. It was also suggested that perhaps he had an asthma attack while swimming. One thing is for sure, Barbiturates were found in his blood, which were prescribed to help Brian sleep, but to this day the real circumstances surrounding his death remain a mystery.
The story of Jones has always fascinated me, so I tracked the publicist for this—it’s not actually part of the festival—and booked the interviews. In person Leo Gregory doesn’t look like Brian Jones—he could maybe pass for his long-lost cousin—but he was chosen for his acting ability and not his looks. We chat about the character and how Jones was a study in dualism—sensitive one moment, abusive and tyrannical the next.
Next I speak with Tuva Novotny who plays girlfriend Anna Wolen in the film and was voted Sweden’s most beautiful woman in Café magazine and Sweden’s sexiest woman by the readers of Slitz. To see Tuva and hear what she has to say, check out the Reel to Real Cannes Specials in May.
The director of Stoned is Stephen Woolley, a first time director, but very experienced producer. Among his credits are films like Backbeat, Scandal, Michael Collins, Interview with a Vampire and The Good Thief. He looks the part of a sixties rock star with long hair tied back in a pony tail and a white linen suit. He tells me that he hired a private investigator to try and get to the bottom of what happened on the fateful night that Jones drowned. We went on to discuss the music in the film, and I mentioned that two of the soundtracks from his films—Backbeat and Scandal—are favorites of mine.
From there I have just a few minutes to make it top a screening of the new Ed Norton film Down in the Valley. I arrive just a couple of minutes before it is scheduled to start and end up sitting in the front row. Not only do I have to sit at a strange angle to see all of the enormous screen, but the stage is only about a foot and a half away so I am forced to tie myself up like a pretzel to sit in the chair. Maybe it was my discomfort, or maybe I was just tired, but this movie, set in the present-day San Fernando Valley, about a delusional man who believes he’s a cowboy and the relationship that he starts with a rebellious young woman seemed to drag on f-o-r-e-v-e-r despite great work from actors Ed Norton, Evan Rachel Wood and David Morse. The filmmakers are looking for a buyer here at the festival, and I hope who ever antes up for it insists that they cut twenty minutes or so of the flab off the story.
Once again I haven’t eaten and now it is quite late. I grab a chocolately bit of goodness from a kiosk on the beach and head over to the party for Where the Truth Lies. We’re covering the red carpet and it will be our only chance to talk to the stars of the film Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth. There is a junket planned for the film, but for some reason Canadian press aren’t invited to participate even though it is a Canadian film. Whatever. I have long since given up trying to figure out how the minds of the people who make up these schedules works. I guess they figure that if we do the interviews and run them on our Cannes shows we won’t be interested when the film is released. I don’t think that is true, but who am I to argue with the evil two headed pubzillas that are running this thing. I’ll make do with the short red carpet interviews and a full length interview I am doing with director Atom Egoyan later in the week.
Colin Firth is first. He is dressed in a tux and seems quite pleased that the film earned a standing ovation at the screening. When I ask Kevin Bacon how it feels to get a standing ovation at Cannes he said, “It feels better than a sitting ovation.” Bacon is a funny guy. Later I read that he was joked with a reporter about Egoyan’s huge vocabulary. After the press conference for Where the Truth Lies he said, “It was like, whew, right over my head. He used like six words I’d never heard before.”
Canadian actress Rachel Blanchard looked beautiful in her turquoise gown, but seemed a little shell shocked by the attention the movie was receiving and Cannes.
By the time we finished our interviews the party was already well under way. I saw Roger Ebert in the buffet line and French superstar Vincent Cassel lurking in the shadows. Overall it was a good party, but it did represent a first for my trip to Cannes—really average food. There was a buffet of dried out pasta, mystery meatballs, chicken skewers and some kind of weird half moon shaped thing that tasted like minced insects wrapped in an onion. The French love their food and I imagine that somewhere Julia Child was rolling over in her grave. Later I hear that the party for Star Wars was also marred by bad food. One reporter wrote, “Next time, the advice for Lucas must be, “Use the forks, Luke,” leaving people’s Hans Solo for wine.”
Home a little too late for my own good…
SATURDAY MAY 14, 2005
The morning comes way to fast. I’m up at 7 am to make it to an 8:30 screening of the new Juliette Binoche film Cache about a family who is terrorized by someone who leaves them anonymous videotapes of their every move. On the walk to the theatre I notice that one of my shoes is squeaking.
On every second step I hear a kind of wheezing sound coming from my foot. Oh no, I think, the small stuff is starting to really get on my nerves.
I’m relieved that while sitting my shoe is quiet. The movie is a front runner for the Palme D’Or and I can se why… but only up to a point. The director, Michael Haneke is a festival favorite and has crafted a film about a family terrorized by anonymously made videotapes about their daily life that reveals the ugly side of humanity that exists in all of us. The film ends rather abruptly and the open ended nature of the final sequence has become a hot topic of discussion here at Cannes. Everyone I talk to has a slightly different idea of what the ending as supposed to mean, and while it makes for a great chat over a drink, the suddenness of the ending left me unsatisfied. Not wanting more, exactly, but wanting something else.
The weather here has been beautiful, but it has been threatening to rain all day today. What starts as a sprinkle soon ends up in a full-on rainstorm as I walk to a photo-cal for George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. I’m hoping to pick up an interview with Romero, and given the rain I doubt that there will be many people there so my chances should be pretty good.
It is pouring as I walk, and from out of nowhere street vendors appear selling umbrellas. I discovered that the price of the umbrellas was directly linked to the intensity of the downpour. At the height of the storm they cost anywhere from 10-15E, as the rain tapered off the price came down. I arrive at the photo call soaked through, but on time.
I begin to ask the publicist if there is any chance to speak to Mr. Romero. Here’s how it went:
“Hi, I’m with a show called Reel to Real from Can…”
“No,” he said waving his hand in my face.
“You don’t even know what I am asking yet,” I said.
“The answer is still no.”
I look around and notice that only three still photographers and no other TV crews have shown up to the photo call. “You have more talent here than reporters,” I said. “Don’t you want the publicity that an interview could bring?”
“No.”
Not exactly sure why the guy was so adamant. Clearly he was not doing his job well. There was virtually no mention of Romero or the movie in the daily press and I didn’t see any photos from the event anywhere. Next time, I would suggest that Romero hire a publicist who knows what he is doing.
Later I hear that a 20 minute teaser of Land of the Dead was shown before a screening of the Stuart Samuel’s film Midnight Movies and once it was over all the people connected with the zombie film stood up and left, not bothering to stay for the main feature. That’s really bad manners, but when I met the guy in charge I understood why it happened.
A History of Violence is one of the buzz films at the festival. Directed by David Cronenberg—a festival favorite—word has it that it is his best, and most accessible movie in years.
New Line has arranged what they are calling a “super secret screening” at a theatre a few blocks off the Croistette. I have been sworn to secrecy. Apparently I will have to face a history of violence from them if I tell anyone the details of the screening.
It starts at two, and unfortunately I have an interview scheduled with Michael Pitt of Last Days at 3:20. I can watch enough of the Cronenberg film to do the interview later today, but nonetheless I hate walking out on movies.
I’m not going to write about the movie until I have seen the whole thing—I had to leave at a pivotal moment—but I will say that I didn’t want to leave and considered blowing off the Pitt interview so I could stay until the end.
When I left the theatre I called Pitt’s publicist to see if they were running on schedule. If they were late I was hoping to be able to go back into the theatre and catch the end of the Cronenberg film. No such luck. I’m told that they are running exactly on time. I doubt that this is true. Even the best run press days never run on time. There are always delays and being off sched by twenty minutes or so isn’t uncommon.
I take her word for it and run over to the interview site only to find out that they are not running on time and I’ll have to wait about half an hour—just enough time that I could have caught the end of A History of Violence.
I wait, imagining what I am missing at the theatre until it is my turn to speak to Pitt. He’s not a great interview. A couple of years ago he made the rounds at the Toronto Film Festival mumbling and burping his way through a series of interviews for a movie ironically directed by David Cronenberg’s nephew Aaron Woodley called Rhinoceros Eyes. It’s a good little movie that, for some reason, has not yet been released theatrically.
Pitt remembers me from Toronto and seems a little more responsive than the last time, and didn’t burp once during the interview. He’s an interesting and unusual actor. He resembles Leo DiCaprio, but save for a stint on the teen soap Dawson’s Creek he has never really played off his pretty boy good looks. Indeed he seems to be taking pains to avoid being typecast as a good looking movie star. In Rhinoceros Eyes he wears a mask for a good chunk of the movie and in his latest, Last Days his hair hangs in front of his face, obscuring his handsome mug like a Halloween mask.
In his choice of projects he appears to be courting interesting rather than commercial work. That is certainly the case with Last Days, the fictionalized last moments in the life of Kurt Cobain. There is no story at all in this Gus Van Sant film, just a series of moments strung together that illuminate the troubled character of a rock star just hours away from his end.
We discuss the loose form of the film, and Pitt tells me that they didn’t start with a traditional script, but a list of things that should go into the film.
After Pitt I was scheduled to interview David Cronenberg on the beach by the Canadian Pavilion. Once again there were only limited spots for the Canadian press to speak to this Canadian mainstay—only two outlets were approved for the full cast interviews. I was told I was third on the list, but I may as well have been 303 on the list because at the last minute it was decided that two Canadian spots was enough. Anyway, with the assistance of a very helpful Canadian publicist we were able to get Cronenberg for a few minutes during a reception for Telefilm.
It was interesting to speak to Canada’s Prince of Darkness on a sun-drenched Cote D’Azur beach. The waves, the sand and sun seemed inappropriate for this interview, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. Just as we are about to start a squadron of jet planes fly over head leaving a trail of red, white and blue smoke behind them. Again, this seems a little inappropriate for a Telefilm Canada party.
Cronenberg is always a great interview. Today he had just gotten off the plane from Toronto and even though he was exhausted he was still sharp gracious, thoughtful and much funnier than you would expect from someone who specializes in creeping people out. To see the interview check out the Reel to Real Cannes Specials in May.
With that interview wrapped we’re done with the daylight portion of Saturday. We still have two events to go—a yacht party for The LA Film Festival and a late night red carpet for the film Down in the Valley.
The yacht is a sixty-foot boat moored at the Port of Cannes and it is quite spectacular. We interview the LA Film Festival organizers and then tuck into a buffet of seafood with shrimps the size of my fist and scallops the size of hockey pucks and lamb on the upper deck. Later we discover a third level with a Jacuzzi and a beautiful view of the harbor. Somehow I manage to drink about seventeen gallons of champagne. Edward Norton and Javier Bardem are both on board, but aren’t doing interviews. Instead of speaking to them, I drink more champagne.
We leave the yacht around 11 pm and make our way over to the last stop of the day—the red carpet for Down in the Valley at the Palm Beach Club VIP Room. I have never been here and aren’t quite ready for what happens when I do arrive. There are Ferrari Diablos and Porsches parked everywhere and a throng of well dressed people are pressed up against metal barriers, waiting to be let in. We stroll past the crowd and get set up inside. More champagne. We have to wait about an hour for the talent to arrive and by the time they get there my area on the red carpet is littered with empty champagne flutes, but I am able to hole it together to do the interviews.
Evan Rachel Wood, the young star of 13 and The Upside of Anger arrives first. Her publicists “helpfully” reminds us of the obvious—that it is late, by this time it is after 1 am—and asks us to be brief. Wood is really good in the movie, and I think she could be a superstar. There is something that is very compelling about her and when she is on-screen even if she isn’t the focus of the action your eye still drifts to her. I hope she continues to pick interesting projects. We talk about a difficult scene in the film in which she is swimming with Edward Norton. She tells me that she isn’t a strong swimmer, and was convinced she was going to get bitten by a shark while shooting the scene. It also didn’t help that her director was seasick during while they were shooting.
Ed Norton is next. He is someone who looks like a movie star—charismatic and handsome. He stops at my spot on the red carpet and I tell him that I think Down in the Valley is the third part of a trilogy in which he plays characters who have alter egos. First was Primal Fear, then came Fight Club and now this movie. He responds well, and to hear his answer tune in to Reel to Real.
We finish off with the director David Jacobson. He tells me about work shopping this script at the Sundance Screenwriters Clinic and how that experience helped shape the film. Whew… it’s now over and it is about 1:50.
I try to gather up the crew to make a hasty retreat, but the two cameramen have disappeared. Apparently one of them discovered the other side of the club which was cordoned off. I went to have a look for them and accidentally walked into Sodom and Gomorrah. Cages with Go-Go dancers in them hung from the ceiling. Thousands of people were bumping and grinding to pounding music supplied by a half naked DJ. I take three steps into the club and get two drinks spilled on me. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air, like the morning smog over Los Angeles. This was going to be hopeless.
I try and call one of the guys, hoping that his phone is on vibrate. No luck. I get bumped another hundred times on the way out while women swing on poles around me. I see one of the camera guys and make sure he has keys to the apartment and tell him that I am leaving and will take the camera with me. Then it was like someone turned on a giant vacuum and he was sucked back into the club as I walked out the front door. Outside was pandemonium. Hundreds of people were desperately trying to get in the club that I was trying so desperately to get out of. It was a sea of black cocktail dresses, hair mousse and expensive shoes.
My head was pounding when I hit the fresh air—from the loud music, not the twenty-two gallons of champagne I had finished off—and I was glad to call it a night.
Not so for the two cameramen who went AWOL until 5:30 am.
SUNDAY MAY 15, 2005
I have an interview scheduled for 10 and I’m not sure whether I will have a cameraman to shoot it for me or not. I didn’t hear them come in last night, and when I left the house at 9 neither of them had shown their faces.
I arrive at the Martinez Hotel around 9:30 with no cameraman, but I have time, and I’m sure neither of them wants me hassling them just yet. I’ll give them till 9:45 before I start making phone calls and yelling.
Luckily they show up just as I am dialing their number and preparing to curse them out. I don’t ask a lot of questions about what happened the night before, but they both say, “It was unbelievable,” and tell me unprintable stories about their exploits.
As it turns out I don’t need them just yet—the publicist is providing a camera set up for this interview. The guys look relieved and use the time to graze from the breakfast buffet in the interview suite. After some much needed food and coffee they head out to shoot b-roll while I sit to chat with Michael Haneke the German director of Cache.
I speak in English to an interpreter who translates for the director, who answers in German. It’s an around about way to do an interview, but Cache has been tipped to win the Palme D’Or and Haneke is pumped so the interview comes off with enthusiasm if nothing else.
From there I head over to the Market. I stop at the Thailand booth and pick up a flyer for a horror movie called Rahtree Returns. The flyer caught me eye because it features a full color—and quite graphic—picture of a woman sewing a man’s mouth shut. The tagline for the film reads: “LOVE… JEALOUSY… HATRED… in the mood of horror and humor, are about to begin!” One of the people in the booth sees me pick up the flyer he hands me their promotional item—a needle and thread with a diagram on how to sew someone’s mouth shut.
I continue wandering around and bump into Lloyd Kaufman who in a fit of European glee kisses me on both cheeks. Lloyd runs Troma films and has been coming to Cannes for over twenty years. He gives me a copy of the new 5 DVD set titled Make Your Own Damn Movie! the companion piece to Lloyd’s best selling how-to book, and according to the front cover, a “film school in a box.” I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it is as informative as it is outrageous. We make plans to meet later in the festival for a drink.
From there I find a photo kiosk to develop some of the digital photos I have been taking. These do-it-yourself photo kiosks are everywhere and they are free. You can develop up to ten pictures at a time, and the quality is quite good. I have been using them to print out my souvenir photos, but have noticed that other people are using them for slightly different purposes. A guy next to me is trying to cover the screen as he caresses the touch screen. I catch a peek at one of the photos as it is spit out of the machine, and I see why he is so secretive. Hard core amateur porn—clearly the kind of pictures that you can’t develop at the one hour photo place in your neighborhood.
I pick up one of the several trade papers that are printed daily in Cannes and see the headline Beauty and the Breast. It refers to French actress Sophie Marceau’s wardrobe malfunction of the night before. Apparently one of her breast fell out of her dress on the red carpet for Where the Truth Lies. Over here it wasn’t a scandal, a la the Janet Jackson debacle of last year. No, despite the torrent of photographer’s flashes that were so intense that they could probably seen from space when it happened, it was just seen as an amusing incident.
My next interview was with Atom Egoyan. We weren’t invited on the junket—again an example of Canadian press ignored when it comes time to dole out interviews for a Canadian movie—but Egoyan has graciously agreed to do some interviews on his own time. We are to meet him in his hotel at 6 and will be given some one-on-one time.
When we meet in the lobby I notice that he isn’t wearing his pass. You don’t go anywhere here without your pass around your neck, even if you have one of the films in competition. He runs back upstairs to get it. When he gets back he says that when he was on the jury he had a gold pass that got him priority seating and the check paid at any restaurant in Cannes, and use of any official Cannes Festival cars. His filmmaker’s pass doesn’t have any of those perks, but I do hear that once you get a film in competition you are given a lifetime pass to the festival.
We step outside to do the interview after being told we couldn’t shoot in the lobby. As we are getting the cameras ready I show Egoyan some of the press stuff I had picked up at the Market. One is a very fancy hand silk screened kit for a zombie movie that he is quite fascinated by. I also tell him that Terence Stamp is annoyed with him. When Stamp found out that I was from Toronto he asked if I ever spoke to Atom Egoyan. I told him that I would be seeing the director later in the week. “Well tell him that I’m mad at him because he hasn’t cast me in any of his movies.” Apparently they have a mutual admiration because when I tell Egoyan this he laughs and says, “I have a Terence Stamp fixation.” He then tells me about finding a rare DVD copy of the 1968 Stamp oddity Teorema, a film in which there are only 923 words spoken.
When the camera starts to roll we discuss his film, Where the Truth Lies. I ask him about his decision to use voice over extensively. He says that usually he hates voice overs, and finds it a lazy way of telling a story, but for this project it seemed to work. Watch the full interview on Reel to Real.
That’s it for shooting today, so I head back to the press office and get caught up on e-mails and study the schedule for the next few days until it is time to head to the town of Mougins for the Telefilm Party. They have arranged shuttle busses for everyone, and despite my general anti-shuttle bus attitude I decide to take one rather than try and get a cab. During the festival cabs are as rare as chicken’s teeth. The ride is fairly quick, only about fifteen minutes, and I pass the time eavesdropping on the couple in front of me. Apparently they have just met. He’s older, she’s at least twenty years his junior. He spends the trip asking her questions about herself which she is more than happy to answer. She says things like, “I may not be the most beautiful person in the room, but I have more charisma than anyone I know,” and generally blows her own horn for the entire ride. Later at the party I keep bumping into her having the same kind of conversation with different men.
We are going to a place called Le Park, a large estate that is now a very fancy restaurant. It is like stepping into another world. The torch lit entrance way lead into a large room that looked like the main chamber in a Gallic castle. Several passage ways branched off to different areas, some inside, some out. I followed one passageway down to a giant reflecting pool, complete with swans and a statue of a horse. The place was so big I didn’t get to see it all, but all night I heard reports. “Did you see the duck pond?” “Have you been to the downstairs bar?” It was a nice party, except for one thing. There was hardly any food.
When you are covering a film festival often you are running from one screening to another, and there often isn’t that much time to eat. Many of the people at this party had done just that, expecting there to be food. When the food did come out people were incredulous. It all looked beautiful—exquisite little bowls of crudités with a personal sized dipping sauce, and some shot glass sized gelatin looking things, and nothing else. People attacked the food table like sharks in a feeding frenzy. One reporter said to me, “I’m so hungry my stomach is eating itself.” The food was gone in sixty seconds, and hopes were high that there would be a second course. Nope. An hour or so later some desserts were set out and they too disappeared in seconds. For the rest of the party you could see drunk people with icing sugar on their faces. There are few things more terrifying than a group of juiced up and hungry movie critics.
When the party was over we all boarded the shuttle busses which took us back to Cannes. Luckily they dropped us off downtown in an area that had several restaurants that stayed open late. We dashed for the nearest McDonalds—in tribute to Pulp Fiction I had a Royal with cheese—and saw a few dozen hungry people dressed in tuxedos from the party lined up behind us. I chose to walk home to burn off some of the McGrease floating around in my system and got in at 2:30. By 2:31 I was in bed and sound asleep.
MONDAY MAY 16, 2005
While I am on the way to my first interview of the morning—the director and cast of a Korean film called A Bittersweet Life—my phone rings and it is a frazzled publicist for the Koreans who wants to reschedule. I’m not available for the time they suggest and decline. Now my morning is largely free and I have time to prepare for my 11:30 interviews for the new Gael Garcia Bernal film The King. It’s about a troubled young man, recently discharged from the Navy, who returns to his childhood home of Corpus Christi, Texas to reunite with his father.
Bernal, who was the heart throb of the most recent Toronto International Film Festival, isn’t doing interviews today but I am speaking to several others involved with the movie. We’re doing the interviews on the grounds of a pretty little hotel called The Resideal just off the Croisette. When we arrive several other crews are getting set up, so we pick a quiet spot and get ready. The first person to come through is Milo Addica the screenwriter. We usually don’t get the chance to speak to writers. They are often at the bottom of the food chain publicity wise, but Addica is hot right now having penned Monster’s Ball and the controversial Nicole Kidman movie Birth.
He comes off as a bit of a curmudgeon at first—funny, but kind of crusty. We chat for fifteen minutes about the film, and he tells me that he can’t watch his own work on the screen. He’s too sensitive about it and constantly wants to go back and make revisions. When I suggest that he view the work as a time capsule of his life, almost like snapshots of where he was personally when the movies were made he says he would consider that, but only after some time has passed—like maybe 100 years.
Next is Pell James the pretty blonde actress who plays the love interest in the film. She has two films at Cannes this year—The King and Broken Flowers. We touch on Broken Flowers, the Jim Jarmusch film, but she can’t say much about it because she hasn’t seen it yet. From there she tells me about the audition for The King, and how she got a leg up on the other people trying out for the role by dying her hair and creating her own wardrobe for the part.
Last up was Laura Harring the bombshell from Mulholland Drive and former Miss USA. The crew were flipping coins and arguing over who would get to clip the microphone on her.
She tells me that this was her most demanding role to date, particularly in one scene where she has a breakdown in the street. To see the interviews for The King, tune into Reel to Real’s Cannes Specials in May.
From there it’s back to the press office to get some clerical work done—make up show runs and prepare to shoot the intros and extros for the final two shows we have to do here. On the way over I pass some of the street performers and vendors along the Croisette. First I see a man who carves and sells large wooden sculptures. He’s been here in the same spot every year that I have come to the festival, and I wonder if he actually sells anything. The sculptures are large, kind of ugly and must weigh a ton. I never see anyone with one of them tucked under their arm, but someone must pay him for them or he wouldn’t be here every year.
Then I see my favorite street performer—the cat juggler. He is legendary in Cannes but this is the first time I have seen him this year. He is dressed like Louis the 14th with a white painted face, a powdered wig and heavy brocade suit. He doesn’t actually juggle the cats, it’s more like balancing them on his outstretched arms while they do tricks with balls and string. He has a sign, written in French, which I’m told explains that he isn’t a hooligan, just a simple street performer who makes his living with his pets. It goes on to explain that the animals are never injured, nor are they drugged. “They are simply well loved.” PETA doesn’t need to target this guy.
At three I am scheduled to do some interviews on top of the Noga Hilton for a movie called Room. I haven’t seen this movie—it was screening at a time when I wasn’t available, but I looked it up on IMDB and one of the user reviews said, “Watch it if you’re looking for a reason to cry or commit suicide.” It is the story of Julia Barker, an over-worked, middle-aged Texas woman is haunted by psychic visions which drive her to New York in search of the Room.
When I arrive it is pouring rain, and I’m concerned the interviews might get cancelled. Luckily there is an indoor area we can use.
As we’re getting ready to shoot the rain lets up so we move to the balcony. It is one of the best views in Cannes—you can see the Croisette, the ocean and the beautiful old part of the city—and I really wanted all of that in the shot. I speak with actress Cyndi Williams first—not the Lavern and Shirley Williams, but a Texas stage actress who makes her big screen debut in Room. I ask the Texas native about shooting Room in New York City and she tells me horror stories about run-ins with giant rats and dealing with the crowds as they shot the outdoor scenes. I don’t think she’ll be moving to NYC anytime soon.
Next is Room director Kyle Henry who based the film, in part, on his experiences of living in NYC for several years prior to 9/11.
At four o’clock I have to see a documentary called James Dean: Forever Young. It is a companion piece to the Warner Brothers reissue of the three classic James Dean movies of the 1950’s—East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. It is screening in a hotel ballroom on a small screen, but I’m interested in seeing the “never-before-seen” archival footage.
The film—if you can call it that—is just a series of old clips strung together with a voice over from President Bartlett of The West Wing, Martin Sheen. It is interesting to see the old scenes of Dean’s television work, but there are too many clips. A typical voice-over from Sheen would be, “On October 14, 1953 Dean appeared in Keep Our Honor Bright on Kraft Television Theatre.” Roll clip. “Then just two days later on October 16, 1953 Dean played Hank Bradon in a teleplay called Life Sentence on the Campbell Playhouse.” And so it goes for an hour-and-a-half. There is no insight into what made him a great actor, no talking heads, just clip after clip after clip.
To describe James Dean: Forever Young as fawning would be an understatement. Any rough edges that Dean may have had—and apparently there were a few—are smoothed and polished to a high gloss here. It seems more like an infomercial for the new DVDs than a film. Twenty minutes in I’m fighting to keep my eyes open, but those around me seem to be losing the battle. I count four people who have dropped off sitting near me.
Afterwards I stay for the cocktail reception thrown by the filmmakers. I may not have enjoyed the film that much, but that won’t stop me from eating their food. I snack on a few sandwiches and order a coke from the bar.
“I’m sorry but the bar is closed,” I’m told by the bartender.
“But the party just started ten minutes ago,” I said, looking at the dozens of pre-poured glasses of wine and chilled bottles of soda and beer.
Several other people try in vain to get drinks, as I find someone to complain to. I find the publicist who thinks I am joking when I tell her that the bar is refusing to serve anyone. She speaks to the bartender, telling him that she is in charge and the bar is to be open for the next hour or so. Still he refuses to pour a drink. Thirsty journalists are starting to circle the bar, and gesture threateningly at the stubborn bartender.
A few minutes later a man in a black suit shows up, presumably the bartender’s boss and has a few curt words with him. “The bar is now open,” says the bartender who is nearly trampled by the rush of journos trying to get a drink. I take a sip of my coke, eat another sandwich and leave.
I’m starting to feel a little frayed around the edges—we have been out quite late the last few nights, the champagne has been flowing and sleep has been scarce. I kill the evening by catching up on some paper work, preparing for my interview with Carlos Reygadas, the Mexican director of Battle in Heaven and watching Star Wars: The Attack of the Clones in French on television before turning in early.
TUESDAY MAY 17, 2005
I sleep in and miss the 8:30 screening of the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers. In fact I would have missed it if it screened at 9:30, 10:30 or even 11:30. I haven’t slept that late for a long time.
The trip is winding down. If the weather holds out we’ll shoot the intros and extros for the 3rd and 4th shows we’re doing from here and I have an interview scheduled with Carlos Reygadas at 3:55 on the roof of the Noga Hilton. I saw Reygadas the other day on the street and he approached me and said, “Do you remember me?” He was one of the first interviews I ever did in Cannes when I spoke with him for his movie Japon, and I think I was one of his first interviews. We say hello and I tell him that I will be seeing him at the press day.
The weather looks threatening, but it is still hot and there are patches of blue sky. When we arrive at the suite we are offered and outside set or a much drabber looking set-up inside. Because there are bits of blue in the sky we choose to stay outside and set up under a large wooden umbrella. There are two large HMI lights—like movie lights; big and powerful—focused on us and other bits of electronic equipment strewn about.
As we start the interview I can feel a drop or two of rain, but am not concerned. By the second question it has actually started to rain, but we’re covered by the umbrella so we’re fine. At question three I hear a popping sound and one of the HMIs blows, but we continue. I see lightening in the sky over Carlos’s shoulder and the back of my jacket is starting to get wet. We continue as Carlos zips up his jacket and looks around nervously. A loud clap of thunder makes us both jump.
I pause before asking a question about the religious symbolism in the film. He begins to answer as the umbrella unleashes a gallon or two of water right down my back. Later the publicist would say that my reaction, or lack of reaction, was one of the greatest things she’d ever seen at Cannes. Despite having a bucket of water poured on me I didn’t flinch and continued the interview. We spoke until the pounding of the rain on the umbrella and claps of thunder were drowning out our words. When the soaked power box on my cordless microphone started to spark I called it quits. Carlos was a great sport about it, and it was definitely one of the more risky interview situations that I have ever been in.
Soaked, we tear down the equipment and head for a dry place. The guys return to the apartment to towel off while I dry out in the press office.
We close off the night, and the trip with a dinner at Gavrouche in the old part of Cannes. It is a tradition with the Reel to Real crew to have dinner there on the last night of our stay each year. It’s a beautiful little restaurant with only ten tables and attentive service from the chef’s wife who doubles as waitress. It is really the first proper sit down meal we have had since we’ve been here, and I’m determined to enjoy myself.
I order a Heineken mull over the menu. The server comes over to explain the house dishes to us. When I point to one that I can’t read in French, she simply says, “You don’t want that one.” When I ask why, her one word reply is, “Kidneys.”
I take a pass on the organs and order a foie gras appetizer (I know, I know, but it so good) and a filet mignon. When I order another beer she frowns and hands me a wine list. I politely tell her that I don’t want wine, but I would like another Heineken.
“We have lots of Heineken,” she says, “but not for drinking.”
I’m not exactly sure what she means. Eventually a beer arrives, but she doesn’t seem overly happy about my barbarian taste for beer vs. wine.
With my dessert I order a cognac and that seems to restore her faith in me.
Tired we load all the equipment into a cab and head back to apartment. It is our last night there, but I have scheduled several interviews for the next day before we have to leave. After packing, then sitting on our balcony—which I haven’t stepped foot on since the first day we got here—I call it a night.
WEDNESDAY MAY 18, 2005
It feels over, but actually the day is kind of busy. Because of the poor weather over the last couple of days we have to shoot the links—intros and extros—for two shows and do a series of interviews before hopping in a cab and beginning the long trek home.
We meet Christi Puiu on the beach by the British Pavilion at 10. He is the Romanian director of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and our first interview of the day. I show him a positive review of his film in the Daily Variety and as he reads it he asks me what certain words mean. When he is done reading he asks me if it was a good review. I tell him it was.
We do the interview on the beach, and despite needing to be coached through the written portion of the day—the review—he did very well on the oral part. He explained to me that he wrote The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, a dour take on the dehumanizing process of medical treatment because he is a hypochrondriac and is obsessed with death.
On that happy note we end the interview and hustle over to the Carlton Hotel for the final interviews of the trip. I’m scheduled to speak to Phil Stern and Marcus Winslow, James Dean’s photographe rand cousin. We arrive on time but there is no one there. A large poster with one of Phil Stern’s photos of Dean is propped up against the door, so I know we’re in the right place, but there isn’t a soul around.
We wait around, and the camera guys are getting antsy. It’s our last day and they want to go out and do some shopping, hit the beach, anything but hang around this hotel waiting for people who may or may not show up.
Eventually they arrive and it seems like things are running out of control. Mr. Stern is an older man with an oxygen tank, a walker and an outrageous sense of humor. “I like you,” he says when we meet. “Let’s go to San Francisco and get married.”
Unfortunately the scheduling gods were not working on our side. Today was supposed to be a print press only day, but I had made arrangements to bring a camera and grab a couple of interviews. Yesterday the publicist assured me that it would work out. Today, however, she seems flustered and it looks unlikely that the interviews are going to happen. After killing time for almost an hour I make the call to cancel the whole thing. The camera guys disappear into the bright sunshine and I do one last round of Cannes before heading back to the apartment to get ready to leave.
The guys come back at 5:30 and we’re off at six, once again the three of us and all our equipment jammed into one small cab that takes us to Nice. At Nice we bump into Julia Taylor-Stanley, the director of These Foolish Things. She’s very friendly and we talk for an hour or so before boarding the plane to London. She tells me that Terence Stamp told her that I was his favorite interviewer of his Cannes press day. I’m glad to hear that, as I enjoyed talking to him so much.
From there on the trip is a bit of a blur. We arrive in London at 10:30 pm but by the time we deal with customs it is approaching midnight and we have an early flight. We take a cab to a local hotel and grab a few hours sleep before heading back to Heathrow for our 8:20 am flight.
On the plane ride home I think about how I always look forward to going to Cannes, but ten days later when it is time to leave I can’t wait to get home. The festival was successful for us again this year, despite the slow start. We grabbed loads of interviews and have more than enough material for the four shows we have to do. Right now I’m over the moon to be leaving, missing my girlfriend and my bed, but in a few months, I’m sure I’ll be excited about going back into the fray next year.
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Today is the 80th anniversary of the Academy Awards and the beginning of my trip to the Floating Film Festival. More about that later. First I have to get to Los Angeles, see the awards and then make sure I’m awake at 3 am LA time to report on the show via phone and satellite for radio and television stations back home in Toronto.
So far things are going smoothly, save for a guy in front of my who has his seat pushed back so far that I am actually pinned into my chair, barely able to move. It does give me a good view of his dinner plate sized bald spot, but I am distracted from the vast hairless tracks of land in front of my face by the little girl sitting next to him whose running commentary includes remarks like, “I don’t feel sick yet, just really, really scared!”
This year there doesn’t seem to be the general excitement in the air regarding the Oscars. Perhaps it’s because of the writer’s strike and the uncertainty of the show happening, or perhaps it’s because if you combined the grosses of all the movies nominated in the marquee categories you’d barely have enough to cover the craft services budget on Transformers. There Will be Blood, No Country for Old Men and Michael Clayton may be great movies, and all three appeared on my Top Ten list for last year, but they didn’t exactly burn up the box office, so the buzz factor is kind of low.
I’m less excited about the whole thing this year, but only because I am convinced that I know who is going to win in the major categories, and because of my faith in my Oscar prognostication skills, the gold isn’t quite as shiny for me this year as it has been in years past. This year I tried logic instead of sentimentality or opinion to create my Oscar Pool entry. I took all the major film critics polls and combined that data with the Golden Globe winners and SAG winners and came up with a mathematical formula to determine who will win and who will go home empty handed.
Somewhere my grade school math teacher is laughing really hard to himself, dancing a jig with his slide rule at the idea of me coming up with a mathematical anything, but I think I have come up with a method that is as good as any to determine the winners. It’s numbers verses gut instinct, usually the kind of thing I hate, it’s way too logical for my taste, but I have taken such a beating on the Oscar Pools in the last few years by using my expertise and opinions that I thought I’d give practicality a try for a change.
Here are my picks and their percentages:
Performance by an actor in a leading role
Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood 50 %
Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men 60 %
Performance by an actress in a leading role
Julie Christie in Away from Her 70 %
Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone 60 %
Achievement in directing
No Country for Old Men Joel Coen and Ethan Coen 50 %
Best motion picture of the year
No Country for Old Men 60%
Now, I realize all it will take is for a few ancient actors to vote for their old buddy Hal Holbrook and my whole mathematical system will be thrown out of whack, but until 5 pm Pacific Time today, at least, I’m standing by my predictions.
As I sit on the plane writing this, the laptop literally resting against my chest because the guy in front of me thinks his seat is a Lazy Boy recliner, my thoughts drift to Dusty Cohl. Dusty, one of the founders of the Toronto Film Festival, the Canadian Walk of Fame and general man about town passed away just before Christmas. I’m thinking about him today because I’m on my way to the Floating Film Festival, a seven day festival on a cruise ship that will take us from LA to Mexico that was another of Dusty’s creations.
For those who don’t know he was a man who knew everyone and took great pleasure in bringing people together for friendship, business and often, just for fun. When he died in December I was asked to comment on his passing by several radio and television outlets. I didn’t really know how to sum up his life and accomplishments with just a soundbite, because his contribution to Canadian culture extends far beyond TIFF or the Walk of Fame or the FFF.
His genius was in putting people together who would go on to do great things. For me it is hard to pin down his legacy because we’ll never know how many shows got green lit, how many scripts go written, how many movies got made or how many good times happened because of Dusty’s influence. It is inestimable and the landscape of Canadian culture is going to be a little more barren and a little less fun now that he is gone. Hopefully his disciples, and there are many that looked to him as a mentor, will keep his tradition of collaboration and coercion alive. I didn’t know him well, but I feel like I owe him, not just for the chance to help program the FFF and cruise the Mexican Riviera for a week, but also for all the stuff he gave Canada, and Toronto in particular, that made it a better place.
This is kind of a vacation—a break from Toronto’s ice and snow at least—but I still have work to do. On Sunday I’m doing radio hits via my cell phone leading up to and during the ceremony. The radio hits and my bad planning got in the way of watching the Oscars at a friend’s villa at the glamorous Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood so I had to settle for the Hyatt Hotel bar in Long Beach. Not as chic, but they had big screens and lots of Stella Artois.
The red carpet show was just as weird as usual. What exactly, were The Rock, Miley Cyrus and Steve Gutenberg doing walking the Oscar carpet? I thought the red carpet was for Oscar nominees, not people who will likely never win anything more than a fan favorite award at a country fare.
Great to see Sarah Polley on the carpet looking slightly bewildered as Julie Christie rambled on about Guantánamo and it was great to hear Ellen Page talk about her recent birthday by saying, “I had a couple of drinks. I’m not gonna lie.”
Low points included Regis Philbin calling Javier Bardem Xavier and Heidi Klum’s spray tan.
Things improved once Jon Stewart took the stage. He poked the nominees saying, “Even Norbit got a nomination, which I think is great. Too often the Academy ignores movies that aren’t good.” He also took a swipe at Away From Her. “It’s the story of a woman who forgets her own husband,” he said. “Hillary Clinton called it the feel good movie of the year.”
Apart from keeping the show running smoothly Stewart did something that I have never seen before. After Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová won for their song Falling Slowly from Once it was quite obvious that by the time that Hansard was finished his thank yous that Irglová was disappointed that she wasn’t able to speak before the music swelled and the show cut away to commercial. Stewart did the coolest thing by bringing her back and allowing her to say her piece.
“This is such a big deal,” she said “not only for us, but for all other independent musicians and artists that spend most of their time struggling, and this, the fact that we’re standing here tonight, the fact that we’re able to hold this, it’s just to prove no matter how far out your dreams are, it’s possible. And, you know, fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. And this song was written from a perspective of hope, and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are. And so thank you so much, who helped us along way. Thank you.”
It was heartfelt, genuine and touching and probably the best moment of the night.
I remembered back to last June when I did a Q&A with Glen Hansard and the film’s director John Carney at the Regent Theatre in Toronto. Once the formal question and answer was over Hansard grabbed his guitar—the same one from the film and the Oscar show with the hole worn in the front from constant use—and played a number of songs, solo, from the edge of the stage. It was a great, intimate performance with the same kind of warmth and charisma that he shows in the film.
It was unplanned and loose. He called up a guy named Peter Katz from the audience to perform and then several members of the audience requested that Glen play Falling Slowly, the future Oscar winner.
“I can’t play it,” he said. “It’s a duet and Markéta isn’t here… although if you want to help me sing it I’ll give it a go.” Three girls stood at the front of the room with him and did a transcendent version of it, complete with perfect harmonies. Of all the Q&A’s I have hosted that one moment stands alone as a high point.
Back to earth… I must admit that my logical system of prognostication didn’t really work out that well. Tilda Swanton and Marion Cotillard were unexpected winners that threw off my calculations and sunk me in the two Oscar Pools I entered this year. Perhaps next year I’ll try runes or astronomy when making my predictions.
Over all the show was short, Stewart was funnyish and occasionally hilarious—two words for you, “Gaydolph Titler”—and although no Canadians took home awards there were some upsets, lots of pretty red gowns with pretty actresses inside them and did I mention it all came in under four hours.
Off to bed early to grab a few hours of sleep before getting up while it is still very dark to do a phone interview with EZ Rock in Toronto and then go to a studio in what turns out to be a dodgy part of LA to do a satellite hit with Canada AM about the Oscars.
MONDAY FEBRUARY 25, 2008
It’s not even six a.m. when they start off my Canada AM segment with a clip from last Friday’s show where I say something like Tilda Swinbton doesn’t have a chance in hell at taking home the gold. It’s a funny clip and Seamus O’Regan and I spend the rest of our time mocking my fortune telling skills. The coolest part of the experience, however, was sitting in front of the Oscar green screen.
I’ve seen it on television for years—the giant gold statues and red curtains—and it was very cool to share a screen with it this year. When I’m done I head downstairs to grab the limo back to the hotel. I find the limo driver crouched in the front seat with the doors locked. Like I said, it’s a sketchy neighborhood.
Once back in beautiful downtown Long Beach the PTC (preferred traveling companion) and I seek out a suitably big American breakfast. We find a diner a few blocks away, and even though it’s a bit menacing looking—there’s a sign in the window that says, “Washrooms are for Customer Use Only. Please Do Not Ask,”—we go in. At the table next to us a woman is doing her hair and makeup. Deciding to stay despite the ambiance, we order two “ultimate” breakfast somethings. I make it about halfway through mine; she even less so. Somewhere a chicken weeps at the waste of her eggs…
After a long walk to burn off the “ultimate” calories we head to the boat, the Crystal Symphony. It’s like an apartment building laid on its side. It’s colossal and, dare I say it, titanic, even. Later I find out that the boat is 781 feet long, 99 feet wide.
Standing in the custom line we end up talking to quite a few people. I come to understand that this is part of cruise culture, it’s very friendly. Most everyone we talk to are Floating Film Festival veterans or “Floaters” as they call themselves. Some have come every single year since day one, others say they have only been coming for a few years, but would never miss it. Their enthusiasm is infectious. In addition to the endless food, the rolling ocean and luxurious surroundings, the people here seem to really love movies.
We get checked into our stateroom. I expected a tiny closet in the bowels of the boat, kind of like the below deck scenes in the Titanic. Instead we have a beautiful room—I’ve had expensive hotel rooms in NYC that were way smaller than this is—with great furniture and a fruit basket.
At 3 o’clock there is a reception in the Palm Court, a giant room with low bar tables and, most importantly, free flowing champagne. Now it is beginning to feel like a film festival.
Danielle McGimsie from e-Talk is here to do a story on the FFF and interviews me, director Barry Avrich and our special guest this year, Gena Rowlands. Danielle suggests that I am the only person she knows who would come on a beautiful cruise to the Mexican Rivera and then spend the whole time sitting in a dark room watching movies. I told her to have a look around. Everyone in that room was going to be spending most of their vacation in the dark.
At six the opening night film, Dinner Guest, a French farce starring Daniel Auteuil and comedienne Valerie Lemercier kicks things off in the Galaxy Ballroom, a large space normally used for live shows that has been converted into a movie theatre. With its pink plush seats and marble cocktail tables it more closely resembles a 1980s hotel nightclub, but the chairs are comfortable and the sightlines good.
After the movie—which everyone agreed was “cute”—we gather in the main dining room. It is a formal affair, although not so formal that we have to wear a tux—that’s tomorrow night. Tonight we’re seated with six strangers, all of whom are huge movie fans who spend the entire time discussing everything from the merits of the Oscar show to Marlon Brando’s best performance to how Julie Christie was robbed of an Oscar for her performance in Away From Her. Despite my virulent anti-schmooze stance, and complete lack of ability to make small talk, it goes well. Just as dinner approached the sea decided to show us who is boss and kicks up some huge swells. Later as the boat rocked I became acquainted with the wonders of Gravol…
TUESDAY FEBRUARY 26, 2008
It’s the first full day on the boat and I have become obsessed with how something this huge can stay in the water. There is nothing around us for miles except open sea—and, I imagine, the odd Kraken or two—so I have to have blind faith that the thing will stay afloat, but I don’t see how it is possible. Also, I wonder, where do they store all the food, the thousands of gallons of fresh water? I ask around and find out that we will use over 1 million gallons of fresh water and 36,000 gallons of fuel on this trip to move the 854 guests and 575 crew members on board.
I’ve never been on a cruise before, so before we left for Los Angeles I decided to embrace my inner cruiser and buy what I thought would be appropriate cruise wear. I wanted to fit in. I guess it worked. Today I saw an eighty year old man wearing the same pants as me. The only difference is, he had a walker and I didn’t, but other than that we were dressed pretty much identically.
Being on the cruise is quite something. Crystal is very serious about service, so much so that the experience of being aboard the ship is kind of like being in a small town where nobody ever says “No” to you. They are relentless in their desire to please and no request is too much. You want to make substitutions on the menu items? No problem! You’d like nineteen extra pillows and a helium stuffed comforter? We’ll be right there! No request is too much and the only time I saw a staff member with anything less than a smile on their mugs was during the mandatory life raft drill when a stern Austrian woman shushed my group, admonishing us for talking and laughing during the drill.
We’re at sea all day today so there is little to do but eat and watch movies. Everywhere grinning staff members tempt me with pastries and tasty treats. The general rule of thumb is that you’ll gain a pound a day during the cruise. I’m shooting for two…
At the first screening of the day Richard Corliss made a funny and heartfelt tribute to Dusty Cohl that bears reporting. Corliss, a writer for Time magazine, was a friend of Dusty’s for many years and one of the original programmers for the FFF. He read a letter written by his wife, Mary Corliss who wrote, “For more than forty years I have been connected with film, working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and covering film festivals from Toronto to Tehran. IN that time I have met more than a few movie stars so you may consider me an expert on the subject. I can testify that nobody had the star quality of Dusty Cohl. His swagger, his patter his passion for life; the cigars and of course, that hat, made him a unique larger than life big screen character and a forever friend.”
Like many of the tributes to Dusty, Corliss’s homage was touching but irreverent, but, unlike the other tributes, ended with a song.
Corliss went on to describe how Dusty had always encouraged him “be all I could be as a writer of bad song parodies.”
“I will now torture you with one of them. Meeting Dusty’s friends in Canada and meeting many of them on the Floating Film Festival I would often ask the question, ‘Are there any Gentiles in Canada?’ So I was inspired to pen this… (to the tune of O Canada) Oy Canada! Oy Vey and how’s by you…”
The song goes on to praise Dusty and other famous Jewish Canadians like David Cronenberg and Lorne Michaels before ending with a stirring “Oy Dusty Cohl and Mazel Tov to thee!” It was a show stopper and the kind of funny tribute I gather Dusty would have liked.
To cap off the tribute to Dusty a short documentary titled Citizen Cohl, made by festival managing director Barry Avrich, unspoiled before the main feature. As the video played you could hear laughter and muffled sobs in the assembled crowd, many of whom were close personal friends of Dusty.
The first film of the day, Snow Angels, based on a book by Stewart O’Nan and directed by David Gordon Green, is a riveting slice-of-life drama set in a small town involving Annie (Kate Beckinsale) and Glenn (Sam Rockwell) childhood sweethearts whose dreams of happiness didn’t work out quite the way they planned. Separated after the birth of their daughter, the main story focuses on Glenn’s increasingly unhinged behavior and Annie’s inability to completely let go of the image of what Glenn used to be. Ripe with great performances, Snow Angels is a taut and uncompromising look at the dark side of relationships turned sour.
Not exactly 10 am entertainment, but pretty much par for the course at a film festival; if you want sweetness and light, go to Disney World. I think people liked it, but no one would ever call this one “cute.”
Just as the bleak blanket of ennui from Snow Angels was starting to lift I went to see the four o’clock presentation of Frozen River. Again, not exactly what you’d call uplifting. Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is having a rough time. Her husband took off just days before Christmas, she doesn’t have the money for the final payment on her new double wide and all she can afford to feed her kids is popcorn and Tang. Like I said, things aren’t going well. She finds a way out when the chance to make some easy, but illegal money, smuggling illegal immigrants into the US across the St. Lawrence River, comes her way.
I think Frozen River really wanted to be a better movie than it actually is. Leo is good in the lead role, but she’s working against a backdrop of waken supporting performances and a clichéd story.
After the one-two punch of downhearted and dreary films I was looking forward to channeling my inner George Clooney by throwing on my tux and meeting the Captain of the ship at a reception in the main ballroom. I felt as thought I had been thrown back in time to 1955 Las Vegas. The men are all wearing tuxedos, the women long gowns. There’s a small orchestra playing on the stage while people dance the fox trot and the mambo on the dance floor. People are drinking champagne and cocktails. It has the kind of glamour that you usually only see in movies, and I wish I had more opportunity to wear my tux.
Later at dinner we sit with six new people and get the inside scoop on Conrad Black’s trial from a friend of his who was on the cruise. Later, still dressed in our tuxes we retire to the saloon to indulge in that manliest of pastimes, cigar smoking and after-dinner port drinking.
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 27, 2008
Slept late after a night of cigar bars, sambucca with venture captialists and port with the owners of several Tim Hortons in Calgary. Up in time to grab the “late risers” breakfast buffet on the Lido Deck and get ready to go into Cabo San Lucas for the afternoon. All I knew about the place was that it was the home of Cabo Wabo tequila, it’s at the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula and that it would be hot. Sure enough, after a quick ten minute tender boat ride from the cruise ship to shore we are on land for the first time in days and the first thing I see is a Cabo Wabo sign.
And yes, it is hot.
It was nice to be on dry land, but every now and again a wave of motion would wash over me as if I was still on the boat. It makes you walk funny and feel like you are drunk, but without the work of actually having to drink booze. I’m told Johnny Depp used this idiosyncratic walk in the Pirates movies when Captain Jack Sparrow was on land to show that he had spent most of his life on the sea.
The harbor front area in Cabo has been built up in the last couple of years and, while nice, is really touristy. I didn’t come all this way by land and by sea to eat at Ruth’s Chris Steak House or shop at Chanel, although I was fascinated by the big hotel at the base of the dock, called, I kid you not, The Taco Inn. Later we see a tatoo parlor called The Spunky Monkey with the most obscene store sign I have ever seen in public, outside of some strip joints in Northern Ontario and a bar called, appropriately enough, The Hangover and another store called Redrum (spell it backwards and it is a weird choice of moniker). I also notice that the street signs in town are sponsored by Dos Equis Beer. Al the signs have the street name and beer logo prominently displayed. I wonder if only people over 19 are allowed to walk the streets.
We spend the day walking through the older part of town, eating at an authentic Mexican restaurant (what other kind would there be in Mexico?) and shopping. I’ve always been fascinated by the Day of the Dead art and was lucky enough to find an out of the way shop that specializes in traditional Mexican masks and art. I bought a diorama of a skeleton Elvis, complete with white jump suit and guitar standing in a box stage emblazoned with the words, “Elvis… Has Left the Building.” Other pop culture tributes included a “Bone… James Bone” spy piece, Marrowlyn Munroe and James Dean skeleton figures. They’re quite unusual, but I love my new Elvis piece and the way it mixes pop culture with the traditional Mexican art.
Walking through the streets I pick up a copy of The Gringo Gazette, a newspaper for tourists, with an eye catching photo of a man in a snow storm on the front cover. Underneath the photo it says “Not Cabo San Lucas.” Amen to that.
I’m presenting the movie Chop Shop tonight at 10:30. It was programmed by Jim Emerson, of The Chicago Sun Times, but he was unable to come this year so I have volunteered to chat it up before the screening. I saw it a couple of years ago at another film festival and liked it’s free form, slice-of-life story about a twelve-year-old’s desperate attempts to make a better life for himself and his sister in the downtrodden Willet’s Point neighborhood in Queens, New York.
There isn’t a story as such, but there is real humanity on display, and the kind of social consciousness usually only associated these days with the films of Ken Loach. Barry introduced as “the guy who you’ve seen walking around the ship who looks like Steve Allen.” I was always more of a Jack Paar man myself, but I won’t quibble.
I hoped people would like it and ended my spiel with, “This is a really great film, and I know you’re going to enjoy it.”
Boy was I wrong.
People hated this movie with the white hot burning fever not felt since the opening night of Plan Nine from Outer Space. It literally cleared the room, with one woman loudly declaring “I don’t like this,” as she stomped out. By the end of the film only a few of diehards are left. I’d like to think that people were just tired from a day in Cabo and a late start for the movie, but deep down I know they hated the movie and I feel I’m going to have to spend the next couple of days explaining the movie to irate Floaters.
My first presentation at the FFF was a bust, and I hope that the good folks won’t hold it against me and boycott the movie I am presenting later in the week. I go to bed tired and feeling slightly paranoid.
THURSDAY FEBRUARY 28, 2008
At breakfast this morning I was so convinced that people were going to chastise me for presenting Chop Shop that I sat with my back facing the aisle so Floaters walking by couldn’t see me.
Today’s port of call is Mazatlán, the “Pearl of the Pacific.” Accoring to Wikipedia “Mazatlán is the hometown of Pedro Infante, one of the most popular actors and singers of the golden years of Mexico’s film industry… and was well regarded by film stars such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and others of their generation as a sportfishing mecca.”
More than one million people visit this small city every year, but unless I missed something, I can’t imagine why. Perhaps I still had a Chop Shop rejection hangover, and wasn’t in the mood for the place, but I found it to be mostly rundown and dirty, and while we had a great cheap lunch and saw some beautiful tile work, there isn’t much here that grabbed me.
The highlight of the trip to Mazatlán was a visit to the beautiful Teatro Angela Peralta. Legend has it that in 1883 revered Mexican opera singer Angela ‘The Nightingale of Mexico’ Peralta was scheduled to perform in the city’s premier showcase, the Rubio Theatre. Upon her arrival she was met with adoring fans that carried her to her hotel. Touched by this show of affection Peralta performed did an impromptu performance from the balcony of her hotel. The tragic part of the story is that just days later the singer died of yellow fever contracted in the boat that brought her to Mazatlán. She never got the chance to perform in the lovely theatre, but the townsfolk named the place in tribute to her, erecting a plaque which commemorates her unfortunate end.
The theatre didn’t fare much better than poor Miss Peralta. According to the Mazatlán city website, “In later years, the theater was turned into a movie theater, then a vaudeville stage, a boxing ring and eventually a parking garage! Finally, in 1975, a hurricane hit Mazatlán and destroyed the inside of the theater. Standing in ruin for years, the theater began a restoration in 1987, and re-opened in 1992.”
Today it is a splendid example of the Neo-Classical style of the era and is still in use as a working theatre. The day we go through a modern dance troupe are rehearsing on the stage. Upstairs some rather dramatic signs tell the story of the theatre’s restoration. My favorite caption shows a tree growing amid the ruins of the theatre and reads, “A gigantic wild Ficus tree sprang up from the middle of the shattered stage, dwarfing the surrounding walls and making this space look like a ruined dollhouse.” Another says, “When restoration was finally undertaken in 1986 the place looked like a thirties movie set for a plane crash in the jungle.”
We get back to the boat sun stroked and crazy from the heat and miss the four o’clock screening of the new Errol Morris documentary Standard Operating Procedure.
At dinner we sit with the guy whose company built the Toronto subway and the 401 highway. Turns out he’s a movie fan and his grandson just completed the producer’s course at the AFI in Los Angeles.
After dinner we’re off to see the 10:30 screening of OSS 117: Nest of Spies, a spoof of James Bond movies presented by thehotbutton.com’s David Poland. This boat is so large it has two screening rooms, one we have been using during the day and a fully equipped theatre that is used for later screenings. Tonight we’re in the Hollywood Theatre, an ersatz art deco movie palace that holds about 150 people. The audience tonight is in full vacation mode, they’re talking moving around and generally making a lot of noise. The movie is funny in a quirky kind of way with a few genuine laughs, but the restlessness in the bleachers annoyed me.
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 29, 2008
We spent a rare February 29 in Puerto Vallarta, a small resort town that became famous after John Huston and Richard Burton shot Night of the Iguana there. Huston fell in love with the place and built a home on the remote Las Caletas beach and another house in town. Huston’s children Angelica and Danny share his love of the place and are the founders and patrons of the Puerto Vallarta Film Festival.
Night of the Iguana isn’t the only Hollywood connection, however. Parts of Predator were shot there (apparently director John McTiernan lost quite a bit of weight during filming because he was afraid to eat the local food) and more recently Ben Stiller staged a fight with a sea lion at the Sea Lion Adventure of Vallarta Adventures for his film The Heartbreak Kid.
It’s a picturesque tourist town, with shops (the most unique of which was the Rolling Stones Leather shop whose logo is the famous Rolling Stones lips with the addition of bulging eyes) and restaurants dotting the main drag on one side with beach on the other side. Along the boardwalk that snakes through town there are really beautiful, but really unusual bronze sculptures. Resembling something out of a Terry Gilliam movie, these art pieces are vaguely disturbing alien looking faces perched atop chairs at various look out points. Very strange, but quite excellent.
After a couple or pineapple cocktails at the excellently named Daiquiri Dick’s we head back to the ship to catch a special screening of the John Cassavetes’s film Opening Night. Made in collaboration with our special guest Gena Rowlands, Opening Night, which could easily have been called Actress on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, or maybe even Actress Under the Influence, is pure Cassavetes—uncompromising, raw and brilliant. In it an actress (Rowlands) suffers emotional upheaval in her personal and professional life after a fan accidentally dies after asking for an autograph.
I am interested to see that Ms. Rowlands came to the screening and stayed for the whole film. Not too unusual I guess, except that I would have thought it would be painful for her to watch a film co-starring her late husband of thirty-five years. “As an artist I love him,” she once said of Cassavetes. “As a husband I hate him.” Maybe she’s just here for the art.
There is time to grab dinner before the Q&A with Ms Rowlands so I head back to the stateroom to change. I am not a small man, but today, for the first time I noticed a passing resemblance to John Goodman when I looked in the mirror. When I get back on dry land it’s diet time.
The conversation with Gena Rowlands was moderated by George Anthony, the former Sun entertainment writer, current CBC executive and biographer of Brian Linehan. After a slow start the two began to click and she talked openly about Cassavetes—“Once he fell in love with directing,” she said, “he cared nothing about acting.”—told a funny story about Bette Davis and said that after she did her Emmy winning role as Betty Ford that the former first lady was “polite enough not to say anything bad about my portrayal.”
She was gracious, and even took a few questions form the audience, including one from me about her first Cassavetes movie A Child is Waiting. Cassavetes lost final cut of the film to producer Stanley Kramer who changed the ending. The temperamental director immediately disowned the movie. I asked how she felt about the film.
She told me some anecdotes about the making of the film, which used mentally challenged child as cast members. During the making of the film Cassavetes worked with these kids and got several of them, who hadn’t spoken in years, to speak. “It was a miracle,” she said. She went on to describe the difficulties with Kramer and the fist fight—“John popped him”— which ended the working relationship between director and producer.
“We had just come up from New York. I don’t think we had ever heard the fact that the director didn’t have the final cut. To us it was an assumption that he did. We found out the hard way. So there was a great deal of controversy about that. On the other hand I thought the picture was pretty terrific from either point of view. I liked John’s better, but I didn’t hate Stanley’s.”
By the time Ms Rowlands left the stage it was well past midnight and well past my bedtime.
SATURDAY MARCH 1, 2008 and SUNDAY MARCH 2, 2008
Arr Mateys! We’re at sea for two days without a speck ‘o land in sight. There’s nothin’ but water everywhere you look and the seas be rough out here in the open ocean.
I spend some time sitting in the main lobby watching the other guests try and walk upright and the boat lurches to and fro. They’re like Weebles; they wobble but they hardly ever fall down. Watching people try and maintain their balance (and dignity) get old fast so I head for the screening room for a morning of short films and one documentary.
Bruce Kirkland of the Toronto Sun has programmed a nice selection of shorts which have been running before most of the main features. Today we see the Oscar nominated I Met the Walrus. When it played at Sundance the program book said: “In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. Using the original interview as the soundtrack, this narrative tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multi-pronged animation.”
It’s really quite remarkable, doubly so when you realize that it is the director Joel Raskin’s first film fresh out of school. I have socks older than him, which probably says more about me than him.
The main feature is Gotta Dance, a work in progress from director Dori Berinstein. It’s a charming doc about a group of senior citizens who become overnight sensations as the first ever hip hop dance squad for a major sports team. It’s a crowd pleaser and gets a couple of applause breaks during the film. Afterward Dory takes questions from the audience.
Next up was possibly a FFF first, a film made by an alumni of the festival. A young man named Jonah Bekhor produced a short film called The Butcher’s Daughter as his final project for the AFI. He has ambition, I’ll give him that. For a student film the production value is exceptionally high—it’s a period piece, has jibs and steady-cams—and character actors that I recognized from series television and movies.
With a plot that owes a debt to David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, The Butcher’s Daughter tells the story of a young girl who grows up quickly when she learns that her father has a shady and violent past. It gets a rousing round of applause and later wins the Best Short Film Award.
At two o’clock George Anthony and Barry Avrich do an engaging interview and Q&A regarding George’s book, Starring Brian Linehan. It’s a best seller in Canada already where Brian’s legend for being the most prepared interviewer ever still has people’s interest. Gena Rowlands is there, and speaks about Brian in glowing terms and calls the book one of the best celebrity biographies she’s ever read.
I’ve seen the other two films programmed for the rest of the day—The Counterfeiters and My Winnipeg—and while they are both great I decide to take the rest of Saturday off and enjoy the weather and the ice cream on the Lido Deck.
Strange celebrity story of the day: Richard Carpenter of The Carpenters, as in Top of the World, Superstar and Rainy Days and Mondays was in the casino last night. I didn’t see him, but David Poland swears it is him. Poland also has the Todd Haynes film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, the infamous short film Haynes made in 1987 with Barbie dolls cast in all the major roles. The film is available as a bootleg on the net, but hasn’t been officially released due to a grocery list of lawsuits filed by everyone from the Estate of Karen Carpenter to their music publisher to Mattel.
Sunday is pretty rocky on the ship and I end up spending most of my time in my cabin reading and gulping down Gravol. I’m presenting the closing night movie, which sounds much more important than it actually is. The film is The Life of Reilly and I think this crowd will love it, I’m afraid though, that no one will come because it’s at 10:30 pm, after dinner and just hours before we’re disembarking.
Here’s the speech I wrote: “The late Charles Nelson Reilly was a Tony Award winner, an Emmy nominee and a Broadway director but will always be best remembered as the slightly tipsy, pipe smoking panelist on the 70s afternoon show Match Game. In Life of Reilly, the touching and hilarious adaptation of his one man show Save It for the Stage, the actor reveals a creative depth and sincerity only before hinted at in his television and film work.
“Shot with high definition hand held cameras at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood in what would become his final stage appearance the film begins with stories from Reilly’s troubled childhood.
“’Eugene O’Neill would never get near this family!’ he says with perfect comic timing, breaking the tension built by a series of autobiographical anecdotes about life with a bigoted mother and alcoholic father. It’s his ability to shift the tone of the monologue with just one well placed line or facial gesture that gives Life of Reilly much of its oomph.
“Dressed casually, he roams the stage, a lion in winter, recounting his miraculous escape from a 1944 circus fire; studying acting with Uta Hagan (with Jason Robards and Hal Holbrook as classmates); his innumerable visits to The Tonight Show and the time he put a snobby guest in her place by accurately and powerfully reciting a monologue from Hamlet on Carson’s stage. It’s a masterful performance that suggests that he was underused and underappreciated as a serious actor.
“The stories are by turns sad, funny and poignant, but no matter the tone, are never less than compelling and illuminating. Almost fifty years after an NBC executive told him, “They don’t let queers on television,” you can still hear the hurt in his voice, but also the determination to break through the prejudice barrier that kept openly gay men off the airwaves.
“Of course Reilly proved that executive wrong—he says during the height of his 1970s fame he once counted his name on 56 entries in one week in the TV Guide—and in the process became a groundbreaker for gay rights. His sexuality never defined him as a performer, but nor did he hide the fact that he was gay. He was simply Charles Nelson Reilly, take him or leave him.
“Charles Nelson Reilly passed away in May 2007 just as Life of Reilly was starting to make a buzz at film festivals all over the world. It’s a shame we won’t have any new CNR performances to marvel at, but I can’t think of a more dignified tribute to him than this heartfelt but well etched portrait that reveals new sides to both the artist and the man.”
It’s good stuff, but as I feared there were only a handful of people in the room for the screening. Unlike Chop Shop, however, the few that showed up stayed and liked the movie, so for me, my first FFF ended on a high note.
MONDAY MARCH 3, 2008
Leaving a cruise ship to fly home to another country is a multi-step process that for us began very early in the morning with a visit to American customs. Then off to breakfast. Then off to pick up our bags which had been collected the night before. Then off to a shuttle which took us to a hotel for lunch and then, finally, to the airport. We see Pride & Prejudice’s (and former Bond girl) Rosamund Pike at the Wolfgang Puck restaurant at LAX and then had an uneventful flight home.
The Floating Film Festival is probably the most casual film festival I have ever been to, but don’t mistake casual for haphazard or uninteresting. The films we showed ranged from mainstream to provocative; we had an Oscar winner and at least one film everyone hated (Chop Shop, in case you’ve forgotten) which I think is a must at every film festival. I was thrilled to be a part of it and still managed to get a bit of a tan even though I sat in the dark for most of my vacation.
The members of Britpop boy band One Direction seem like five nice young lads—and they fight poverty with Comic Relief!—and I don’t want to hurt their feelings, so Zayn, Harry, Louis, Liam and Niall if you’re reading this, please skip ahead to the next review.
“One Direction: This Is Us” is a behind the scenes look at the singing sensations from their beginnings as 2010 “X Factor” contestants to teen dream superstars.
Like five tousle-haired Justin Biebers they prance about onstage and off, prompting fans to squeal things like, ”They make me laugh! They make us believe anything is possible! They make me happy when I’m sad!” and newscasters to emote that, “the Beatles didn’t have such transatlantic success so early on!!”
In the concert segments they make vocal sounds that clearly hypnotize anyone under 17 years old, but will have no effect whatsoever on people who have outgrown their training bras.
If this movie could be summed up only using punctuation, I’d suggest younger folks might use the exclamation mark (!) while their elders may prefer the question mark (??).
Of course boy band pop music isn’t supposed to be appreciated by people of a certain age. What’s the fun of liking something of your parents also enjoy? So the music isn’t exactly the point here, but the bar is quite high for these kind of docs and I don’t mean in comparison to “Don’t Look Back” or even “Behind the Music.” No, I mean “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” and “Katy Perry: Part of Me.” Both were finely honed promotional pieces but neither were dull, which is “One Direction: This Is Us’” greatest sin.
While Keith Moon used to while away the time on tour driving Rolls Royces into swimming pools, Zayn, Harry, Louis, Liam and Niall tweet to fans and try to figure out the vagaries of miso soup while in Japan.
The movie is as sure a hit as will be released this year, so it’s disappointing that it feels so prepackaged. It would have been interesting to learn about the marketing and selling of the band but that, I guess, isn’t the stuff that teen dream movies are made of.
Instead the movie is a parade of banality. Despite a few moments with the boys’ parents that ring true and an almost revealing bit near the end when the boys contemplate life after One Direction, the movie panders to fans expectations while revealing very little.
“One Direction: This Is Us” is a blunt force promotional object that portrays its stars as cuddly young men. It preaches to the choir, but anyone of a certain age will feel like they’re being beaten… with a bunny.
“Old Stock,” a new Canadian dramedy starring Noah Reid, starts with a quirky premise. Stock (Reid) has been happily living at the Golden Seasons retirement home for two years. He enjoys the life—the bake sales and flirting with the dance instructor—but the problem is, he’s sixty years younger than most of the other residents.
He’s been living at the facility with his grandfather Harold (Danny Wells) in a vain attempt to escape a monumental mistake from his past and control his future. He’s forced to confront real life when the other residents evict him, for his own good.
He reluctantly leaves, fleeing on an electric wheelchair to his grandmother’s house beginning process where Stock takes stock of his life and prospects.
Despite its odd premise “Old Stock” is a surprisingly effective and touching film. It’s a snapshot of the fear young people have of an uncertain future, centered around a young character who wishes he was old so he could avoid all the unpleasantness of growing up.
This is a character-based movie and your enjoyment of it will depend on whether you buy into the Stock, Harold and the rest. The ruminations on growing up versus maturing aren’t new or groundbreaking and some of the characters—like the grandfather who refuses to grow up—are best described as stock characters, no pun intended—but Reid and Melanie Leishman as Patti, the on-parole dance instructor he falls for, cut through the story’s quirk to deliver nice, resonate performances.
“Old Stock” is a slow burn of a movie that improves as it goes along. There are a few laughs, some pathos and less quirk than the premise might suggest.
“Oblivion” is one stylish movie. Every frame could be clipped and hung on the wall to garner oohs and ahhs from your houseguests. Everything about it looks great. Morgan Freeman even wears a jaunty cape. But, I’m afraid the style took precedence over the substance. There is much to like here, but for me the story starts to go slightly out of orbit in the last hour and never quite becomes earthbound again.
Tom Cruise plays Jack Harper, a security and drone maintenance man on planet earth sixty years after a war with the alien Scavs destroyed all life on the planet. Nearing the end of his mission on the desolate place, he and girlfriend Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) are due to return to home base, now located in outer space. Thing is, Jack doesn’t really want to leave. He has memory jolts, little shards of recollections the life he led before the war and his memory wipe, and he wants to stay and explore them. When he discovers a human survivor, Julia (Olga Kurylenko) he begins to question everything about his existence.
This is the kind of movie Tom Cruise was born to star in, the sort of thing that made him a superstar. He understands the dynamics of anchoring a huge movie like this, and hits all the right notes in the action scenes.
Nobody outruns a fireball quite like Cruise.
The trouble is, this is a romantic sci fi movie without much of an emotional center. It’s all stark and calculated, and feels sterile.
Riseborough does bring a lot of humanity to a character who isn’t required to do much but much of the heavy lifting is left to Kurylenko’s character, and while she’s beautiful, I’m afraid she has the range of an emoticon. She does much better work in To the Wonder.
I won’t give away any spoilers from the last half because the plot thickens near the end, but it still manages to be kind of standard. Of course there is the customary scene where someone is about to be executed but is saved by an alarm, and does everyone in post apocalyptic worlds listen to classic rock? But beyond the usual Hollywood contrivances, it telegraphs virtually all of its third act reveals. Pay attention in the first hour and there’s no real need to hang around for the closing credits except for the view.
Visually director and writer Joseph “Tron” Kosinski creates an amazing world. There is a bombed out beauty to the images of New York City—you see the top of the Chrysler Building peeking up from the earth, surrounded by fields and lakes—the result, we’re told of the Scavs destroying the moon and Mother Nature destroying the rest.
Seems Mother Nature also wiped away whatever humanity was left on the planet as well.
When a judgment call costs him his job as a personal security guard to the President of the United States (Aaron Eckhart), Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is reassigned to a desk job in the Treasury Department. He wants his old job back, a second chance to show he has the right stuff. He gets another crack at it when North Korean terrorists invade Washington, overtake the White House, killing POTUS’s entire security team and kidnapping the Prez. As he only man left with a gun and knowledge of the White House’s security systems, he alone must protect the future of the free world!
“Olympus Has Fallen” is about as standard as action movies get. It’s so standard that the two most presidential of actors—Aaron Eckhart and Morgan Freeman—both play the Commander in Chief. This movie has everything you expect, which, if you have low expectations—and you should—is guns, bombs and at least one character who comforts a mortally wounded man with the words, “C’mon! Hang in there!”
Imagine “Red Dawn” with fewer teenagers and a bigger body count.
And this movie is all about the body count. The first twenty minutes or so is spent on “character development,” an attempt to make stock characters—like the charming but fearless Secret Service agent—but it really begins with the audacious attack and the ensuing mayhem.
From then on it is all bash, boom, bang with a side of motive—evil North Korean mastermind Rick Yune wants to reignite the Korean civil was the U.S. interrupted—and the kind of patriotism that only ever shows up in movies like this (ie: Banning crushes a bad guy’s skull with a statue of Abraham Lincoln).
Director Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua embraces the 80s-style b-movieness of it all, liberally mixing melodrama with mano-a-mano old-school action. If you had a poster of Dolph Lundgren on your wall in 1984 or rent JCVD movies today you’ll find a kindred spirit in “Olympus Has Fallen.”
James Franco is quickly becoming Hollywood’s King of the Prequels. First came “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” which provided the backstory to how a monkey named Cornelius took over the world. Now he stars in a mega-budget, all-star prequel to one of the most beloved films of all time.
“Oz the Great and Powerful” aims to let you know everything you always wanted to know about “The Wizard of Oz” but were afraid to ask—how the wizard became the wizard, why the wicked witch is so wicked and what was up with the giant projected head.
Set decades before the original film, Franco dons a tattered top hat to play Oscar Diggs, an egotistical traveling circus magician. According to his inflated sense of self he should be playing the Orpheum circuit making big bucks instead of amazing the yokels with parlor tricks. He has ambitions–“Kansas is full of good men,” he says. “I don’t want to be a good one, I want to be a great one—Harry Houdini and Thomas Alva Edison role into one.”–but an ill advised dalliance with the circus strongman’s wife causes him to put his ambitions on hold.
Jumping into a hot air balloon to escape the big man’s wrath, Oscar drifts into the eye of a tornado and into the heart of Oz, a magical land in search of a leader. A good witch named Theodora (Mila Kunis) rescues him from the toothy water fairies, and convinced he is the savior her people have been looking for, takes him to the Emerald City to meet her sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and claim his throne. Enter a third witch, Glinda and Oscar’s ascension to the throne becomes very complicated. He must prove he isn’t “weak, selfish, slightly egotistical and a fibber,” as Glinda says, and worthy of the title Oz the Great and Powerful.
Oz’s journey echoes Dorothy’s in “The Wizard of Oz.” Both begin in black and white until a tornado transports them to a luminous, beautiful color world where they learn about themselves. Dotty learns about the importance of home and what she left behind. Oz rediscovers a sense of self, lost to years of conning audiences with his cut-rate magic and smarmy charm.
Both are large-scale epics for children, but “Oz the Great and Powerful” doesn’t have the magic of the original. There’s no shortage of imagination on screen—just a deficiency of star power to equal the high voltage images.
Franco and Kunis are a-listers with Oscar nominations and big hits on their collective resumes, but they seem out of their league here, like two hipsters cast back in time to a more formal era. Franco plays Oz like some kind of stoner wizard, and despite his habit of yelling, “Simsalabim,” his performance isn’t nearly flamboyant enough to carry the magic of the movie.
Kunis, as the wannabe wicked witch, hands in a performance that relies on cackling and the limpid pools that sit where you and I have eyes. None of her crack comic timing is required because she isn’t given any laugh lines. Pity.
Some of the fanciful creatures are more interesting than the human ones. A broken ceramic doll that gets a second lease on life courtesy of the Wizard’s glue pot is the kind of character needed to bring this material to life. Ditto the wise cracking Finley, a monkey butler voiced by Zack Braff.
“Oz the Great and Powerful” will suffer in the inevitable comparison to “The Wizard of Oz,” but movie wouldn’t? It’ll make your eyeballs dance but, but no amount of ruby red shoe clicking could fix the central casting problems.
At one point in “On the Road,” the new film version of the famous Jack Kerouac novel, a character says, “Bless me father for I will sin.” Many of the fans of the book may take that line as a mea culpa from director Walter Salles, who has dared to bring a novel long thought to be unfilmable to the screen. Beatnik purists need not worry. There are sins on display, just none of the cinematic kind.
Proto beats Dean and Sal (Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley) spit in the eye of authority and embark on an existential search for self on the self-awareness, friendship and the “rainy night of America.” Along the way jazz happens, the discovery of the “joy of pure being” is revealed to be fleeting, and the central question, How are we to live? goes unanswered.
“On the Road,” the novel and movie, isn’t a piece of art to be explained, it needs to be experienced. The film, like the book is uneventful—nothing resembling an actual story actually happens—but both reverberate with the pulse of be bop jazz. Salles has created a movie populated by fascinating characters played by good actors who live in rhythm to the freeform structure of the story.
It’s a road trip that sees people come and go, relationships formed and broken and hearts broken. At the center of it all are two souls, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s pseudonym ion the book), bound together by friendship and restless spirits.
Dean is described as someone who spent 1/3 of his time in jail, 1/3 in pool halls and a 1/3 in public libraries. He’s one of the towering characters of American literature and is brought to vivid life by Garrett Hedlund. A charming rascal, he’s deeply self-involved, a hip cat but in reality, the most desperate character in the bunch.
Refusing to take responsibility for himself or his actions he’s the bad boy your mom warned you about and Hedlund embodies it.
But as good as Hedlund is, the movie belongs to Sam Riley, the English actor most distinguished for playing Ian Curtis in the film “Control,” the biopic about the lead singer of Joy Division, is the beating heart of the movie.
Supporting characters come and go. Viggo Mortensen brings edge to his brief portrayal Old Bull Lee (a thinly disguised William S. Burroughs). Kirsten Dunst is shows the deep ache of jilted Camille and Kristen Stewart plays lovesick Marylou as a strong, but vulnerable victim of Dean’s charm.
Some will find ”On the Road” aimless, others will be swept along by its ride, the beautiful photography and the search for meaning.
