They're Blocks of Text, They're Online

The farce that is In Utah This Week's webpage continues. My review of "Sicko" and my column of the AFI's new top 100 list have mated and, since they were both my children, spawned some mentally disabled offspring. If it's been fixed, read on. If not, come up with a funny joke about it for the comments section.

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Once, Controversy Strained My Mighty Heart

EDIT: Apparently all the articles are fucked. You may want to hold off until they're fixed. ("A Mighty Heart" might be OK—haven't checked.)

So, everyone has been gushing about Michael Winterbottom's "A Mighty Heart" for the past couple weeks, but I didn't think it was amongst his best work. Maybe it's that I like Winterbottom and hold him to a high standard, maybe it's that I saw the film in Cannes and had just seen several of the year's best films. Maybe it's just not as great as everyone says it is. If I have time, I might give it a fresh look and see if I feel any differently. It does have a couple great moments, but overall history will prove me right.

I am, however, in agreement with the fawning over "Once," a great re-imagining of the backstage musical. (The page seems to be fucked, though).

I remember some recent and one not-at-all-recent controversial films in my latest column—dig it.

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If You'll Allow Me a Moment of Fanboyishness…

He's back.
(Photo by Little Stevie)

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I Have Seen the Future

And it's a big-ass table called the Microsoft Surface.

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The End of a (Quite Shitty) Era (That Won't Be Missed)

Disney is no longer going to make sub-standard, direct-to-video sequels of its contemporary and classic titles. Although I've gotta say, I was looking forward to "Cinderella 17: The Cute Mice Sing Another Song," which has been removed from 2008's release slate. It looks like the Pixar crew is making some smart moves to clean house.

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Let the Complaints Begin

"Fargo" was booted to make room for "Titanic" (which I didn't think anyone respected nowadays), but we can all breath a sigh of relief in knowing that Buster Keaton finally made it onto the American Film Institute's revamped top 100 American films of all time. I'll be filing a column on it this week, but let's go ahead and voice some complaints here. (I know Chris Bellamy already has some ready...)

As someone who prefers "Raging Bull," "The Searchers" and "Vertigo" to "The Graduate," I think overall this list is much better than AFI's 1998 effort, even if it still lacks "Sherlock Jr." (Keaton went from not being on the list to having the no. 18 spot with "The General.") Robert Altman's "Nashville" should be much higher, but I guess we should just be grateful it's there at all.

Note: I linked to Ebert's article on the list because it has all 100 films on a page. If you want to enjoy the AFI's "visual tour," feel free.

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Bringing It All Back Home

Sorry for the big gap of content, but just as I was starting come back from my Cannes exhaustion, I had to leave town for a funeral.

I'm now back, and you can read my column from last week, on the best films of the year so far if you haven't already. I also did a story on the "Out/Ex" film program's collection of archival frame-at-a-time film strips and Brian Dewan's modern use of the art form. Unfortunately, the program took place on Saturday, so that's pretty much screwed.

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Dali Dali Oxen Free (I Have No Idea What This Headline Means)

In his review of a Dali on Flm exhibit at the Tate Modern, Richard Dorment points out that Dali was nothing without the great Luis Buñuel as his collaborator.

But real dreams normally take place in ordinary, everyday settings - it's the oddness of what happens in them, and the disorientation caused by abrupt dislocations in time that feel so weird. In the films Dalí made with Buñuel, he respects this reality. What he serves up here is high camp, cardboard stage sets that so insistently call attention to their strangeness that the meaning the dream has within the film's narrative is overwhelmed by the screaming symbolism of the backdrops and props.

My only complaint would be that Dorment gives Dali a bit too much credit for Buñuel's work.

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Have I Mentioned How Much I Love Judd Apatow?

Oh, well then I guess you don't have to read this.

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Gracie's Got a Good Heart, but Mr. Brooks Has no Brain

The sweet little soccer movie gets it's job done, which is more than I can say about another of this week's releases.

I was really ready to give "Mr. Brooks" a good review after the first scene, but after sitting through some crime procedural crap and other lame subplots, I was forced to reconsider.

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Get Knocked Up Now

The biggest mistake you could make this summer isn't forgetting your SPF 40 and falling asleep in the sun. It isn't going to a high school kegger and getting to drunk to ask the girl you're hitting on if she just graduated or just finished her freshman year. It isn't going to see "Georgia Rule" (although that's close). But if you miss "Knocked Up," which will surely be the funniest comedy of the year, you'll regret it.

Read my review, check out an interview with the supporting cast in USA Today, but most importantly, see the damn movie. Now.

Also, in my review, I somehow (might have had something to do with traveling, jet lag and a film festival) switched the names of Jonah Hill and Jay Baruchel.

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I Totally Invented This Thing in 2001

The Boston Herald reports that some schmoe has finally passed off the invention—which up to this point only existed in my mind—as his or her own. The Regal Entertainment Group has tested the Guest Response System, with mostly favorable responses. My idea: the picture's out of focus? Some asshole won't turn off his cellphone? Don't want to miss five minutes of the movie to tell the theater employee? Now you don't have to. I always pictured the buttons built into the seat, and not limited to one specially selected snitch, but the basic idea is the same:

"Select patrons will get a pagerlike device to notify managers of concerns inside the theater. This new breed of hall monitor can alert theater authorities by pressing either the “picture,” “sound,” “piracy” or “other disturbance” button.

The last button can flag anything from ringing cell phones to loud talkers."

I guess I should have patented it or something…

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Back in the states and still recovering

In my mind, I had already posted my last column from In while I was at Cannes, which includes my thoughts on the deserved Palme d'Or winner, "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days." I guess the stress of Cannes got the better of me and I just assumed that it posted itself. Other than Julian Schnabel's Best Director award for "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," most of the Stephen Frears's jury's selections are rather bizarre, but at least they got the big one right.

On Sunday, the Tribune ran my interview with U alum Isaac Chung, whose new film about the Rwandan genocide played in Un Certain Regard.

More to come soon.

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Kustirica Closes Out the Competition

Emir Kustirica is unlikely to win a third Palme d'Or for his ridiculous but amusing "Promise Me This." Charming enough to get by but not funny enough to explain its nonsensical, broad-comedy plot about a young peasant who comes to the big city to fight gangsters and woo a bride twice his age, the film was nevertheless a nice cap to the 22 Official Competition entries, most of which were not what you might call "jolly." The other competing film that screened today, "Mourning Forest," for example, slowly followed a crazy guy and a young woman through the forest for a couple hours. Too much may have been going on in "Promise Me This," but at least it was something.

What will win? Julian Schnabel's excellent "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" has been picking up word—even Chris Bellamy, who couldn't be arsed to see the thing, thinks it will win. My four other favorites are the festival's surprise hit, "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days" from Romania, Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park," Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men" and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof." Of those films' directors, only Romanian Cristian Mungui hasn't won the Palme d'Or. Yet.

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You, the Living Must See 'You, the Living'

Due to a series of scheduling dominoes, I had a choice this morning: see "Ocean's Thirteen" or surreal Swedish director Roy Andersson's "Du Levande" ("You, the Living"). This was not a difficult choice, as Andersson's last film, "Songs from the Second Floor" premiered at Cannes in 2000 and I didn't get to see for three or four years later, and Steven Soderbergh's new film comes out in a week. After seeing "Du Levande," I only wish that I could re-erect some of those dominoes and see the it one more time.

Well worth the seven-year wait, this late addition to the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar is a certifiable, holy-shit-that-was-amazing masterpiece. Describing a Roy Andersson film to someone who has never seen one is like telling a blind person what green looks like. The deep-focus, often static photography, hilarious gags, haunting emotions and unexcitable tableaux add up to such an unexpected sum that the film's wonders charm and hypnotize you. "Du Levande" is at once a musical, a romance, a tragedy, a comedy, a dreamscape, a series of unrelated vignettes and a cohesive unit. Andersson has created dreams within a dream world and finished it off with one of the best closing shots in cinema history.

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'Persepolis' an Animated Surprise

Could an animated film win the Palm d'Or? The possibility has been on a few tongues since yesterday's screening of "Persepolis," Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's "Persepolis," a stylish, sparsely colored but consistently vibrant tale of growing up while a country crumbles.

Adapted from Satrapi's popular autobiographical graphic novel, the film is a lively, constantly inventive and fun account of Satrapi's childhood in Tehran, Iran and life in Vienna and Paris after she left the country. Satrapi and animator Paronnaud bring out both the personalities of the characters and the history of a troubled country, while recalling different styles of hand-drawn and cutout animation.

It's been 20 years since a French film won the Cannes Film Festival's prestigious top prize, but based on the lengthy standing ovation it received in the Grand Theatre Lumiere, some people think that it could add a nice surprise to the festival's 60th celebration of film. It still has lots of stiff competition, however.

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When the Competition's Away…

With only one film screening in the Official Competition on Sunday (thanks largely to "To Each His Own Cinema," a collection of new short films about going to the movies, in celebration of the festival's 60th Anniversary), the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section got to spend some time in the spotlight.

"My Brother is an Only Child," an uncommonly fresh coming-of-age tale about an Italian boy who supports the dying, post-Mussolini Facism party in Italy in the 1960s while his older brother becomes a communist. Director Daniele Luchetti warmly captures the folly of immature youth with a touch of humor and character that has been lacking from many of the Official Competition entries. We see these siblings grow from teenage boys to young men, and deeply care about how their fragile, shaky lives turn out.

The Chinese film "Mang Shan" ("Blind Mountain") directed by Li Yang, centers around an outstanding performance by its leading actress, Huang Lu. Huang plays a college student who is kidnapped and sold as an imprisoned wife in a poor, backwoods town where no one is willing to help her. The family whose son she has to marry doesn't care if she was kidnapped or not—they paid for her—and her resilient quest for escape only leads to greater pain.

The film plays like a cyclical nightmare, and the ending is a perfectly frank commentary on where this kind of helplessness leads people. Unfortunately, the lousy Chinese government plans to make Li change this ending to make them look better. Stupid government censorship. I guess that's why you've got to see 'em at Cannes.

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Van Sant, Schnabel, Coens and Tarantino (With the Lapdance) Triumph

I only care about Americans in my latest Cannes report for Film Threat.

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Kim Ki Duk's 'Breath' of Fresh Air (Now That's a Headline!)

Kim Ki Duk's latest film, "Soom" (translated originally as "Breathe" but now as "Breath") is about a connection between a man and a woman who barely know each other but desperately need connection. The man is a murderer on death row who constantly tries to kill himself, only to be kept alive until the execution. The woman is in a loveless marriage with a husband who doesn't understand her, and talks at her rather than to her. After seeing the constant TV news coverage of his execution, she decides to pay him a visit.

Thanks to a prison warden who is much more lenient on the rules than the Cannes Film Festival employees, meets and performs for him in the visitation cell, which she decorates with absurd wallpaper that creates a brilliant contrast between freedom and confinement. The imagery throughout the film contrasts between the open and the confined, as the characters try unsuccessfully to break out of their prisons and find peace.

As best exemplified in his strongest film, "Three Iron," Kim likes to work in silences and small moments, and "Breath" masterfully creates character dynamics by means of who speaks (or sings) to whom and whether or not they can shut the hell up. The two leads both add to Kim's careful direction. Zia is fragile and exuberant. Chang Chen, who doesn't speak during the entire film, provides a range of emotions that make us see his character as more than just a killer.

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Insert Bad Headline About 'Sicko' Being 'Healthy' Here

Michael Moore's latest film, "Sicko," shows the opinionated documentarian in full power of his abilities to tug at his audience's heart strings. "Sicko" presents a thorough arguments against HMOs and the priority of making money over curing the sick.

Moore started moving away from his trademark ambush interview in "Fahrenheit 9/11," and his only such tactic in this involves a half-hearted, just-for-fun effort to obtain healthcare from the Guantanamo Bay U.S. military base in Cuba (the trip also launched a government probe, which has been the source of much conversation on the Croisette).Here, he presents a collection of personal stories like he did in his first and best film, "Roger and Me." We meet the people directly affected by the corporate healtchcare mentality, and learn first-hand about the process of refusing people's care—all with Moore's usual combination of humor and compassion. Moore also visits countries to show how happy people are with socialized medicide (although he didn't need to spend full sequences in Canada, England and France to prove his point).

However, I fear that Moore may be intentionally underplaying issues like the over-crowding in Canadian hospitals, which he should have learned by now could come back to bite him in the ass. The healthcare systems in other countries are portrayed as a bit too utopian, which can only hurt the film's credibility. That doesn't mean that universal healthcare is a failure. It's just better to acknowledge the issues and address how they can be fixed if the United States were to adopt such a system.

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