Oh Penelope. Just once, could you look crappy for the rest of us?

Elizabeth Renzetti, 19/05/09 at 12:05 PM EST

It strikes me as deeply unfair that Penelope Cruz should rise from her sickbed looking like Venus rising from the sea.

Yesterday we'd heard that the star of Pedro Almodovar's Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) had come down with a case of food poisoning, but this morning Cruz appeared, seeming a tiny bit wan but still more glamorous than the rest of us could achieve without surgical intervention or a late-night chat with the devil.

Cruz said she'd had a spot of the flu - the normal flu - she added reassuringly, but still wanted to support her friend Almodovar, with whom she's working for the fourth time.

In the genre-straddling film (which, alas, fell a bit flat for me), Cruz plays a secretary-turned-call-girl-turned actress, who's much better at the former jobs than the latter. It's a noir with comic elements, and, in the main character of a blind film director lost in painful memories, a metaphor for Spain's post-Franco journey: Now that the country's had democracy for more than 30 years, Almodovar said, the time has come to recover those memories of the past. (He probably put it a bit more elegantly than that, but since his Spanish was translated to French then English, we were all clinging to the tower of Babel.)

Fans of Almodovar's earlier work will be happy to know that he reprises scenes from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, including the great spiked-gazpacho bit.

That earlier film's having a bit of a resurgence; it's being adapted as a U.S. TV series and as a Broadway musical, and it's been resurrected in his new film. Almodovar filmed Broken Embraces on the same set as Women, so he felt every time he showed up to work he was being haunted, but these were very nice ghosts.

The stars are finally beginning to appear in Cannes, with Cruz, in her lovely satin platforms, being one of the highest-profile. Jim Carrey is also here to promote I Love You Phillip Morris, based on a true story about a con man who is jailed and falls in love with his cell mate (Ewan McGregor).

Carrey took time out to pose ankle deep in that fake snow I wrote about earlier, in a stunt to remind us that there's only six shopping months left until the animated version of A Christmas Carol hits theatres. The ghosts of Christmas past and future were busy tormenting misers in some other dimension, but costars Colin Firth and Robin Wright Penn frolicked gamely by Carrey's side.

Tomorrow, of course, we'll see Brad Pitt on the red carpet for Inglourious Basterds, or Quentin Tarantino Goes to War. Tarantino told the Hollywood Reporter that this is the closest thing I've ever done to Pulp Fiction. Even the actors haven't seen it before tomorrow's unveiling, but it's said to clock in at more than two and a half hours (oh, and it costars Mike Myers as a British intelligence agent. Austin Powers' dad, perhaps?)

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Bang your heads

Elizabeth Renzetti, 18/05/09 at 8:43 AM EST

From the outside of Morrison's pub, you would have thought that the Stones or Radiohead were playing a secret gig, not an obscure Canadian metal act that even those of us who grew up in Toronto in the eighties have trouble remembering.

But Anvil's not just any washed-up band: Sacha Gervasi's documentary Anvil is already a word-of-mouth hit in the UK and North America and is now looking to find buyers around the world. This may not be too difficult, judging by the standing ovation at last night's screening. "I was nearly in tears throughout," said a clean-cut British buyer, who did not look as if he'd spent his teenage years smoking a bong in his parents' basement.

While the crowd outside hustled to get in, Anvil took stage, ready to rawk: Steve "Lips" Kudlow, the guitarist, wore a t-shirt emblazoned with a maple leaf and the word "eh"? as a badge of hoser credibility, and drummer Robb Reiner spun his sticks above his head in time-honoured fashion.

"This is [bleeping] awesome, guys!" Kudlow shouted. "We should have brought metal to Cannes a long time ago!" Then his guitar screamed and the rocking began. Normally reserved film folk began banging their heads like hormonal teens and didn't stop till the band's big hit, Metal on Metal, squealed to a halt. 

 

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Von Trier delivers shock and odd

Elizabeth Renzetti, 17/05/09 at 5:05 PM EST

Who says that the ability to shock is the privilege of the young? Sometimes you need an old dog to teach the young ones tricks – like how to portray acts so shocking, even in the era of torture porn at the multiplex, that they leave your jaw on the floor. If I had dentures, I'd be groping for them, too.

The first five minutes of Lars von Trier's Antichrist contain both a scene of eye-opening sexual explicitness and an act of tragic misadventure so extreme that it begs a new word to describe over-the-top: Baroquecoco, maybe.

The couple in the film is played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are well-known enough actors to suggest that body doubles were used for at least for the initial erotic interlude. But that's not the case for the rest of the film which features the two in various instances of coupling and decoupling (literally, though to say any more would give the game away).

They play an unnamed couple, recovering from a personal tragedy, who retreat to their remote cabin called Eden to heal. The religious (and sexual and Freudian) imagery only gets more extreme from there. It's as if Don't Look Now took a huge hit of peyote and moved to the mountains.

The audience at the first Cannes screening – and there would have been many who had seen the Danish auteur's disturbing earlier movies – didn't seem to know how to react, alternately gasping and laughing as the acts of violence became ever more weird. One bit of self-mutilation in particular is not likely to help von Trier's reputation as a director who has a tricky time representing women (along with lines like, “A crying woman is a scheming woman.”)

He seems, however nuttily, to be making some point about women, nature and history - though I'm honestly not sure if I know what it is or if he does either. He's said that this is the movie he made to recover from depression, and it is laden with dream images and references to Freud and psychoanalysis. It's also loaded with a big trunkful of crazy … Ingmar Bergman meets Saw, let's say.

Von Trier is to subtlety what Don King is to neat hair. This movie is not likely to endear him to suburban audiences (I prophesy a Variety review: “Pic not natural date fodder, auds may find odd.”) but it sure isn't boring.

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Faux neige in the bright French sun

Elizabeth Renzetti, 17/05/09 at 1:35 PM EST

It was an act of artifice that Louis B. Mayer would have loved: Early this morning outside the Carlton Hotel, Cannes's main garage for the marketing machine, a man stood in the bright sun with a cigarette in one hand and a hose in the other. He was spraying a thick layer of fake snow on the grass and palm trees outside the hotel, a promotion for A Christmas Carol (due this fall and featuring Jim Carrey as Scrooge.) The memo about thinking green most have got lost on its way to the Côte d'Azur.

His faux neige gizmo was labelled “machine à floquer” and when a young woman ventured onto the new-sprayed snow, leaving sandal prints behind, he gave her a Gallic snarl and chased her off. Let the magic remain undisturbed.

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Girls on film

Elizabeth Renzetti, 16/05/09 at 3:53 PM EST

The arrival of Jane Campion's Bright Star, a luminous story about the love between John Keats and his neighbour, Fanny Brawne, has ushered back one of my favourite debates: Is there such a thing as a woman's picture, and if so, can men enjoy it (truly enjoy, that is, without the application of hot coals to the soles of the feet)? I'd say the answers are yes, of course, and yes, sort of.

Critics (including male critics) have praised Bright Star for its beauty and nuanced storytelling, but when I talk to men about it, what I hear is a lot of grumbling: “dull,” “conventional,” and in one fellow's words, “a lot of people looking out the window moaning.” Yeah, well, that's what you did in the 19^th century, at least until the consumption came along, and then you sat looking out the window and coughing.

I loved the movie, but then I'm the target demographic: I could watch asphyxiated passion for years, and I was actually enthralled by Fanny's innovative double pleats (no one else in Hampstead village was so neat with a stitch!) Is this because I'm a woman, or a sap?

Now, before anybody gets hoppity, let me say that of course there are movies that bind the sexes in popcorn-eating solidarity, that don't cause Netflix riots in the house, that can be enjoyed by both partners without one fuming in silence for two hours. Yes, there are men who enjoyed Sex and the City and women who love the Three Stooges (don't ask me how many times I've seen The Road Warrior. Okay, about 40. And today at the festival I was gripped by the violent, macho world of prison feuding in Jacques Audiard's Un Prophet.)

Yet there are movies that speak to women's lives, for whatever reason, and Bright Star, with its attention to domestic life and its beady-eyed observation of 19^th-century social protocol, is heaven. And, of course, you can't overrate the erotic frisson provided by twenty layers of boiled wool, with only two fingertips touching.

Then there are movies that seem, on the surface, to have more appeal for women, and yet are just as powerful for men, and one of them is The Red Shoes. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 fable about passion and its manifestations – does she dance or does she love? Ah, the agony! – is so beautiful, so red in colour and purple in tone, that it seems, classically, a “woman's picture.”

 But look at the directors it's influenced: Coppola, de Palma, Spielberg and of course Martin Scorsese, who introduced a newly restored print of the film in Cannes last night. (With him was his longtime film editor Thelma Schoonmaker-Powell, who is Michael Powell's widow.)

Earlier in the day, while discussing his World Cinema Foundation project to restore disintegrating films from around the world, Scorsese talked about how his father had taken him to see the film in New York when he was eight years old, and how profoundly the film had affected him ever since. There's a reason, if you needed one, to take your kids to the movies today. You might have a little Scorsese or Schoonmaker on your hands

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Long, beautiful hair

Elizabeth Renzetti, 16/05/09 at 7:56 AM EST

Taking Woodstock is Ang Lee's light-hearted look at how the three-day festival of peace, love and brown acid affected a family who owned a motel near Max Yasgur's farm (Yasgur, by the way, is played by Eugene Levy.)

The movie's based on a memoir by Elliot Tiber (played by stand-up comic Demetri Martin), who throws in his lot with the canny hippies organizing the festival, in order to save his parents' motel.

 Lee felt, "after making six tragedies in a row," that he needed a laugh (Hulk was a tragedy? Who knew?). But he was also aware -- and maybe his star whispered this in his ear -- that comedy's a lot harder than it appears.

"If you do a comedy and people don't laugh, you've failed. If it's a serious movie and people don't get it, you can always blame the audience."

The other difficult thing, Lee said, was ensuring that all the extras had an authentic late 1960s vibe. This was more difficult than you might imagine, due to issues of ... well, personal grooming. One scene features some blissed-out skinny dipping, and "getting the pubic hair to look right, that was hard."

Added screenwriter James Schamus, "the challenge was to get extras who were skinny, but weren't working out all the time ... to find people who weren't staring at themselves in the mirror, and had hair down there. That pretty much encapsulates the difference in the past forty years."

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Thank God for the real Mariah, frosted tips and all

Elizabeth Renzetti, 15/05/09 at 1:41 PM EST

I had a doll once that looked like Mariah Carey - she rode around in her Barbie camper van, usually wearing her wedding dress, Ken nowhere in sight. Sometimes I'd move her arms so she'd flick her hair, and it would land, just so, on her shoulders.

Mariah does exactly that, I noticed happily as she sat in front of me (I mean, I sat in front of her) on the Croisette this afternoon. If there were a gold medal for self-presentation she'd be on the podium - the posture, the lunchtime décolletage, the oversized sunglasses that never left her little nose, it's all there.

I was relieved that it was the real Mariah who showed up on the beach in her nude, floor-length gown, and not the faux Mariah who has a small role in the festival film Precious, as a plain Jane social worker. It's a pretty strong performance, I have to say, but she doesn't even have frosted tips! I spent about 20 minutes thinking, Who is that slightly familiar woman with the raspy voice?

Mariah's friend Lee Daniels is the film's director, and unlike a true friend (who always responds "yes" to the question, "Do I need more makeup," Daniels was determined to strip away the glamorous façade that the singer presents to the world. "On day one, I said, 'No makeup, nothing. Not a stitch on her.' I said, 'Put the bags under her eyes!'"

Mariah laid her hand on Daniels' arm and whispered, "Tell them the blush story" This is the blush story: At one point, Daniels had turned to talk to the film's star, Gabourey Sidibe, who plays the abused but resilient title character, Precious Jones. Mariah was standing just behind him, "and just in my peripheral vision, I see this blush stick appear." So he turned to Mariah: "You're not wearing makeup, are you?"

And Mariah said, "no." (At this point during the story, she put her hand over her eyes in mock humiliation).

Daniels continued: "And I said, 'you are!'; And she said, 'But Gaby's wearing blush!'

They collapsed together in giggles. I am pleased to report that Mariah got her blush licence back, and it's been pedal to the metal ever since.

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And she never talks back

Elizabeth Renzetti, 14/05/09 at 7:05 PM EST

It's crucial to get noticed here, as Brigitte Bardot famously learned. The only limits are taste and imagination, and they're both pretty boundless. The inflatable press kit for Kore-eda Hirokazu's movie Air Doll, a fantasy about a sex doll who comes to life, rose above the pack. It doesn't perform any services, however.

The plastic companion may soon deserve a film genre of her (or his) own. There was Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling as a man with a particularly flexible lady friend, and Canadian artist Wrik Mead's short film Toybox, about a deflating erotic experience. Are there any other inflatable plastic characters on screen? No Pamela Anderson jokes, now.

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From Cannes to Mom

Elizabeth Renzetti, 14/05/09 at 12:55 PM EST

Katie Jarvis, the 17-year-old star of Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, couldn't make it to Cannes for a very good reason: She had a baby earlier this week. Jarvis is a complete unknown, and a natural screen presence.

After much fruitless searching - Arnold was looking for an authentically lippy teenager - the producers found Jarvis on a train platform in the unloved corner of England called Essex, screaming at her boyfriend across the tracks. "That made her stand out," Arnold said earlier today.

Fish Tank is set on a council estate, like Arnold's hypnotically grim last feature film, Red Road. Jarvis, completely untrained and in her first role, is in every shot: "When you've been acting in films a long time you learn to pace yourself," Arnold said. Not Katie. "She'd go out and party every weekend and buy loads of shoes with the money she was getting." The director was quick to add that Jarvis adapted remarkably smoothly to acting, and now has an agent, hoping to make more films. Once the baby's sleeping through the night, of course.

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