I'm OK, everybody. It's true that I'm staying in the very hotel where $1,000,000 in House of Chopard jewels was stolen late Thursday night. Except for the sudden appearance of a very tired-looking security gentleman asking to see hotel keys, you'd never know anything had happened. The sun was out the last couple of days, and so, I suppose, are the crazies. Well, this is the Cannes Film Festival — every other person is a little bit nuts. But now the crazies are armed. Yes, it seems an as-yet-unidentified man fired shots during the live evening broadcast of Le Grand Journal, which on Thursday featured Christoph Waltz and the French superstar Daniel Auteuil, both of whom are on the main-competition jury.
The shots were reportedly blanks fired into the air, and the grenade he allegedly brought with him was a prop. You can count on a bit of mild anarchy in France from time to time. You can also count on a pronounced police presence along the Croisette. But whether it's the fresh memory of the Boston Marathon bombing or the knowledge that the Troma Entertainment Company is in here with a ragtag crew staging Occupy Cannes events (more on that in the days to come), there's definitely an extra dose of precaution in the air.
It's easy to prepare for most of what goes on at this festival. You know that at some point you'll nearly be run over by any of the official black sedans that could be dropping off Emma Watson then heading off to Transporter 7. You know you'll wind up trapped watching a three-hour talkathon that's two hours too long. You know you'll want to marry a movie that all your friends think is totally wrong for you, which means it's really just wrong for them. These are things you can anticipate. But even though you manage to pack two-dozen Balance bars, six neckties you won't wear, and a lint brush, even though there's this service called the weather report, what you never quite see coming is rain. It's so sunny here so often that it just never occurs to you to pack protection. This is how you end up borrowing a plaid hotel umbrella that has nothing to do with the tuxedo you're wearing — not even your socks.
Scarlett Johansson Is Depressed: "She was totally out of control in Moscow recently" at a champagne brand's promo event. "She was drinking nonstop and barely slept. It was obvious that she was trying to numb her feelings." She's sad about her breakup with ad exec Nate Naylor. "She's not used to going home alone — it's a shock to her system. The fact that Ryan Reynolds is happily married while she's single again has done a number on her. And the drinking is taking its toll — she's been crying because she feels so fat." She got a lucky horseshoe tattooed on her ribcage "because she's feeling a bit unlucky." A rebound with ex-boyfriend Jared Leto quickly went south. "She thought a fling with Jared would make her feel better, but since it was only a hookup, it only made things worse." Time for Lost in Translation 2? I know I'd pay good money to watch Scarlett be sad in Russia.
Matthew McConaughey will star alongside Gerard Butler and Sam Worthington in Thunder Run, an adaptation of David Zucchino's book Thunder Run — The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad about the three-day assault at the beginning of the Iraq War. Here’s the thing, though: This will be a 3-D CG movie that will use facial-capture technology and green-screen technology to create a unique effect. “What we capture in our cameras will be them,” explains producer Brian Presley. “It’ll have a stylized effect to it but we are shooting them.” “That means when CG Matthew McConaughey takes his shirt off, the real Matthew McConaughey has also taken his shirt off,” Presley did not add. Grade: B+ [HR]
At first the trailer for Trespass, Nicolas Cage’s latest, seems like a step down on the insanity scale for the man who has somehow managed to churn out Drive Angry, Season of the Witch, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Kick-Ass, Knowing, and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in just the last two years. Directed by Joel Schumacher, it’s your standard home-invasion thriller: Cage, his wife (played, reasonably, by Nicole Kidman), and their daughter are taken hostage inside their own mansion, with ski-masked bandits threatening violence and demanding money in a quippy fashion. In the trailer, everything gets super hectic super-fast — office chair through a window for no discernible reason! — and deep dark secrets and possibly very-obvious-anyway twists are revealed. And, sure, it’s violent and sweaty and gross, but that extra bit of inspiration — that uniquely Cageian madness — seems to be missing. Until you read up on the back story and learns that Cage decided, just weeks before production, that he no longer wanted to play the husband — he wanted to play the head kidnapper. The producers scrambled, reaching out to Liev Schreiber to replace Cage in his original role, and then Cage suddenly quit the movie altogether. Then, days later, he changed his mind again, returning peacefully to both the movie and to the role of the husband. Of course he did. Now, does that make your Trespass trailer viewing experience any more enjoyable?
