Cannes and shorts, 5/23.

Scan the papers anywhere in the world today, and you'll naturally find that the top film-related story of the day is the Palme d'Or for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (here's a photo by Eugene Hernandez; more pix from the fest from Brian Brooks).

In the New York Times, AO Scott, both in print and in an accompanying audio slide show, registers both Moore's surprise and the audience's jubilation immediately following international jury president Quentin Tarantino's announcement. Scott also quotes Moore stressing, "If you add Tilda [Swinton], then you could say that more than half [of the jury] came from the coalition of the willing." Wrapping up his piece, Scott reminds us that other prizes were awarded as well, ranging "far and wide over the competitive slate, recognizing both audience-friendly commercial movies, and challenging art-house films, and acknowledging the strong Asian presence at the festival this year."

Once again, these winners are listed at Cannes's official site; and that list is also annotated by Filmmaker's Steve Gallagher and Filmbrain.

For all the afore-mentioned surprise and jubilation, it's easy to forget that films were still being screened this one more last day and that reviews are still trickling in. As of Friday, The Edukators was still at the top of George the cyclist's list. His friend respectfully disagrees; it's got to be Tropical Malady.

Maggie Cheung may have won the Best Actress Award for her performance in Oliver Assayas's Clean, but indieWIRE's Peter Brunette finds the film itself "even more disappointing [than demonlover because he has clearly tried to film a more mainstream, linear-plotted story but has failed miserably."

Back to the New York Times:

• Just a week ago, I wrote, "We don't yet have, say, a Susan Sontag of Abu Ghraib..." Now, we do. Susan Sontag herself.
• Lynn Hirschberg asks Hanif Kureishi about sex and movies.
• Felicia R Lee reports on Bill Cosby's efforts to explain his "inflammatory remarks on Monday about the behavior and values of some poor black people."
• As Andrew C Revkin reports, both sides have dug in as The Day After Tomorrow edges towards its premiere. More from Johnny Sharp and John Vidal in the Guardian.
• Another piece on the hard-to-classify Saved!, this time from Mim Udovitch.
• Bruce Weber has some fun imagining classicists fully employed in Hollywood.

• Dave Kehr gets Jorgen Leth to, once again, tell the story behind The Five Obstructions.

Andrew Anthony celebrates Moore's win with one of the harshest reviews of the man himself you're likely to find in a paper you might assume would be sympathetic to Moore's politics. After lobbing a series of decidedly unfriendly questions (which is, after all, what a journalist should do), Anthony concludes, "Though a talented film-maker and a clever showman, a populist who knows how to play the maverick, he is too often both big-headed and small-minded.... At Cannes, Moore may have been the star but he was not, it seems, the man of the people."

Also in the Guardian and Observer:

• F-9/11 was not Jason Solomons's favorite film at Cannes - that position is reserved for Nobody Knows, "closely followed by two splendid biopics, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers and The Motorcycle Diaries." He then plays a Cannes round of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
• Giles Foden introduces two memos from Evelyn Waugh that display the novelist's disgust with "the California savages" of Hollywood as well as his "visceral racism."
• Alan Wall reviews Neil Jordan's novel, Shade.
• Andrew Pulver's "Adaptation of the week": Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman.
• Robin McKee reports that Brad Pitt and Jake Gyllenhaal are among Hollywood's new "carbon-neutral" movie stars, that is, they've contributed to Future Forests to offset the slight percentage of the globe's CO2 imbalance they feel individually responsible for.
• "If you had seen one day of war, you would pray to God that you would never see another." Oddly enough, Napoleon said that; not so oddly, Richard Sambrook makes use of the quote to introduce the BBC doc, One Day of War.
• Gaby Wood on Sarah Morris, whose short, "Los Angeles," can be caught at the White Cube Gallery in London; and then? "[A]lthough she is quick to add that the Oscar idea is 'sort of a joke', it does present an interesting problem. Is this art film, made for an exhibition in a gallery, a documentary or fiction?"
• Liz Hoggard: "From Heathers to Election and Welcome to the Dollhouse, the best examples break taboos or act as dark social satire. They win critical applause but rarely make much money. But now with the US blockbuster Mean Girls, bullying has gone mainstream."
• Miranda Sawyer on Bollywood Star, Channel 4's reality show premiering in June: Over 1000 UK residents have applied; six will be chosen and sent "to India for training by industry experts in choreography, acting and stunt work. The overall winner is to be picked by director Mahesh Bhatt, who will put this first ever British Bollywood star in one of his films."

Time's Richard Corliss: "Left-wing documentaries are nothing new. In fact, with the exception of Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi-rally film Triumph of the Will, it's hard to think of a right-wing documentary." Oh, but there were hundreds of them a few decades ago. They were called educational films, bore titles like Our Friend the Atom and unreeled in classrooms from coast to coast and were fortunately so bad the 60s might never have happened without them.

Also in Time: Jack Klugman remembers Tony Randall.

Several dozen University of Nevada students convince Gary Dretzka that Vegas Vacation may well be the quintessential Las Vegas movie. Also at Movie City News: Andrea Gronvall asks Yann Samuell about his first feature, Love Me If You Dare.

What, according to Matthew Sweet, do the "three greatest drop-your-popcorn scenes in the past year" have in common? "[N]obody pitched them at a meeting; nobody loved the script; nobody's people called anybody else's people; nobody took it again, from the top." In other words, the best movies going on at the moment are docs. Sweet profiles a handful of their makers. Also in the Independent: David Thomson ponders the absent gods of Troy.

Roger Avary raves: Shaun of the Dead is "the best zombie film in close to 20 years."

Matt Dentler catches John Waters's appearance in Austin.

Super Size Me? Third highest per screen average in the country.

Newsweek's Sean Smith on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: "[T]he real reason this third film in the series outshines the others is that it's about something far more frightening than failing your Potions final or facing Lord Voldemort. It's about being 13."

Erik Davis, via Boing Boing, via Wiley Wiggins:

This spring, I had the opportunity to read and consult on Richard Linklater's screenplay for Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly, which is set to start filming this July. As I love many of Linklater's films, this was a great honor, although much less funny than the New Yorker's description of me as a "Dick expert." Expert or no, I can tell you that I have every reason to believe that Linklater's film will be what Dickheads everywhere have been waiting for: the first "real" "authentic" PKD movie.

Posted by dwhudson at May 23, 2004 2:41 PM