Cannes. Views and previews.

"A standing ovation greeted the arrival of Gena Rowlands, who was in Cannes to deliver the 'leçon d'actrice,' the festival's pompous appellation for an onstage interview." And Andrew Pulver was there to hear it. He got a sneak peak at Factory Girl, the Edie Sedgwick biopic starring Sienna Miller, too. Also in the Guardian, Natalie Press, in Cannes with Red Road, writes about all the goings on.

In the Los Angeles Times, Robert W Welkos reports that the 20 minutes of Oliver Stone's World Trade Center previewed at the fest was "received with thunderous applause by a packed audience."

Simon Crerar was there, too, for the Times of London: "Even with unfinished special effects, this is powerful stuff: the sheer panic and horrific destruction as the tower collapses is brilliantly captured." Woo-hoo?

The Boston Herald's Stephan Schaefer prefers to focus on the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Platoon.

A bit of Dreamgirls has been shown, Mary Corliss was there, and blogs for Time: "Twenty minutes, even the 20 shown at the Martinez, do not make a movie. There's no telling how the entire film will play. But the Friday-night tastes were savory.... As someone who saw the original show five times, I would not have thought that a movie could have equaled my Dreamgirls memory, but what I saw might just be its cinematic equal." Roger Ebert had a rough time getting in - Roger Ebert! - but once he did, he found, "Those were 20 terrific minutes."

Via Movie City News, Richard Brooks previews Marie-Antoinette in the London Times. Related: Laurent Rigoulet and Louis Guichard profile Sofia Coppola for Télérama (in French).

Todd at Twitch: "Apparently Choi Min-Sik and Bong Joon-Ho have been leading nightly vigils in from of the Palais Lumiere every night at eight, just on time for the big nightly galas. The duo are there protesting, once again, the reduction of the Korean screen quota system."

A "group of London campaigners have poured scorn on Provoked, an all-star film [Aishwarya Rai, Miranda Richardson and Robbie Coltrane] that premiered in Cannes last week, which they claim is riddled with 'factual and legal inaccuracies,'" reports Rob Sharp in the Observer.

"When you see Cannes on the news, it's all the red carpet stuff and the films in competition; the reality of Cannes is very different," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi. "Cannes is like a half-inch layer of wedding cake icing layered over a buzzing, humming beehive - class over commerce, couture garments over the bone-and-sinew reality of money, marketing, business."

David Gritten fills you in on a "dirty little secret." Most parties at Cannes "simply aren't very good."

Posted by dwhudson at May 22, 2006 9:23 AM