Anticipating Cannes 08.

With Cannes opening on Wednesday (and running through May 25), with indieWIRE tuned into the buzz, and with Variety's special section up and running, it's time for an entry set to chronicle seven days of anticipation. Earlier: the lineup, with comments and such.

Updated through 5/11.

Meantime: "Cannes is a pleasant town - particularly, out of season. I think if old Lord Brougham were around today he would be rather happy - not terribly unhappy, anyway - at the evolution of the peaceful little fishing village he started along the primrose path." Apropos of not much, really, so begins a profile by Carlton Lake for the July 1957 issue of the Atlantic: "I arrived a little before two o'clock and I assumed that Picasso would either be eating or working, so I decided to hold off making contact until the next day."

Updates, 5/9: The Guardian opens its special section; Xan Brooks captions snapshots of the 22 directors with films in the running for the Palme d'Or.

In the Telegraph, Will Lawrence talks with Fernando Meirelles about the film that opens the festival, Blindness, based on José Saramago's 1995 novel. Meirelles: "We talk about the same things in the film, the same story, but to shoot it exactly as it was written would be too unbearable to watch. In literature it is easier to go really deep, but if you see it, in can be too much."

Cannes "is a festival that sometimes appears to be suffering severe personality disorder, uncertain whether it exists to celebrate art or commerce," writes Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent.

"When camera-shy screenwriter Charlie Kaufman unveils Synecdoche, New York, he'll be the only director making his debut in the Cannes competition," writes Anne Thompson in Variety. "Being in the French fest is 'good for the movie and gives us attention right away,' says Kaufman, 'and makes everyone feel like we accomplished something.'"

Updates, 5/10: "This week [Mike] Tyson and his new advisers will fly to the south of France for the Cannes Film Festival, where a new documentary about his life, Tyson, will make its premiere," reports Tim Arango in the New York Times. "Directed by James Toback, the film, which interposes interviews of Mr Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips, has forced Mr Tyson to relive and reconsider a life that shames him."

"If eyes are the window to the soul, then Cannes Film Festival organizers' choice of Blindness as the opening night film promises a 24-frames-per-second allegory about the fragile state of civil society and the human spirit." Sheigh Crabtree in the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 5/11: "Wearing one of the widest smiles on the Croisette this year will be Terence Davies," writes the Observer's Jason Solomons, introducing his interview. "The man behind some of the most distinctive British films of the past 25 years, including the masterly Distant Voices, Still Lives, is that rarest of cinematic beasts: the British auteur. This year, Davies is back at Cannes with his first film for eight years." Cannes describes Of Time and the City as "both a love song and eulogy to the director's birthplace - Liverpool."

Also: Cannes 08 highlights.

Geoffrey Macnab looks back at the notorious 1968 edition: "Fist-fights broke out, Jean-Luc Godard lost his spectacles, and the recriminations soon began. The Polish director Roman Polanski, who had resigned from the Cannes jury in sympathy with the protesters, suggested Truffaut, Claude Lelouch and Godard were 'like little kids playing at being revolutionaries... I lived in a country where these things happened seriously.'"

Also in the Independent, lots of little sidebars: a general preview, the blockbusters, the auteurs, the Brits, the comebacks and the oddballs.

"As US filmmakers, buyers and sellers head for Cannes, they are tamping down expectations," report Variety's Pamela McClintock and Winter Miller. "And it's not just because the economy is tilting steadily toward recession."

Updates, 5/13: "Everyone I've talked to says that this will not be a great Cannes," blogs Facets Multi-Media Executive Director Milos Stehlik. "Perhaps they are right, but how do they know? Something has changed at the Cannes Festival during 20 years: the gulf between the true lovers and connoisseurs (this is a positive term, not a derogatory one) is wider with each year." Further in: "For me, the possibility that art films can continue to exist largely depends on committed or knowledgeable people, the 'enablers' of art cinema."

"Rainy skies and industry-wide gloom-and-doom hover over this year's Cannes, but the nearly 11,000 registrants attending this year's festival and Market can't all be depressed." Anthony Kaufman files a first dispatch to indieWIRE, whose Cannes section is already chugging along nicely, featuring, too, the first "Biz Daily."

Cinematical presents a preview.

For the Los Angeles Times, Scheigh Crabtree reports that Michael Moore will be in town to arouse buzz for his sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11; production is set to begin "immediately."

In the Independent, Sophie Morris offers a quick pre-festival primer in Variety-speak.

Charles Ealy will be filing for the Austin Movie Blog.

Posted by dwhudson at May 8, 2008 7:51 AM