With Cannes starting to wind down — or with people probably starting to leave in the manner of Hollywood folk at lengthy fests much in the way Los Angelenos leave sporting events early — maybe the news will start to slow down a bit as well. In any case, it’s looking like I won’t be around to cover it tomorrow, and then comes the weekend movie preview, so this will have to tide you over for a bit.
* Our top story tonight, however, is far away from anything likely to screen in, or even out of, competition at the world’s most famous film festival. Seems that Megan Fox, who you might remember compared director Michael Bay to Hitler some time ago, will not be returning in “Transformers 3.” Apparently Bay has finally realized there are lots and lots of unnaturally attractive young women in Hollywood and some of them can act a little.
In any case, Nikki Finke brings you a crash course on the apparent Fox/Bay hate affair, while AICN’s Merrick reminds you of some of those other unnaturally attractive women.
The Weathermen and the Black Panthers terrified many in America’s “silent majority” of the 60s and 70s and, of course, resurfaced as right-wing bogeymen during the 2008 election. Still, our relatively timid terrorists were complete pantywaists compared to the vastly more deadly, focused, and entirely co-ed German Baader Meinhof gang. This grimly disciplined, ideologically inflexible group of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist “New Left” ideologues was not about “palling around” with anyone.
Directed by Uli Edel and with a sharp screenplay co-written by producer Bernd Eichinger, “The Baader Meinhof Complex” takes a similar approach as Eichinger’s previous historical work as a writer-producer, “Downfall” — now famed as the source of all those Internet videos featuring Hitler (Bruno Ganz) ranting in his bunker about video games, ‘net problems, and the like. Ganz is back in a far kinder and gentler role as the keenly intelligent head of the German police tasked with capturing the gang. Still, this is a true ensemble piece as Martina Gedick, Moritz Bleibtrau, Johana Wokalek and others portray the nucleus of the so-called “Red Army Faction,” whose attempt to spark a revolution while protesting the Vietnam War and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians starts at bank robbing and takes increasingly murderous turns from there. Eichinger and Edel’s historical epic starts somewhat slowly, but at more than 2 1/2 hours, this Oscar-nominated combination of documentary ultra-realism a la “The Battle of Algiers” with Paul Greengrass-style slam-bam action film makes for a bracing work.
Cannes is in full swing and there’s plenty other stuff going on besides — way too much to cover completely. So, consider this just me hitting a very few of the highlights of the film world right this moment.
* The critical wars are going full strength at Cannes with the biggest love-it/hate-it proposition appearing to be Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful.” I haven’t seen the film, of course, but Iñárritu is most definitely my least favorite of “the three amigos” of Mexican/Spanish/U.S. cinema. (The other two being Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro) and not only because his name is the most impossible to type. I mostly liked “Amores Perros” but his “21 Grams” and “Babel” struck me as exercises in touchy-feely realism that was a lot less real than it seemed to fancy itself.
Still, he’s working with different writers now and everyone seems to agree that the always great Javier Bardem is especially fine in it, so I suppose I should keep an open mind. Still, reading about the film, it’s hard not to side with the anti-faction when much of the commentary echoes my feelings about past films and when the pro-side is being taken by Jeffrey Welles, who really doesn’t seem to respond well when other people don’t love his favorite films. It’s a conspiracy, I tells ya!
In any case, David Hudson does his usual amazing job summarizing the critical reaction from a wide swath of the press; John Horn at the L.A. Times focuses on the reactions of big name critics.
* Could the ultimate case of movie development hell finally be unraveling? We’re told that Ewan McGregor will star in Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.”
* Lionsgate may be on the block with all kinds of possible ramifications for hardworking and often underpaid workers there. However, just in case you were worried, they’ve got $16 million set aside for five executive golden parachutes if Carl Icahn’s attempt is successful. Whew!
* Anne Thompson discusses the people who didn’t show up at Cannes. Somehow, she overlooked my absence.
* One of the people who isn’t showing up is living cinema legend/bad boy Jean-Luc Godard, who is citing the chaos in Greece as his reason. Yeah, I have only the vaguest possible idea what he means by that myself. Meanwhile, the Playlist’s Christopher Bell reviews a new documentary about the severed friendship between Godard and Francois Truffuat, who were respectively the Rolling Stones and the Beatles of midcentury French New Wave cinema and, alas, finds it lacking.
* Marina Zenovich, the woman whose documentary many credit/blame with restarting the Roman Polanski mess — and, yes, that’s the “evil profligate dwarf” himself next to Godard, Truffaut as well as Claude Lelouche and Louis Malle in the picture above — will next be doing the film version of Mark Harris’s widely acclaimed book, Pictures at a Revolution, which looks at the remarkable five best picture nominees from 1968.
* Speaking of Polanski, Oy vey, Woody. (Via FilmDrunk whose headline repeats the obvious, but still hilarious, joke here.)
* Cameron Crowe, who was on an amazing run of movies like “Say Anything” and “Almost Famous” until suddenly, he wasn’t, is getting back on the horse with a fact-based tale that involves all kinds of animals, possibly including horses. It does sound like a heck of a story.
* Nikki Finke thinks James Robinson should pay up before showing his face at Cannes.
It’s late. I’m tired and I want my turkey burger and an Old Fashioned. More to come later.
There’s no other way to say it: the carnage from tonight’s episode of “24” made me positively giddy. Jack Bauer may have dispensed some Dirty Harry-style justice in the past, but this time around, he’s a Terminator. He doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, and he absolutely will not stop until you are dead. Jesus, I can still feel the small jabs that he hit that hit man with last week, but that shot of Novakovich’s suite littered with dead guys, with Novakovich himself taking a poker to the stomach…that was a thing of beauty. I have been waiting for years to see Jack do something like that. Way to give the people what they want, Fox. I love it when shows finally start acting like they have nothing to lose. Unfortunately, they usually only do so after they’ve lost everything.
Having said that, I’m still unhappy that Jack hasn’t thought to upload the incriminating video to the interwebs. On the plus side, Mr. Blonde still has a copy of it on his hard drive, and since the video is of Starbuck, and Buffy is the one that’s about to pay him a visit, it’s possible that Buffy will get one look at this video and want to blow the whistle whether Jack wishes it or not. Either way, it will be a huge missed opportunity if the world doesn’t see that clip.
I thought for sure that Timmy was going to quit on the spot when Allison asked him to organize the raid of a newspaper. He’s always had a strong moral compass. He has to know that this is bad juju. But never mind that: Jack had to know that White She Devil was not smart enough to evade the authorities long enough to get her piece written. Heck, how many of us are smart enough to fall off the grid? The second you use a credit card, boom, you’re done. Need cash? Can’t get any out of an ATM. She was a sitting duck, and Jack should have known that.
“Hello? Hey, Mr. Rafferty, how are you? Are the royalty checks still coming in?”
Then again, I’ll forgive him for having other things on his mind, namely how he was going to make I.M. Weasel sing like a canary about his involvement in the day’s events. I’m actually tempted to reinstate Logan’s other nickname of Buck Buck Brawwwwwwk, because the sounds he was making as he was grilled by Jack sounded just like a chicken. And, to bring the Terminator analogy back, I loved how Jack only wounded the American agents while mercilessly killing any and all Russians. I half expected him to say to Logan, after knocking one of his Secret Service agents unconscious, “He’ll live.”
So I.M. Weasel finally reveals his source within the Russian government, and it is none other than President Suvarov himself. Now forgive me, because I can be a little dense – I’ll pause while you get all jokes out of your system – but this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why on earth would Suvarov tell Logan anything? There is no good that can come from this, especially if he’s trying to torpedo a peace treaty that the President of the United States is pushing. If I’m Suvarov, I am meeting Logan’s call with a long string of phrases that vary on the theme “You dumb motherfucker!” Gee, thanks for not ratting me out, but you may as well have, dingus. Please tell me I’m missing something here.
That was a nice touch, though, to see that Jack planted a bug on Logan and overheard everything he said to Suvarov. Here’s the question, though: was he able to capture that recording? Overhearing isn’t exactly admissible in a court of law. Not that Jack is thinking about the letter of the law at the moment, but you get the idea. In case the video’s destroyed, he’s going to need a backup plan. Assuming he even has a plan at this point. Seriously, he’s killed every single Russian connected to Renee’s death. What else is left? Killing Suvarov? He should make a video of himself, in the event of his untimely death, where he explains everything that has happened up to now, and finish it by playing the recording of the conversation he just overheard, if he’s capable. Then, upload it to the Web. Have I mentioned that he should be uploading stuff to the Web, multiple times, and sending copies directly to TV stations as well?
Two hours left. It’s the end of an era, if you will. We’ve given nine years of our lives to this show, and in a week, it’ll all be over. They say that they want to turn it into a movie franchise, but as Mr. Paulsen points out, if people aren’t willing to watch it for free, who’s going to pay to see it? Surely the people at Fox know this, which gives me hope that they will actually have the balls to kill Jack in the final seconds of next week’s series finale, giving him a ten-second silent clock tick. Ah, but who are we kidding, that will never happen. The thing is, it should. For what he’s done in the last few hours, Jack’s either looking at death or life in prison, even if he succeeds in exposing two corrupt administrations. And I for one do not want to see Jack end the show behind bars.
I originally planned on titling this blog “…And you will know us by the trail of dead” after seeing that slow pan of Novakovich’s suite. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t pimp Ice-T’s hardcore side project from the early ’90s, which seems positively quaint now but was a big deal at the time, to the point where his song “Cop Killer” got him in so much trouble that Time Warner voided his contract. These days, of course, he’s a “Law & Order” guy. You know what would be really awesome? When the time comes to kill off his character, it’s at the hands of a guy who was amped up after listening to some rapper talk about killing pigs. I have to think even Ice-T would appreciate the irony of that.
* Our top story tonight, however, is far away from anything likely to screen in, or even out of, competition at the world’s most famous film festival. Seems that Megan Fox, who you might remember compared director Michael Bay to Hitler some time ago, will not be returning in “Transformers 3.” Apparently Bay has finally realized there are lots and lots of unnaturally attractive young women in Hollywood and some of them can act a little.
