The moral undercurrent in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys -- a quietly devastating Turkish family drama about guilt, adultery and lots of Biblical thunderclaps -- is in every frame. It's about people doing wrong things, one leading to another in a terrible chain that won't stop making things worse, and trying to face or at least deal with the consequences but more often trying to lie and deny their way out of them. Good luck with that.

Hatice Aslan, Yavuz Bingol in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys.

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My suitcase is still in the hands of Air France baggage retrieval. A French-speaking gentleman -- probably, I'm guessing, the delivery guy hired by Air France to deliver retrieved luggage -- called this morning, but our attempts at communication were a complete failure. (His English was non-existent; my French is pathetic.) I've been wearing the same clothing since Monday morning. I have to figure this out, so I may be out of the loop until later today.

I'm nursing a vague interest in attending a 3 pm Kung Fu Panda press conference. I'm definitely seeing Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Three Monkeys...Read More

Variety's Justin Chang has joined the growing throng of Blindness panners. "The personal and mass chaos that would result if the human race lost its sense of vision is conveyed with diminished impact and an excess of stylish tics in Blindness, an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on Jose Saramago's shattering novel.

"Despite a characteristically strong performance by Julianne Moore as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her, Fernando Meirelles' slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance...Read More

The timing of John Edwards' endorsement of Barack Obama, which I heard about 90 minutes ago, is, I admit, a stroke of good timing. It blows Obama's West Virginia loss (downmarket racist rubes realizing it's now or never to try and stop the black fella) off the proverbial front page. Clinton will hang tough until early June, but never have her true colors flown more brightly.

"Somehow we are locked at the hip to Hillary Clinton, who won't stop her manic tarantella until her party whirls into ruins, like the run-amuck carousel in Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. [Her] campaigning has come to: a monotonous exercise in showboating solipsism, like Shirley MacLaine as the geriatric mother in Postcards from the Edge, hijacking her daughter's party and kicking up her heels to sing 'I'm Still Here!'

"Even with strong wins in Appalachia, Hillary has no true rationale...Read More

Myself and Cinematical's James Rocchi at last night's journalist dinner at La Pizza. Shot taken by Glenn Kenny and posted on his new blog, Some Came Running. Rocchi and I look glum and fatigued, I admit. Then again, we were that! Kenny wrote that the pic portrays "the pulse-pounding excitement that suffuses the evening before the first day."

An American Pavillion panel discussion about "Buzz Builders," sponsored by Skype, concluded about 90 minutes ago. Alex Ben Block moderated with Variety's Mike Jones, IFC.com's Alison Willmore and Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez participated along with MCN's David Poland on a live video hook-up. A few interesting subjects were tossed around, including a speculation by Poland that the Hollywood Reporter may be toast in three years' time.

(l. to r.) IFC.com's Alison Willmore, Variety's Mike Jones, Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez, moderator Alex Ben Block.

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A remake of Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant will begin shoting in the late summer with Nicolas Cage reinterpreting Harvey Keitel's coked-out, self-destructive Manhattan cop and -- talk about a curious but totally dynamite call -- the great Werner Herzog directing. Inspired! I love it sight unseen.

The only uh-oh is that it's being partly slapped together by the very "bad" (in a manner of speaking) Israeli producer Avi Lerner, who's long been regarded as more of a wheeler-dealer in the Dino de Laurentiis-Eli Samaha-Giancarlo Perretti...Read More

N.Y. Times critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis have written that "for many" -- code for themselves and other top-dog elites like Jim Hoberman, John Powers, Glenn Kenny, Scott Foundas, et. al. -- Cannes-spotlighted directors like Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Le Silence de Lorna), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Three Monkeys) and Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman) "are the real stars of Cannes...Read More

There's at least one solid defense of Recount screenwriter Danny Strong, who's been criticized in Edward Wyatt's 5.14 N.Y. Times story for having unfairly portrayed former Secretary of State Warren Christopher as "one of the great all-time wimps" (my quote) during the spin battle over the Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election, which Strong brings up.

He tells Wyatt that "one of his primary sources" on the Christopher-wimp angle was 'Too Close to Call,' a book by Jeffrey Toobin...Read More

The problem with Fernando Meirelles' Blindness, which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival, is that the milieu of the story, which is based on a novel by Jose Saramago, is bleak and confining. It's more than just the milieu, actually. The second and third act of this film delivers a kind of lockdown vibe.

A darkly emotional mood piece about of an outbreak of mass blindness, Blindness constitutes a blunt metaphor about how a pervasive lack of sight (i.e., perception, understanding) makes beasts or slaves of us all. Yes, agreed, of course...but this is basically an ...Read More

Yesterday Israeli blogger Yair Raveh put up an exclusive look at the trailer for Waltz With Bashir, Israel's Cannes entry that he calls a "unique animated war movie."

Yesterday was a great travel day -- everything happened on time, no delays, etc. -- until my Air France flight landed at Charles DeGaulle airport in northeast Paris at 6:15 am. Alas, my suitcase didn't make the overnight trip across the Atlantic with me, and I didn't find this out until it was too late to make my 8:20 am Easy Jet flight to Nice. I filled out the lost-luggage form and got on a bus for Orly Airport, where the next Easy Jet flight was leaving at 10 am.

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At the not-yet-begun Cannes Film Festival "there is lots of speculation about Oscar potential for new Cannes entries from past academy nominees and winners like Fernando Meirelles, Atom Egoyan, Charlie Kaufman, Walter Salles, Steven Soderbergh, Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and others, although the sad fact remains that since it won, no film other than Marty has gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar after also nabbing the Palme d'Or -- and that was in 1955!" -- from Pete Hammond's first Envelope column from Cannes.

While announcing that David O. Russell's Nailed is shooting again after last week's SAG-mandated shutdown due to actors not being paid, Variety's Dave McNary and Anne Thompson are reporting that the film's financier, Capitol Films, and its indie distributor subsidiary Thinkfilm appear to be on wobbly financial footing.

Thinkfilm "is known to owe substantial amounts to media outlets, among others," the story says. It adds that "problems emerged Thursday when ThinkFilm execs suddenly discovered there was no money for Friday newspaper ads for Then She Found Me."

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The concerns about wind and rain delaying the flight didn't pan out. Air France #39 is pulling away from Dulles gate #42 as we speak. We be cool. Two wailing babies in my section. Isn't it fair to put crying babies and their parents in the luggage area below the seats? I'm speaking as a father of two boys. I've been there. I used to be mortified when my kids disturbed others.

A much younger Bill O'Reilly (as he looked, I'm guessing, a good 12 or 15 years ago) showing a little temper on Inside Edition. Pretty funny, I feel. Video provided by the College Humor guys.

Sunday's post about Steven Soderbergh finishing Che at lower Manhattan's Post Works is "wrong," a trustworthy tech guy says. "Not sure who led you down that road. They should get their shorts yanked.

"Both films are being finished at Technicolor," he says. "Tim Stipan of Technicolor Creative Services New York did the DI, and the DCDM for Cannes is being done at Technicolor Creative Services in London. And Technicolor Madrid is doing the filmout and video mastering."

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Two of my all-time favorite movie titles are I Dismember Mama, which was used for a 1974 slasher film, and The Importance of Being Ernest, the title of a script for a Jim Varney "Ernest" film that was unfortunately not used. And I've always loved Out of the Past, the quietly haunting title of Jacques Tourneur's legendary 1947 noir with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.

I'm also partial to Se7en, Freddie Got Fingered, Platoon and Earth Girls Are Easy...Read More

Posts will be few and far between starting tomorrow morning due to last-minute running around before heading out to JFK for the flight to France. I may be able to tap some stuff out while waiting for this or that plane. The Big Black-Out period begins around 5 pm Eastern with the departure from Washington, D.C. (I went for a cheaper flight that entailed flying there first from JFK) to Charles DeGaulle. All in, it'll be catch-as-catch-can for 18 to 20 hours. The thing to do during long flight periods, I've found, is take a lot of photos.

Steven Spielberg's long-delayed Abraham Lincoln movie, which I've been writing about for nearly three years as an example of Spielberg's capacity for endless fence-sitting when so inspired, may finally roll sometime in early 2009. Variety's Michael Fleming, responding to a Spielberg comment made to the German weekly magazine Focus, reported today that the directing "will return his attention to an epic project about the 16th president" about shooting Tintin in the fall.

Great -- heavy rain and wind will begin in the NYC area starting tomorrow morning. Maybe my Paris flight will be delayed and I can miss the Easy Jet flight I'm supposed to take from Paris to Nice two hours after I land at 6:15 Tuesday morning. Yeah!

"I don't know who I am," former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson says to N.Y. Times contributor Tim Arango in a 5.11 piece about James Toback's Tyson, a pared-down but altogether touching doc that will show later this week in Cannes. "That might sound stupid," Tyson continues. "I really have no idea. All my life I've been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop."

The line this most recalls, of course, is the one from Wim Wenders' The American Friend, spoken to Dennis Hopper...Read More

"I remember seeing Greenwich Village from seven feet up in the air growing up as a kid, because he'd have me on his shoulders and we'd be tripping around. And at a time before underground and independent film became a hot idea, then a dirty word, then a hot idea again as it is nowadays, my dad was making films that influenced a generation of filmmakers.'" -- Robert Downey, Jr., speaking four days ago about his director dad, Robert Downey, Sr., at the "Time 100" celebration at Lincoln Center.

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"I'd almost forgotten I existed. Being selected by Cannes has done wonders for me. I thought working again might have a negative effect and I nearly turned it down, but it's been quite the opposite. My heart beats anew." -- British director Terrence Davies, director of Of Time and City, a low-budget, personal documentary about the changes in Liverpool since his childhood, speaking to the Guardian's Jason Solomon.

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Articles by Maureen Dowd, Robert Novak and Bob Ray Sanders are saying either Barack Obama won't ask Hillary Clinton to be his vice-presidential running mate, or would be wise not to.

Clinton's loathsomeness has become the stuff of legend, yes, and her campaign since the start of the New Hampshire inning has colored her reputation for good. But sometimes in politics you have to hold your nose and make an accomodation with people who may be repugnant in some respects if they can provide what you need. John F. Kennedy didn't pick Lyndon Johnson...Read More

Steven Soderbergh has been doing his frantic last-minute editing of Che at Post Works, a Soho facility on Varick. ("The best in the world for film and video post-production...no one compares. For real." -- Bob J.) A magazine editor told me over lunch a couple of days ago that he's spoken to a Che guy who wonders if they'll finish in time for the Cannes screening on Wednesday, 5.21.

It hit me yesterday afternoon that I had left my passport in my bureau drawer. My flight to Paris leaves Monday at 1:45 pm, so I called Fed Ex and was relieved to hear they could deliver it to my Brooklyn address no later than 8:30 am that morning. So I called the guy who's staying in my place and left a message to please put the passport in an envelope with the Brooklyn address on it, and give it to a Fed Ex pick-up person who would be there between noon and 2 pm yesterday.

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Yesterday my son Dylan and I visited my mom at an old folks' home where she lives in Southbury, Connecticut. I'd been told by a nice woman who works for the facility that my mom, who's been grieving since the recent death of her daughter Laura, was somewhat upset by the presence of her ashes, which she had been keeping in her bedroom closet. So Dylan and I resolved that we would take the remains down to the family plot in a cemetery in Wilton, Connecticut, where our family lived from '64 to '94, and surreptitiously bury them ourselves.

Amy Poehler's delivery of the "my supporters are racist" line got the biggest laugh and even a little applause on last night's SNL. The other two rationales: "I'm a sore loser" and "I have no ethical standards." Not genius-level or even that funny, really, but who would argue this isn't where Clinton is coming from? It's easy, of course, to go with a spot like this now.

The Troma guys are claiming that weekend ticket sales for Poultrygeist, Night of The Chicken Dead tallied $12,000 for a single-screen showing at Manhattan's Village East Theater. This is the highest per-screen haul of any film playing anywhere this weekend, they say. A press release says that Poultrygeist was called "a masterpiece!" by an Ain’t It Cool poster, and that CHUD's Jason Pollock has called it "the best film Troma's ever produced, without a doubt.”

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Lena Gieseke's 3-D recreation of Pablo Picasso's Guernica. I'm wondering if any American painters or sculptors have created anything within the last three or four years about the horrors of Iraq? If so, have they appeared at an any galleries?

HE reader Matthew Dessem has sent along a still taken from that first seven minutes of Speed Racer clip that went up last Thursday. He pointed out the numerous duplications that the Wachowski's CG guys copied and pasted to make up the crowd. The same five or six people are everywhere, and nobody is sitting in rows -- they're just thrown together in rough collage fashion. It's no big deal, but I can't recall seeing a frame capture of digital crowd with this many obvious repeats. (Click on the photo caption for a larger image.)

After reading Nikki Finke's well-reported story (last updated yesterday morning) about the temporary SAG shutdown of David O. Russell's Nailed, a Washington, D.C.-based comedy about relationships, politics and morality, I reviewed the Amazon.com information about "Sammy's Hill," the Kristin Gore novel that the script, co-written by she and Russell, is based upon, according to Finke.

There are differences between the book...Read More

In his usual perfunctory way, N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply has reported on the bad-internet-buzz-chasing-Indy 4 story ("Indiana Jones Is Battling the Long Knives of the Internet"). He's ignored, however, what may turn out to be the most interesting aspect of reactions to the film.

This, as I wrote two days ago, refers to a possible generation gap with older viewers liking it (or at least finding a place in their hearts for it) and younger viewers being less enthused, at least in part because the film has allegedly been infused with an older guy's (i.e., ...Read More

For years I've made do at the Cannes Film Festival with a regular pink pass, which at least is better than blue and way above yellow. A couple of days ago I found out that I've been slightly upgraded to a pink-with-a-yellow-pastille pass -- the first time this has ever happened despite years of persistent pleading. The highest-grade press pass is all white, but that's a privelege extended mostly (only?) to veteran dead-tree types. Has an online journo ever been granted one? I'm asking.

Am I understanding correctly that Saturday Night Live has just started its political blog? Now they do this? With Amy Poehler's HRC front and center just as the Real McCoy is entering her final cycle? Or is it that people are just starting to notice...?

Accurately or not, the general impression has been all along that Poehler and former SNL costar Tina Fey...Read More

One of HE's fundamental attitude foundations was, after all, laid out in an excerpt from The Film Snob's Dictionary back in the summer of '05 (even if the book itself wasn't in stores until February '06), to wit: "The Film Snob fairly revels, in fact, in the notion that The Public Is Stupid and Ineducable, which is what sets him apart from the more benevolent film buff, the effervescent, Scorsese-style enthusiast who delights in introducing novitiates to The Bicycle Thief and Powell-Pressburger movies."

The Film Department CEO Mark Gill has told Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Schuker that "the quality of independent films [this summer] is higher, less bleak and dark, and the studio films are more cartoon stuff and less for a college educated audience. Last summer, everybody in my snobby crowd saw the Bourne movie and loved it, [but] this summer there are fewer of those big blockbusters to go to." Is The Dark Knight not expected to appeal to film snobs? I know for sure that Tropic Thunder will. Iron Man...Read More

Remember the days when vampire movies didn't need super powers and the ability to fly in order to compete with other CG thrillers? I do. Their peculiarities aside, vampires used to be shlep around and suck blood somewhat normally. No longer. When did they become flying bullets? Was it with Len Wiseman's Underworld? Before? If vampires can stop cars from slamming into people, does this mean they can also stop falling jumbo jets from slamming into baseball stadiums? Can they now theoretically lift ocean liners out of the water and hurl them into space orbit?

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In its second weekend, Paramount and Marvel's Iron Man has again taken the #1 position. With my California number-guys currently experiencing REM sleep, Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is reporting earnings of $14.7 million yesterday with an expected $49 million by Sunday night and 10-day earnings total of roughly or close to $175 million.

Poor Speed Racer, forecast for weeks as a likely disappointment, apparently took in only $6.5 million yesterday and will hit about $23 million...Read More

...but this is a somewhat clever ad, pushing the idea that it's advisable to see an optometrist now and then. The actor playing the driver/would-be recipient does a very good job. The last shot would, of course, never be permitted on American television. So what else is new?

Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet has posted new stills from three major Cannes attractions -- Steven Soderbergh's Che, Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Fernando Meirelles' Blindness.

God forbid that the Democratic primary fight goes to the Denver convention (which of course it won't), but watch this climactic scene from Franklin Schaffner and Gore Vidal's The Best Man ('64) and ask yourself which of the two present candidates -- Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama -- is closer to the character of Cliff Robertson's Joe Cantwell and which somewhat resembles Henry Fonda's William Russell? (Thanks to HE reader John Muller for passing this along.)

Before zotzing Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management "did look at various permutations of keeping the companies in discussion," the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein and Borys Kit wrote last night, including having Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and WI honcho Polly Cohen co-manage a merged specialty division, "something the execs agreed to do shortly after the New Line absorption was announced, Cohen said."

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Did the cautious-to-a-fault John Edwards say "I just voted for him on Tuesday" or "I just voted for 'em on Tuesday"? The man is a hedger, a tap-dancer, a slick operator, an angler-dangler with no balls.

Here, sequentially, are some of the Cannes Film Festival day-by-day highlights:

Wednesday, 5.14: Fernando Meirelles' Blindness (comp.).

Thursday, 5.15: Pablo Trapero's Leonera and Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (comp.) along with Mark Osborne and John Stevenson's Kung Fu Panda (non-comp), Steve McQueen's Hunger and de Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry's Tokyo! (Un Certain Regard).

Friday, 5.16: Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uc Mayman (comp.) along with Allison Thompson's The Third Wave...Read More