Given the relentless rain pounding the Croisette, it's small wonder Nastassja Kinski would rather stay in bed than keep our interview date
Ahead of my scheduled interview with the actor Nastassja Kinski, I sit down to watch the restored version of Tess, the film she is in Cannes to discuss. Roman Polanski's 1979 epic drifts on a summer breeze of hay wains and dairy farms, bumps for a spell in the frozen mud of the potato field and then fetches up at Stonehenge, where our fugitive heroine has fled with her milksop husband, Angel Clare (Peter Firth). The bobbies come to arrest Tess but it turns out that they must wait their turn. "She's still sleeping," Angel whispers. "Just a little longer." Somewhere, very distantly, alarm bells start ringing.
Screenings in Cannes run to an immaculate clockwork precision. Interviews, however, are something else entirely; like confetti tossed to the wind, blown this way and that by changing schedules, shifting schedules and the whims of the talent. Sometimes you find yourself sat down with a subject and simply left there for hours on end (thanks for your patience, William Hurt). Sometimes (only sometimes) you don't get sat down at all.
The Kinski meeting is set for noon, in a beach-front pavilion further up the Croisette. At 11.30 the publicist calls to say it's running late, "she's still asleep". At 2pm I'm chewing my knuckles, cooling my heels, ready to go at a moment's notice. Half an hour later, the meeting is cancelled.
It rains and rains and rains some more. Small wonder that Kinski would prefer to stay indoors with the duvet pulled up. Outside, everyone is sopping, squelching, poised to erupt. They turn mutinous in the lines outside the Kiarostami screening where the umbrellas clash and scratch like some garish armada. Inside it's dry and the screenings keep coming. Killing Them Softly is a lean, supple and sure-footed American noir. Brad Pitt headlines as a discreet, leather-coated assassin called in to clean up a mess in a recession-hot America, while Andrew Dominik makes great play (perhaps too much play) of the weedy vacant lots, overlooked by brightly hopeful campaign posters from the 2008 presidential election. James Gandolfini co-stars as a fellow hit-man at the end of his tether, while Ray Liotta's fall-guy is first beaten to a pulp and then shot in slow-motion, the bullets razing him through the car window as he waits at the lights. "This country is fucked," Pitt says at one stage. "There's a plague coming."
Elsewhere, the delegates indulge You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, a play-within-a-play-within-a-film from 88-year-old Alain Resnais, though his celebration of the wonderful business of acting turns a shade irksome after a while; a heaped plate of meta-cheese. Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone In Love comes in for a rougher ride. The viewers find it baffling and obtuse and they boo at the end. And yet Kiarostami's tale of play-actors and contrived-intimacies in Tokyo casts a definite spell. One danger of Cannes (aided and abetted by Twitter) is that it forces the critics to make snap judgments. But some films take longer to settle and confound the knee-jerk response. Already, 36-hours after it played, I have a sense that people are slowly coming round to the Kiarostami.
Back in the flat, I find the Tess DVD is still stuck in my laptop. I pour some wine and idly flick the time-bar through to that final scene on Salisbury plain. Kinski is sleeping amid the stones but she has to wake sometime and, when she does, the cops are waiting. Her dress is muddy, her eyes are fearful. The policemen haul her up and march her brusquely away down the rutted path, while the closing caption explains that Tess was later "hanged in the city of Wintoncester". And, shaming though it is to admit it, this does cheer me up.
Andrew Dominik's immensely gripping and brutal world of recession-hit criminals, starring Brad Pitt, is smart and nasty, with a political dimension, too
The adverb is horribly inappropriate. Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly is a slick ensemble-nightmare of middle-management mobster brutality and incompetence in the tradition of Goodfellas and Casino, Pulp Fiction and TV's The Sopranos, with something of the opening voiceover monologue from the Coens' Blood Simple: the one about being on your own.
It is outstandingly watchable, superbly and casually pessimistic, a world of slot-mouthed professional and semi-professional criminals always complaining about cleaning up the mess made by other screwups. The movie delivers the classic mob "betrayal" trope: someone shoots someone else, at close range, suddenly and terrifyingly, having lulled his victim – and us – into a false sense of security with a long pointless conversation about what they were going to do later.
The movie is adapted by Dominik from novelist George V Higgins's 1974 thriller Cogan's Trade, updated to the Bush/Obama handover era of 2008, albeit with some automobiles that seem to belong to that earlier era. It is a time of financial anxiety, which Dominik applies cleverly, if not entirely subtly, to the world of crime. American taxpayers were being asked to bail out banks for the sake of confidence and prestige – and these taxpayers also had to tighten their belts. Here, local wiseguy Markie (Ray Liotta) has to be whacked for robbing some other wiseguys' poker game: he didn't do it, but someone has to be seen to get killed for the sake of confidence and prestige. And the hit-men will have to accept a reduced fee in the current economic climate.
The assassin in question is Cogan, played with suavity and shrewd style by Brad Pitt, a killer who prefers to shoot people at long range, because he detests the screaming and pleading of victims who realise they are going to die – what he calls "killing them softly". He is called in to help out with a mixed-up situation. As well as Markie, others have to be addressed. The poker hit was actually carried out by two ridiculous young jerks, Frankie and Russell, brilliantly played by Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn, hired by another mobster whom Cogan feels delicately unable to rub out because he is personally acquainted with the man, so he subcontracts this wet job to a second assassin.
And here is where Cogan himself is guilty of incompetence; he calls an old friend Mickey, hilariously played by James Gandolfini, who's in need of the cash but instantly reveals himself to be nowadays quite unequal to the demanding task of contract killing: a heavy drinker and prostitute addict (he calls it his "hobby") who is, moreover, morosely in unrequited love with one of the girls he despises, and on the verge of a breakdown. To Cogan's dismay, Mickey is exhibiting precisely those messy and undignified emotions he hates in his own murder victims.
Killing Them Softly is a reminder of what Tom Wolfe wrote about crime in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: it is not the dramatic or romantic notion of some brilliant desperado who knows what he wants and is prepared to go outside the law to get it. It is more a question of ruthless, greedy, stupid people who get themselves into a progressively worsening, violent mess.
Dominik controls the scenario and the cast tremendously well. Admittedly, slo-mo hit scenes to the accompaniment of ironically romantic music, and pre-crime banter and squabbling between robbers, are not entirely original, but these scenes are executed with flair, with a regular supply of dialogue zingers. There are some outstanding set pieces – the moment when Russell and a fellow criminal try to destroy a car by setting it on fire is a surreal moment of dismay.
The political dimension to the movie, emphasised with continually recurring glimpses of the outgoing and incoming presidents on the TV news, is restated with a grandstanding monologue from Cogan. Perhaps it's too emphatic to count as satire, but it gives an extra edge to a smart, nasty, gripping movie.
MGM studio takes advantage of its extensive back catalogue to resurrect classic 1960 western, with updates of Robocop and Carrie also on the cards
Tom Cruise is in line to star in a remake of the classic 1960 western The Magnificent Seven, according to a Variety report.
The new version is in the early stages of development at studio MGM, which is taking advantage of its extensive back catalogue to reassert itself following several years of financial travails. The studio will also deliver new versions of the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi romp Robocop and the classic Stephen King horror Carrie, both of which go into production later this year.
The Magnificent Seven was itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Japanese tale Seven Samurai. John Sturges's film featured an impressive ensemble cast of Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and Horst Buchholz. It centred on a ragtag group of Americans recruited to help defend a Mexican village against raiding bandits. It is not known which role Cruise is considering or who might star alongside him. Variety says MGM does not yet have a writer, either.
Such projects are prone to falling by the wayside – a remake of Seven Samurai, touted last year, was to be set in Thailand and directed by British film-maker Scott Mann, but has not yet made it to the big screen – though MGM seems pretty serious about revisiting its back catalogue. As well as the above-mentioned films the studio wants to remake 80s horror Poltergeist, geeky teen tale War Games, vigilante revenge thriller Death Wish and Nicolas Cage romcom Valley Girl.
Cruise has plenty of projects to keep him busy after seeing the latest Mission: Impossible film, Ghost Protocol, deliver the series' highest box-office yield and strong reviews earlier this year. He will play an ageing sex god rocker in the upcoming musical Rock of Ages, and is set to portray the retired military policeman Jack Reacher in an adaptation of Lee Child's thriller novel One Shot, which is due in cinemas this December.
3.00pm: Sorry for the intermittent nature of this - we're all hammering away back in the flat working on copy I'm afraid.
Here's another picture of Brad Pitt to keep you going.
2.11pm: Sometimes, in Cannes, it can feel like the sky is falling in. Sometimes, that's actually true: the roof of the Soixieme Theatre (which does catch up screenings and has no loos) collapsed on Sunday night due to weight of rainwater.
1.49pm: Good to see photos of the Ken Loach cast. I visited their villa yesterday afternoon. Smelled of fish soup, in a great way.
1.39pm: Still to come today we've Xan Brooks's diary, video of his annual turn around the Marche, plus reviews of Le Grand Soir, the new film by Bertolucci, a gallery of the day's events, news on the Brad Pitt and Ken Loach press conferences, plus an encounter with some Fast Girls.
1.34pm: Hello again - thanks ever so to Theresa Malone for taking over while I nipped out. I'm back in the Cannes flat now, have fuelled up on eclairs and am tapping away stickily.
... outstandingly watchable, superbly and casually pessimistic, a world of slot-mouthed professional and semi-professional criminals always complaining about cleaning up the mess made by other screwups. The movie delivers the classic mob "betrayal" trope: someone shoots someone else, at close range, suddenly and terrifyingly, having lulled his victim – and us – into a false sense of security with a long pointless conversation about what they were going to do later.
12.22pm: And here's actor Benoit Poelvoorde and director Albert Dupontel at the photocall of Le Grand Soir:
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12.17pm: Here's Ken Loach at the Angels' Share photocall.
12.57am: It's still raining in Cannes, by the way (so those of us enjoying the soaring temperatures in London do at least have something to feel smug about).
Day 7 of #Cannes2012. Day 4 of Rain. Day 8,513 of Resigned Dread.
12.40am: Catherine has just nipped out down the Croisette for a pint of milk, so we're taking over the live blog temporarily at Guardian HQ. We've just published a video of Michael Haneke talking to Xan Brooks about his new film, Amour.
Mortality is a theme directors seem to steer clear of, he says – probably because they're afraid of it. And while we're on the theme of life being too short Mr Haneke doesn't seem too pleased that he spends most of his time at Cannes conducting interviews rather than watching films (ahem). Also: never work with pigeons.
11.33am: So the Aussies are doing well in this press conf - Dominik and Mendelsohn both very funny and self-deprecating. Pitt's suggestion that we don't have press conferences before 1pm doesn't seem to have garnered the groundswell of popular support he perhaps would have expected.
They're now saying it's not totally a coincidence it's coming out in an election year.
11.20am: Dominik explains how the id, the ego and the superego relates to his film. He also says he hopes that it tells you to have good mental health.
11.17am: Update on the press conference: the director has said he likes violence in films (hold the front page); Brad Pitt has said - in response to a question about how he can square being a father and playing such a violent man - that he'd rather play someone who shoots people in the face than, say, a racist. He's also said that he doesn't feel troubled by the symbiotic relationship between art and commerce in Hollywood. So now you know.
11.09am: Here's some Twitter snippets on the film:
@zlobuster Killing Them Softly = boring them deadly.
‏@daveyjenkins A kind of nasty pulp/noir NASHVILLE. Fun, though politically like being preached at through a bullhorn.
@robbiereviews KILLING THEM SOFTLY is a scorcher: real American crime cinema. Tough, violent and nihilistically funny. Loved it. #cannes
@firstshowing Dominik's Killing Them Softly - Brutal as f-k! But also lacking a bit. Felt way too short, oddly. Typical hit-and-kill kind of crime flick.
‏@erickohn KILLING THEM SOFTLY would make a great double bill with THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE, both period pieces about recession-era 2008. #cannes
@charlesgant Killing Them Softly's "crisis in the economy" not-so-sub text: messaging you can enjoy and then feel smart for finding it too crude. Clever!
‏@yo_damo Liked but didn't quite love Killing Them Softly; some very good hardboiled set-pieces and Brad Pitt is excellent
@GuyLodge KILLING THEM SOFTLY (B-) Blinding dirty-70s homage taken to stylistically suspended present, all to add stunningly banal Obama surtext? Why?
@XanBrooks Cannes screening: Killing Them Softly. supple, punchy hit-man noir from the front-line of recession America. Ray Liotta goes through hell
11.07am: The press conference has kicked off. Our own Charlotte Higgins is inside and will file the full story later. If there's any breaking hot potato quotes, I'll try and serve them up.
11.05am: Anyway, while I've been wittering on, Pitt and co walked past. He hammered on the window trying to get my attention, but I was busy, so I just kept on typing. Later, Brad, later.
10.52am: The film itself is a blood-lust-tastic crime thriller set in 2008 round New Orleans. Directed by Andrew Dominik, with whom Pitt teamed up for The Assassination of Jesse James by Robert Ford the Coward, it's a tale of sweaty crooks and desperate junkies, cracked codes of honour and the primacy of cash.
I spoke to Peter Bradshaw and Jonathan Romney as they came out of the screening: both were pretty enthusiastic. Me, I'm not so sure, less because of the undeniable glamourisation afforded to repeatedly shooting someone through the head, or the fact the only woman in it (for half a scene) is a hooker, but because the endless spliced political campaign footage (primarily Obama) feels too on the nail for me. This is allegory for dummies, which shoves the irony about the recession hitting hitmen just as bad as the rest of us down your throat a little over-insistently. The music cues, too, are aren't just on the nose, they slap you around the face. Still, great gamey performances, especially from Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn as the scummier crims in an ensemble that also includes Ray Liotta, James Gandolfini and Richard Jenkins. It's a good film; I'm not convinced it's the masterpiece of crime cinema it's probably about to be hailed as.
10.47am: Good morning and welcome to the latest Cannes liveblog. I'm ripping back the reigns from Andrew Pulver as he gets the train down to the south of France, where he'll grab the baton (or, perhaps, just a baguette) from me and I'll fly home.
I'm back in the press room, which is currently humming with slightly inelegant excitement as Brad Pitt is about to walk past, on his journey from the Killing them Softly photocall to the press conference.
10.47am: Good morning and welcome to the latest Cannes liveblog. I'm ripping back the reins from Andrew Pulver as he gets the train down to the south of France, where he'll grab the baton (or, perhaps, just a baguette) from me and I'll fly home.
I'm back in the press room, which is currently humming with slightly inelegant excitement as Brad Pitt is about to walk past, on his journey from the Killing them Softly photocall to the press conference.
Timo Vuorensola's Nazi space romp is the most high-profile film to use crowdsourcing for both development and finances. Is this to blame for those lukewarm reviews?
If you've ever fancied yourself as a Hollywood screenwriter, producer or even star, the film section of crowdfunding site IndieGoGo might just be the place for you. Browse through the fledgling movie projects touting for cash in the past few months, and you might have come upon opportunities to pick up a writer's credit for $50 on the British post-apocalyptic drama Remnants of a Disaster, or an executive producer's credit on the Kiwi documentary God Is Incredible for $500. The director of comic book tale Super Day recently promised to shave his head if the film's campaign reached its $3,500 target, with donors permitted to scribble their names on his newly bald pate.
Amid the silliness, the site addresses a very real need. Movies cost an awful lot of money to make, and not everybody who wants to make movies has an awful lot of money. Some of these features may provide the opportunity for the next Kevin Smith or David Lynch to take their first step on the film-making ladder. And yet one cannot quite imagine either of the above offering to pass over creative duties on Clerks or Eraserhead for less than the cost of dinner for two at a half decent curry house, as at least one IndieGoGo project has promised recently.
A shift in terminology may even be in order: crowdfunding, via which film-makers reach out for help with the financial costs of a particular project, is becoming increasingly blurred with crowdsourcing, via which wannabe producers engage fans via the internet to become part of the creative process of putting together a new movie. Kept separate, each has its place. When one becomes contingent upon the other, creating a sort of "crowdeverything" hybrid, it gives the film projects in question an unsavoury air of mercantile desperation.
"There is a real dark side emerging," says British independent film producer and screenwriter Ant Neely. "I am seeing crowdfunding campaigns that offer 'a line in the film and an IMDb credit' for a big enough donation. The thought of casting someone because they can pay, as opposed to their abilities, is really very sad."
Neely and his wife Sloane U'Ren (a director) took a different approach to getting their science fiction-cum-period drama flick Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads, on to the big screen – they simply sold their house. While he accepts that getting a movie financed is an incredibly difficult process, Neely doesn't believe the crowdeverything approach is the way forward.
"It's an interesting concept and arguably connects a film-maker directly with the audience," he says. "However, we're not comfortable with having movies made by committee. I'm not saying selling your home is any more of a sensible strategy though!"
If one film has a chance of escaping the crowdsourcing/funding ghetto, it's Iron Sky, a comedy romp about space Nazis from Finnish director Timo Vuorensola and a supporting online crew of thousands which is released on Wednesday in UK cinemas (more of which later). The €7.5m film will be shown in more than 70 countries this year and stands a good chance of making a profit for its legions of financial backers. Despite its origins, Vuorensola says his film eschewed the cash-for-credits approach.
"I have to say that I've been seeing this kind of thing a lot," he says. "They always start out cool and everybody is really excited for two weeks but then there's a mess of everybody doing something. If you want to crowdsource you have to be very dominant – I've always made it clear with Iron Sky that this is not a democracy, this is a dictatorship.
"With our film the idea was to use the community to develop ideas and issues that are problematic rather than get them working on the script. We needed lyrics for the national anthem of the moon Nazis, and I don't speak German, so it was something we put to the community. They knew what I was looking for, and they were able to let me know if something that someone had written was getting close."
Since this interview was conducted, it has emerged that the Iron Sky is to be released for just one day in the UK, a decision which producers have blamed on the distributor, Revolver. "The fact that they are releasing Iron Sky for just one day (in the middle of the week) shows a great disrespect for us, the film-makers, who have been slaving to make this film as cinematic – with big special effects, sounds and great action – as possible," reads a statement on the movie's website. "It's also a major middle finger to the fans, followers and investors who have been following the production for years and now suddenly have only a few hours to run to the theatre, and then enjoy their quickly rushed DVD and Blu-ray release."
Might the decision be linked to lukewarm early reviews for the film? And does the critical indifference which has greeted the project emanate from its crowdsourced origins? If so, the Iron Sky team are showing no sign of having got the message: their statement asks fans to email Revolver in protest at the short UK run. There's something to be admired, at the very least, in the producers' determination and audacious, barefaced belief in people power. Shouldn't critics take account of the film's meagre budget and reward its struggle in the face of adversity, rather than gloat over its failures?
He adds: "Cinema going back to (Robert Rodriguez's) El Mariachi has benefited from people reviewing the budget. Critics are supposed to be detached, but you tend to absorb the conditions under which the work is made. However in the case of Iron Sky the special effects were great, but after the first five minutes it really fell apart.
"The wider story is that 95% of filmmakers can't get the money they want, and crowdfunding is the latest thing. It was the same a few years back with microbudget and people like Terence Davies doing films for pennies: the first few who get on the bandwagon have done well but then you get the lemming-like rush. I find the thought of people surrendering control over their film – to treat it like it's a commodity – very bizarre. Giving someone a role as an extra is one thing, but writing is a very difficult art. It's like selling off articles in newspapers."
• Iron Sky is released in UK cinemas on Wednesday. Dimensions: A Line, A Loop, A Tangle of Threads was shown recently at the London film festival, and also at the London independent film festival, where it won best film.
Brandon Cronenberg's hypo-horror of celebrity disease-obsession should fit Cannes perfectly. I doubt it will go viral
The appearance of a laborious and derivative body-horror satire by David Cronenberg's son Brandon – showing among other things the exploitative replication of celebrity DNA – officially takes the Cannes film festival beyond satire. Antiviral is set in a dystopian future-present in which obsession with celebrity has reached such neurotic levels that fans eat specialist steaks and burgers created with cultured cell-lines from celebs' bodies. Worse still, the real hardcore believers get themselves injected with viruses and diseases that once lived inside their idols – all to get up close and personal with the stars.
Caleb Landry Jones plays Syd, a pale and haunted young man employed by the corporation which markets celebrity viruses; his employer has an exclusive licensing arrangement with the world's biggest female star, Hannah Geist, played by Sarah Gadon (Carl Jung's wife Emma in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method). We never find out what Hannah is famous for, which is maybe the point. Syd is one day given the important job of reporting to Hannah's hotel suite and picking up a sample of a new disease she has. Obsessive and addictive, Syd injects himself with it – Brandon Cronenberg shows so many wince-making closeups of injections he may have invented a new sub-genre called "hypo horror" – and finds that this sickness he shares with Hannah is more serious than he thought.
It is possible that Brandon Cronenberg was inspired by the real-life case of movie star Gene Tierney who in 1943 contracted rubella, while pregnant, from an infected fan who had sneaked out of quarantine to get her autograph at a Hollywood Canteen event. Tierney's child was born with disabilities which caused Tierney herself to suffer from severe depression and become bitterly disenchanted with the business of celebrity.
But celebrity is an easy target, and it's tricky to take seriously a satire featuring imaginary celebrities, played by real actors who of course want to be famous. Our alleged obsession with celebrity is a fashionable talking point – but it's far from clear how interesting or indeed accurate the notion is. Are we so much more obsessed than the 30s and 40s, with their fan mags? It's not proven. Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.
Ken Loach's understated comedy uncasks a taste of something real for our times
Ken Loach's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty is warm, funny and good-natured. It's a freewheeling social-realist caper – unworldly and at times almost childlike. Loach has for my money found a happy comic register – happier, I think, than his Looking for Eric – and it is an unfashionably uncynical and unironic kind of comedy. In many ways this is his most relaxed and successful screen offering for some time. The Angels' Share could stand as a companion piece to Loach's Sweet Sixteen (2002) or even his early classic Kes (1969). Of course, it also draws upon the Ealing picture Whisky Galore: an apparently gentle comedy with a harder edge than at first appears.
Again, Loach has used non-professionals and first-timers: his leading man is newcomer Paul Brannigan, playing Robbie, a violent young Glasgow criminal on an assault charge who is given one last chance in court, owing to the fact that he is about to be a father, and his lawyer argues that he has mended his ways. Robbie gets community service instead of prison and finds himself repainting a community centre with a bunch of lawbreaking dopes and dorks: Mo (Jasmin Riggins), Rhino (William Ruane) and the fantastically stupid Albert (Gary Maitland), whose bizarre comments are treated with the incredulous amusement that Karl Pilkington gets from Steven Merchant and Ricky Gervais.
The supervisor, Harry, played with sympathy and charm by John Henshaw, is a kindly soul who has a connoisseur's passion for whisky and out of the goodness of his heart takes them on an outing to a distillery. Miraculously, Robbie turns out to have a "nose" – an untrained discerning judgment of whisky, perhaps like Billy's ability to train kestrels in Kes, although Robbie takes his skill far less seriously.
He is intrigued that some whisky evaporates in the cask: the so-called "angels' share". Given that some of this whisky sells for hundreds of thousands of pounds, the unreconstructed criminal in him wonders how he can get his share.
Loach often stages scenes in a gentle, almost quietist way, certainly compared to the way contemporary television drama has to be supercharged with force. Some may find the tendons of the story a little slack occasionally, but for me Loach and Laverty are speaking with an engaging dramatic voice. A key scene is the one where Robbie is called up on stage at a "blind tasting" and challenged to identify a whisky.
If Ron Howard had been in charge, there would have been much more disapproval of Robbie's working-class appearance and more of a gasp at his Rain Man brilliance. Loach gives us something much more understated and real.
The dramatic climax, with its touch of cheerful implausibility, has to be indulged a little, but as ever, the humanism and optimism of the comedy wins out, providing a solvent to the brutality that Robbie in his muddled way is trying to transcend. Henshaw does a tremendous job as the father-figure, doing his best to show his charges a way of finding their finer selves. He is bemused at the hapless Albert's failure to recognise Edinburgh Castle. "Is there no shortbread in your house?" he asks.
How strange to compare the conclusion of The Angels' Share with that of Kes. Suffice it to say that the worldview is a little different, and maybe the times are different too. Then there seemed to be no way out – but, though this film is under no illusions about long-term youth unemployment in 2012, this film finds some light, or perhaps it is rather that this film is experimenting with a lighter way of addressing the issue. Robbie and his mates are no angels: but the film finds a way of giving them something that real life can't or won't: a chance.
Turner Prizewinner Douglas Gordon shoots his first film in England, bringing work as well as carefully-managed arson to a Cumbrian nook. Alan Sykes looks on admiringly
Talkin Head is normally an extraordinarily quiet place – an isolated Cumbrian hill farm in a wooded valley nestled in the fells looking southwards towards the Lake District hills. The loudest noise you normally hear is the call of the curlews or the mewing of buzzards overhead. Last night, however, the farm was overrun with activity, with over 30 people – cameramen, special effects specialists, firefighters, sound operatives, producers, arts commissioners, runners, a gardener, security people and assorted hangers on – from 10 different countries from Chile to Denmark (and many from Scotland) beavering away up the fellside prior to filming from an hour or so before sunset until an hour afterwards.
The (relatively) calm centre of this storm of activity was Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, who had chosen the spot to make his first ever film in England – albeit within sight of his native Scotland.
The work is to be called The End of Civilisation, and centres on shots of a grand piano burning in a dip in the fellside. Another screen will show the results of a tracking camera on a scaffolding tower, circling 360 degrees and filming the panorama of the Scottish borders, the line of Hadrian's Wall, Venus dipping into the Solway Firth, Helvellyn and the only three other mountains in England, as well as a closer (smaller) hill called Tarnmonath and the North Pennines.
Douglas, probably best known for Zinedine Zidane: A 21st century Portrait, explained the symbolism of the piano burning: "a piano started to represent for me the ultimate symbol of western civilisation. Not only is it an instrument, it's a beautiful object that works as a sculpture but it has another function entirely"
"I wanted to do something with a piano in a landscape of some significance and I suppose, as a Scotsman, there's nothing more significant than the border. When Jon Bewley of Locus+ led me to here, I thought it was beautiful to look from one country into another and I liked the idea Hadrian's Wall is, under a certain interpretation, a great end of civilisation. But of course technically with what we're doing with the 360 degree camera, there is no end or start of civilisation. You can imagine the Scots looking over the wall and thinking "what the hell are those Romans up to now?" - so it's a nice game to play over that border on what civilisation actually is. On my first visit I was overwhelmed to be in a landscape of such beauty and with such a huge unfathomable history."
Beth Bate, director of Great North Run Culture, said:
" We're delighted to be working with Douglas Gordon and again with our partners Locus+. The End of Civilisation is a major new commission and we're especially grateful to Arts Council England for their support."
Like all films, this one brings a boost to the local economy, with many local people being involved, and pubs and accommodation providers benefitting. Harriet Dean, whose ancestors have owned the place since the 1150s, farms her sheep at Talkin Head, runs the holiday cottages where the film crew has been based and has been providing their catering. Initially somewhat sceptical about the project, she has been won over and says:
I've been thrilled to welcome such an amazing group of talented people here. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results and hope it will encourage more visitors to this wonderfully beautiful but empty corner of the country.
Another piano burns tonight and tomorrow the film crew will pack up their huge quantity of equipment and the farm will revert to the tranquillity that it has enjoyed for the last 850 years – until the next Scottish invasion.
The border theme will be continued when the film gets its premiere, on July 5th and 6th at the Tyne Theatre & Opera House, built on the line of Hadrian's Wall in central Newcastle. You can book free tickets here. After the Newcastle premiere it tours to form part of a Douglas Gordon retrospective in Tel Aviv and will then be shown at film festivals and exhibitions in Venice, New York, Berlin and London.
Douglas Gordon's The End of Civilisation is a Great North Run Culture and Locus+ True Spirit co-commission.
Eleven-year-old Wang Han lives in a small factory township hidden in the mountains of Guizhou province, southern China. The year is 1975 but he is unaware of the Cultural Revolution. He only sees some of the more distant ramifications of Mao's merciless crusade when they affect his own small world. He unquestioningly accepts the harshness of his existence, for he has never known anything else.
His fairly free day-to-day life leaves room for play and even art and sometimes a rare event such as the cherished gift of a new shirt, which allows him to stand with pride on the schoolyard podium when he leads the morning martial arts exercises. It also leaves room for crime, because a murderer is hiding outside the village, a youth who is too young to die and still clings to his primitive notion that justice can be both transparent and pure. He has just killed the man who raped his sister.
Each has a complementary quest, the killer and the child, which intersects when the injured man steals the boy's shirt to bandage his wound. For the child all events are either commonplace or dramatic; Mao and the Red Guards play a lesser role. For a short time – the duration of the film – the shirt becomes the centre of his universe, his point of reference and the only reason to fight.
Filming Mao's China without discussing the Cultural Revolution may seem surprising. We overhear scraps of conversation we barely understand, and glimpse codes, gestures and set phrases that as western observers we don't readily pick up on.
Since the film's value lies in the experience, it is best to abandon the political discourse. The film is existential – a big word but with a simple ambition, which is to stroll through history as perceived by a child, when the words of adults take on different meanings. In spatial terms the boundaries lend themselves to that, with the misty riverbanks beyond the village, where young people fight and age too fast, and where Wang Hang's father, an actor out of place in this political world, disappears once a week on his bicycle. There are moral boundaries too, where good and evil are observed from the blessed distance of those who still have time to choose. They construct themselves around the young murderer, with whom Wang Han has formed an initiatory tie with a trifling symbol (the shirt) but an important one in the grand epic of childhood.
Carefully framed, as though not to break the spell, Wang Xiaoshuai's young actors wander about familiar streets, unaware of the great wind of history. Time flows gently like the river until it hurtles into the wall over which the children are peering into the calm waters from which a white corpse has just been removed. The boy will weigh up his own history. He will move forward, for the shirt is just a pretext for that headlong, solemn race toward adulthood. All the symbols are there: the new shirt, the blood, the injured young woman who triggers the desire to be strong, the father and mother with occasional glimpses of their flaws, and the disturbing keys to Mao's ambitions glimpsed from one enigma to another. But the spectator feels no need to pick them up. They latch on and intertwine, much as lightweight shackles around the ankles of those children from another era.
Manchester band have been busy in the studio according to screenwriter Chris Coghill, who has been working with Ian Brown and Mani on upcoming film Spike Island
The Stone Roses "have at least three or four new tracks recorded", according to a screenwriter who has collaborated with the reunited band. Chris Coghill claims to have been in contact with Ian Brown and Mani as he works on Spike Island, a forthcoming film about the Stone Roses' most famous concert.
"I'm mates with Mani and I know Ian a bit," Coghill told BBC News. "When we first started talking about [the movie], I emailed them both an outline of what we wanted to do and they said, 'You have our support, you have our blessing, whatever you need.'"
Announced last year, Spike Island tells the story of a group of teenagers who try to sneak into the so-called "baggy Woodstock". "It's my love letter to the Stone Roses and being 16 years old in 1990 in Manchester," said Coghill, who is best known for playing Tony King on EastEnders. "I never went to Spike Island ... I got let down with a ticket the day before, which is what happens to the lads in the film."
Misfits director Tom Green announced the movie last year, and a trailer was recently premiered at Cannes. Producers hope to have the finished film by November. "The Roses died in '95," Green said at the time. "This is the resurrection." Shameless actor Elliott Tittensor and Game of Thrones' Emilia Clarke will star, and the feature will allegedly make extensive use of the Stone Roses' songs
The Stone Roses will launch their comeback in just a matter of weeks, beginning with concerts in Barcelona on 8 and 9 June. They play three nights in Manchester starting 29 June, followed by a series of festival gigs.
The French-Polish filmmaker surprised Cannes with a short film for the Italian fashion house
Roman Polanski introduced the premiere screening of his collaboration with Italian fashion giants Prada on Monday (22 May) by telling the audience the three-minute film was an "anti-commercial".
In his speech, delivered in French, the director added that he wanted to prove he "can make short films as well as long films." The film, titled A Therapy, was announced as a complete surprise before the screening of his 1979 film Tess, which was showing as part of the Cannes Classics section.
At odds with the majority of fashion shorts, Polanski's film is heavy in dialogue.
A suave, melodramatic Helena Bonham Carter, draped in a fabulous purple fur coat, swans into the office of Ben Kingsley, who plays her silent psychoanalyst.
She removes the coat, kicks off her Prada shoes, drapes across a chaise lounge and recounts a dream surrounding typically Polanski themes of loneliness and anxiety.
Kingsley drifts off, besotted with Bonham Carter's coat, which hangs on a hat rack. He approaches it, caressing the fur with personable affection before slowly putting it on and fully embracing his fantasy. "I'm a very lonely person," Bonham-Carter says, "I think it's because I'm rich, and daddy left me everything."
At the end the message reads "Prada Suits Everyone," while Bonham-Carter asks: "What does it all mean?"
The notion of a "fashion film" has grown in recent years; Prada have previously worked with Jordan and Ridley Scott, and in 2010 Dior hired David Lynch and Missoni hired Kenneth Anger to shoot their 2010 A/W selection.
Though its characters are self-indulgent fantasists, Polanski's film is witty, sharp, stylish and wonderfully camp. As a brand/artist match, it's near perfect. As Polanski says, "It's very refreshing to know that there are still places open to irony and wit and, for sure, Prada is one of them."
No, a ÂChilean film directed by Pablo LarraĂn which explores the human cost of the Pinochet dictatorÂship, is one of the unexpected hits at this year's festival
Once in a while, a film comes along at Cannes that gets the blood pumping – a work that seems destined to break out of the arthouse ghetto, that feels, above all, like a fresh vision and voice. This year, that moment has come with No, a ÂChilean film tucked away in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar of the festival, its unpromising-sounding subject being Chile's 1988 referendum. Its premiere was greeted with whoops, cheers and seemingly unstoppable applause.
Its director, Pablo LarraĂn, was born in 1976, three years after Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown; LarraĂn was 12 at the time of the referendum that eventually brought down General Augusto Pinochet. He was, he said, brought up in an affluent household where the assumption was that "Pinochet was the right man for the country because we were economically growing". It is partly to make sense of what he only obliquely understood as a child – "to finally open this black box" – that compelled him to make No, the third in a trilogy exploring the human cost of the Pinochet dictatorÂship. "Maybe I still don't understand anything, but I am trying to think about why this happened," he says.
The main character is Rene, played by the Mexican Gael GarcĂa Bernal. A smart young advertising executive, he is first seen devising an ad for a soft drink called Free. His next job is a more serious proposition. Clandestinely – and facing intimidation – he leads the team devising the TV campaign for the "no" vote, opposing Pinochet's rule. One of the most distinctive aspects of the film is its look. Shot with 1980s-style video cameras, it has precisely the grainy quality of the archive footage of the real TV adverts: new and found material merge seamlessly.
What Gael's character does is key to understanding present-day Chile, says LarraĂn. "Pinochet imposed a capitalist society in Chile: our character grabbed the tools of capitalism that Pinochet had provided – advertising – to pull him out." For all the film's humour and joy, there is an ambivalence at the story's heart: a hardnosed cynicism in the admen's tactic of selling the idea of l'alegrĂa, happiness, to the populace, just as if it were a soft drink called Free. Charlotte Higgins
Movie about slavery stars Christoph Waltz, Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L Jackson
It was all very exciting. A crowd of journalists in Cannes was invited to a special presentation of "footage" of Quentin Tarantino's new film Django Unchained on Monday night at the Majestic Hotel on the Croisette, outside which there is a poster for the movie so massive it can be seen from space. We had been told to arrive in good time because the screening would begin precisely at 7.30pm.
Critics, bloggers and people in suits gathered in a large antechamber, sipping wine and feeling skittish yet solemn, like cardinals who had been invited to inspect a newly discovered splinter of St Francis's femur.
An executive from the Weinstein Company mingled, reminding us of the ground rules. Reviewing the film on the basis of what we see tonight? Not on. Tweeting photos of the poster that was here in the room? So not cool. Getting your smartphone out, recording the Django footage in its entirety and uploading it to your pay-per-view website? Harvey Weinstein will personally scourge you with the silver-tipped flail he keeps for this purpose.
In fact, there were three films of which we were being offered a teasing glimpse: Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (possibly a fictionalised version of L Ron Hubbard), David O Russell's The Silver Linings Playbook – and Tarantino's Django.
Seven-thirty sharp became seven-thirty blunt, which morphed into 7.39 on the dot, and then Harvey Weinstein himself materialised in the middle of the room, strolling through towards the screening room with the fat man's rolling gait. He cordially called out to someone, pointing, and raising his voice only slightly: "Hey, Jeff. That was kinda fun last night, wasn't it?"
Jeff breathed back sensually: "Yeah."
What was? What was kinda fun? The rest of us pondered, awestruck. What possible epicurean pleasure could Harvey have shared last night with Jeff?
The event began. Inevitably, these batches of "footage" were in fact extended and glorified trailers. The Anderson and the Russell came and went and then Django was up.
Django Unchained is about something on which Hollywood is traditionally very reticent: slavery. To the music of Johnny Cash and James Brown, a weird drama of violent revenge in the Old South unfolds. Christoph Waltz is a bizarre travelling dentist, whose profession is, in fact, a cover for his activities as bounty hunter, gunfighter and assassin.
With maximum and freaky violence, he frees a slave called Django, played by Jamie Foxx, and they track down some brothers with whom he has business.
Django wears an electric blue suit and a stylishly raked hat, and they encounter a very haughty slave owner, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. We don't get to see what Samuel L Jackson actually does in the movie, other than checking him in the credits.
The footage looks good – of course it would – but it's impossible to tell what the movie is going to be like. It could be brilliant, like Kill Bill, or underwhelming like Inglourious Basterds. Well, the chains come off at Christmas and we'll see then.
David Cronenberg and his son Brandon, Aida Bagic, Andrei Konchalovsky, Abbas Kiarostami and a snail all put in much-hyped appearances as the 65th edition of France's famous film festival begins to gather pace. Plus, French director Alain Resnais' You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, Tim Roth … and Pacey from Dawson's Creek
Ricardo DarĂn brings presence and authority to this heartfelt if slightly muddy film about priests tackling drug gangs in a Buenos Aires slum
The title of Pablo Trapero's new film is the nickname given in Argentina to the colossal ruins of what was once intended to be a tuberculosis hospital, built in the 1930s and long since abandoned. It is now a wrecked cathedral of poverty and despair in the "Villa Virgin", the toughest shantytown in Buenos Aires; here is where the poor and the homeless take refuge and where the drug dealers ply their trade and make recruits. The shots of this hideous yet weirdly fascinating building make it look the Ceausescu presidential palace in Bucharest.
Nicolás and Julián take radically different views on the drug wars that are tearing the people apart. Nicolás wants to engage with the gangsters, get involved, even mediate their turf wars. Julián believes this inevitably will make the priests combatants, and liable to be killed. Julián's superiors are telling him that if he can promote stories of miracles caused by the memory of Father Mujica, they can get political support for building a new hospital. Meanwhile, Nicolás is beginning to fall in love with a beautiful social worker, Luciana, played by Martina Gusman.
White Elephant is a muscular, heartfelt movie, and DarĂn brings to the screen his presence and authority. There are moments that bring to mind Fernando Meirelles's City of God. But it is not clear what the focus of the movie actually is, or in emotional terms what Nicolás is sacrificing by falling for Luciana. Finally, it isn't clear what the movie's attitude is towards the neo-Mujica martyrdom that appears to be developing. Is it a symptom of desperation? Or a genuine, inspiring spiritual phenomenon? For all the competence and strength of Trapero's direction, the film is not as powerful as it might have been.
The move, which gives Wanda ownership of more than 5,000 screens at 346 multiplexes, is just the latest example of co-operation between US and Chinese companies at a time when filmgoing practices in the two nations are becoming increasingly polarised. Box-office figures in China are growing rapidly as more and more screens are opened, but cinemas in the US are having a tougher time. AMC lost $73m (ÂŁ46m) in the fourth quarter of 2011. A Wanda spokesman said this was due to the high cost of repaying loans. AMC says it has 23 of the 50 highest grossing sites in the US.
Wanda said it would invest $500m in its US screens and pledged to maintain all 18,500 staff at the chain's Kansas City headquarters and around the country, where day-to-day working practices would be unchanged. The new owner's chairman, the Beijing-based real estate developer and billionaire Wang Jianlin, said he wanted to see AMC grow in both the US and abroad.
South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and French actor Isabelle Huppert join forces in this transnational doodle of a film that is diverting but forgettable
In Another Country is a transnational doodle of a film, of the kind created by disparate movie eminences who meet each other at film festivals – well, probably just Cannes – and promise to work together. Sean Penn and Paolo Sorrentino's collaboration on This Must Be the Place was one such, and so surely is this: an odd conjunction between South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo and French actor Isabelle Huppert. It is amusing and exasperating, with the amusing part just about in the ascendant. Mostly.
To distract herself from money worries, a young film student sketches out three different versions of a script featuring an elegant, slightly haughty Frenchwoman (naturally, Huppert) who comes to Mohang. In the first version, she is a visiting film director; in the second, a woman having an affair with a Korean film director and in the third, she is a single woman whose husband has deserted her for a Korean man, and now she seeks guidance from a monk.
We of course see these three variations acted out on screen, interspersed with scenes showing the woman scribbling: it is a little like Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda. But the "real" story, the story of the writer's financial woes – that is left irritatingly unexamined and unresolved. Perhaps even the fiercest Isabelle Huppert fan would not expect her to give three radically different performances, and so it proves. In Another Country looks very much like something written on a napkin and shot in the one afternoon that Huppert could come to South Korea. Slight, diverting, forgettable.
Pete Doherty's performance as a philosophising dandy is as catastrophic as the rest of this insufferable film
There is a long and noble British tradition of musicians becoming absolutely godawful actors. Gary Kemp gave it his best shot; Sting outdid himself. Pete Doherty, however, breaks the mould. His performance as a shambling yet sensitive libertine (geddit?) in Sylvie Verheyde's adaptation of the Alfred de Musset novel is catastrophic. Still, that does mean it's tonally of a piece with the rest of the film.
Face as pasty as porridge, feathered Hoxton hairdo intact, Doherty plays an inexplicably minted dandy whose hobbies include super-intense philosophical debate and orgies. After he breaks up with Lily Cole, who has been playing footsie with a male friend (apparently more of a deal-breaker in a debauched society than you might imagine), he has a chance encounter with Charlotte Gainsbourg and a baby goat in a wood. They spend three months as pals, then what seems like forever as on/off lovers. Of the goat, we never learn. But you will find yourself begging for its reappearance.
The shambling amateurism of Doherty's line-reading, his sixth-form fidgets, his uncertain eyes, sadly don't share the apt emotional ineptitude of, say, Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon – a film Confession faintly resembles, in the same way that a crab stick resembles a Dover sole. It also brings to mind Hollyoaks, or, perhaps, an ad campaign for Hollyoaks that channels Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.
That the camerawork takes its cues from its leading man's sweaty jittering doesn't help, nor does the muffled, insufferable voiceover. In a few small scenes that feel as if they might be semi-improvised and don't involve a lot of talking, Doherty hints at his charisma. But for the time being, he'd be advised to stick to the strumming.
There are decent enough offerings from Vinterberg and Mingiu, but Michael Haneke's angel of death casts a shadow over all
Cannes officially turns weird on me on Sunday morning, post-Haneke, when Dave starts berating me for skipping our meeting. I have never met Dave and the meeting is a mystery. Come to think of it, I don't even think his name is Dave. The upshot is, I'm horribly confused.
"Hey guy, don't bail on me," barks Dave, glaring into my face and bouncing agitatedly on the balls of his feet, like a boxer awaiting the bell that starts the round. "You can't do that. We had a meeting."
I tell him that I'm sorry. What meeting, exactly? "OK, I get that," he says, still beaming his radioactive stare. "But guy, come on, we gotta make this work." And it is at this point that I realise that this man is wearing an earpiece. He is glaring right through me, merrily hollering at someone else altogether.
Such miscommunications are a common hazard inside the Cannes Palais, where the delegates speak in a variety of tongues and commune constantly with unseen colleagues. All around, the people are gabbling into mobile phones. They are variously angry, amused, bullish and needy. But they are not angered or amused by us, because their reference points are all elsewhere; possibly in another part of the Palais or further up the Croisette, where someone is being angry or amused right back at them. The whole thing can be very disconcerting.
Or maybe I'm simply feeling delicate, having just weathered two hours of Amour, an astonishing dying fall of a film, perfectly played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as Georges and Anne, an elderly couple preparing for death. Writer-director Michael Haneke won the Palme d'Or here for The White Ribbon back in 2009 and Amour is this year's first uncomplicatedly great picture, utterly unsparing of its characters and yet suffused with a tenderness and wisdom that carries us through. It's no spoiler to reveal that Anne dies in the end. Haneke elects to show us her corpse in the very first scene, as though establishing from the outset that this is where she (and by implication the rest of us) are headed. Hang on to your coverlet, your crucifix or your loved one's hand. Sorry Mr Goldwyn, but there are no happy endings.
It says much for the power of Amour that it risks making the other competition films look mockbuster-ish too. At the bottom of the barrel sits Lawless, John Hillcoat's draught of macho rotgut about boisterous bootleggers in 1930s Virginia. I much preferred Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills, a hushed and simmering tale of two former orphan girls at a Romanian nunnery, even though it takes a shade too long to get where it's going. And Thomas Vinterberg's Jagten (or The Hunt) is brilliant within a narrow bandwidth: a crudely compelling red-button drama about a classroom assistant (Mads Mikkelsen), wrongly accused of child abuse, who finds himself ostracised by his friends and punched out by the butcher. All of these films have their advocates; all (even Lawless) have something going in their favour. All, however, have just been put to bed and laid to rest. There's no point arguing with the angel of death.
The creator of James Bond lived more than his own fair share of drama, to be explored in a new 'period action movie' by the director of Moon
Some believe he dreamed up James Bond to be the bon vivant, daring and cultivated epitome of masculinity he could never quite live up to. In at least one regard, however, Ian Fleming is about to mimic his most famous creation: the author and former second world war naval commander is to be the subject of his very own movie, from the director of Moon and Source Code, Duncan Jones.
Jones will base his biopic on an adaptation by screenwriter Matthew Brown of Andrew Lycett's biography The Man Behind James Bond. The film reportedly has the support of the Fleming estate and is set to go into production later this year. It is something of a departure for Jones, whose two feature films thus far have had science fiction themes.
The celebrated writer's life may not have been quite as exciting as that of 007, but it had more than its fair share of drama. Born into a wealthy English family with Scottish roots, the young Fleming was removed from Eton College a term early by his mother after falling out with a housemaster who disapproved of his playboy lifestyle. He subsequently flunked out of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst after contracting gonorrhoea. Women, often those married to other men, were a constant presence in Fleming's life, and he did not marry until he was 44, to Anne Charteris, a divorced woman with whom he had been having an affair for more than a decade.
Much of Fleming's background for the Bond novels was drawn from his years in British naval intelligence during the second world war, a career he embarked upon after failed attempts at banking and stockbroking. Prior to that, he had found more success as a journalist for the Reuters agency, once receiving a signed apology from Stalin for being unable to attend an interview following a high-profile court case in Russia. It was the latter career Fleming later credited with gifting him the writerly skills that helped forge the Bond novels.
"Fleming lived through one of the most perilous periods in world history, in a position that allowed him a unique vantage point of all the players, all the stakes," said Jones in a statement. "He witnessed true heroism firsthand. And he saw the evil men could do. Then, when the war ended, he went off to write fiction. The essential question for me is: where did Ian Fleming end and Bond begin?"
Like his creation, Fleming drank and smoked (around 60 cigarettes a day) throughout his life, the effects of which probably contributed to an early death in 1964 at the age of 56, following several heart attacks. He spent his final years at the Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, where he had been living for three months annually for more than a decade to write.
Fleming is said to have masterminded a number of ingenious missions during the war, including a ploy to seize a Nazi Enigma decoding machine, which never came to fruition. The idea was subsequently borrowed for the plot of 1957's From Russia With Love, which focuses on a Smersh bid (Spectre in the 1963 film) to lure 007 into a trap with the promise of a Soviet decoding unit.
The writer was instrumental in the formation of the 30 Assault Unit of intelligence commandos, which he oversaw from the rear during the war. The unit, initially 30-strong but later expanded, was trained in lock-picking, safe-cracking and unarmed combat. Last year's action thriller Age of Heroes used the 30 Assault Unit as its focus and starred James D'Arcy as Fleming.
Intriguingly, Jones's film is described as a "period action movie about the life of Fleming and the origins of Bond", suggesting it may take the writer's wartime experiences as a starting point. It will arrive at a time when interest in 007 and his creator has rarely been more intense, with the Eon-produced Bond movies having just celebrated 50 years of production and the company's latest film, Skyfall, premiering in October.
A separate Fleming biopic, with James McAvoy and Leonardo DiCaprio each at one point reportedly set to play the writer, was announced in 2008 by DiCaprio's Appian Way production company, but remains in development.
Actor has contacted friends via email to assure them he is safe and heading to 30-day rehab programme
'Missing' Terminator star Nick Stahl has contacted friends to assure them he is safe and heading to rehab, according to reports.
The 32-year-old actor's absence was reported to police last week by his estranged wife. Roseann Stahl told officers her husband had been frequenting the notorious Skid Row quarter of Los Angeles and said she was concerned he may have been caught up in drug-related difficulties.
According to TMZ, Stahl contacted friends via email on Friday apologising for scaring them and stating that he was heading to rehab. Roseann, the mother of his daughter Marlo, was not on the list of recipients.
"I'm relieved," she told People magazine. "But I'm also skeptical that he is really in rehab." She said she had read the "unemotional and unapologetic" email because she has access to her husband's account. It stated that Stahl was headed to a 30-day rehab programme.
Earlier this year Roseann filed court documents asking for her husband's visitation rights with their daughter to be cut to eight supervised hours per week owing to what she claimed was his regular drug use. Stahl has had a number of brushes with the law recently, including an incident where he was charged with not paying a taxi driver following a long journey through Los Angeles in March.
Stahl, who appeared as resistance fighter John Connor in 2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, debuted as a child actor with 1993's The Man Without a Face, before moving to adult roles in films such as Sin City and In the Bedroom. His most recent role was in the 2011 war satire Afghan Luke, in which he played the lead. While his star has fallen since Terminator 3, the actor has continued to work regularly in film and television.
Wayne Blair's musical drama about a group of Australian Aboriginal singers who perform for GIs in Vietnam is a sweet 'n' dumb feelgood bopper
Australian director Wayne Blair's based-on-real-life musical drama sees the McCrae family – a group of Australian Aboriginal singers known as the Cummeragunja Song Birds – hoisted from the outback and refashioned as kick-ass soul band, the Sapphires, to perform for GIs in Vietnam circa 1968.
Heading for Saigon are frosty older sis Gail (Deborah Mailman), feisty sexpot Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) – a stolen aborigine returned to the family fold to supply backing vox – and front woman Julie (Australian Idol star Jessica Mauboy). They get their big break via talent scout Dave Lovelace (Chris O'Dowd) – a white, Irish, self-proclaimed "soul brother" with the gift of the gab and a taste for the booze. He's the girls' ticket to Holiday Camp Vietnam, where there's soul food on the grill, buff, respectful GIs on tap and the lethal danger of war is a mild distraction from belting out James Brown hits to crowds of adoring grunts.
The Sapphires was snapped up by the Weinsteins the night before Cannes. It's easy to see what they saw in this sweet 'n' dumb feelgood bopper. The performances are sparky, the musical numbers – including a lovely rendition of the Jackson Five's Who's Loving You? – are beautifully shot and sung. Racism – seen through the prisms of the Martin Luther King assassination and the scandal of Australia's Stolen Generation – is discussed quickly and lightly via the slow-burning relationship between O'Dowd (excellent in a role that stretches his serious acting chops) and Mailman's angry, righteous Gail.
There are gloopy bits (a scene in which the girls sing to the war wounded – sad-eyed pups with head bandages and slings – made me long for Oliver Stone to come and blow off a limb or two), but there's also a strange comfort in watching a film where any battle – from family feud to one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century – can be eased by yodelling a bit of Wilson Pickett and doing the M*A*S*H potato. The Sapphires is glossy and often silly, but it's zippy enough to make the tour worthwhile.
French actors play themselves in Alain Resnais' indulgent, self-conscious film about acting, memory and the persistence of the past
Alain Resnais' remarkable film-making career continues with his return to the Cannes competition at the age of 89. This is a quasi-theatrical contrivance based partly around Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice. Bruno Podalydès plays Antoine D'Anthac, a cultured and wealthy dramatist whose death is announced by telephone to his close friends in the opening sequence. These are French acting eminences, playing themselves: Michel Piccoli, Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Lambert Wilson and many more. His lawyer invites them to D'Anthac's home and declares it is the wish of the deceased that they all watch a video recording of a performance of his play Eurydice, acted by a company of twentysomethings, La Compagnie de la Colombe. This was a play they had all been in, when younger, and the recording transports them back in time: they start reciting the lines, feeling the emotions, and we see them swept back into the roles.
It is a movie about memory and the persistence of the past, and like a lot of Resnais' recent work it mounts an interesting challenge to the realist consensus of cinema, to the convention that we must pretend that what is being played out on screen is actually happening. But despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull.
It certainly returns us to the great enigma of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth: by looking back at her in the underworld, he loses her. Perhaps Resnais is saying that the act of looking back is what is stifling – the past is not the past, its emotions and truths are vital now, and we can feel them truthfully by looking forward and living in the present. Perhaps. This is a stately and self-conscious piece of work, though with a quaint kind of elegance and poise.
Abbas Kiarostami's Tokyo-set drama is beautifully shot and acted, but the curtain comes crashing down too abruptly
Abbas Kiarostami can sometimes create challenging endings. The sign-off to his masterpiece A Taste of Cherry is still something to be pondered. But his latest movie, set in Tokyo, really is bafflingly and even exasperatingly truncated. There are some interesting ideas and sympathetic performances in a superbly shot and fascinatingly controlled exercise. There is potential. But the curtain comes down with an arbitrary crash just as the drama was becoming interesting.
As in his previous film Certified Copy, Kiarostami shows interest in social norms, persona and role play. The movie also shows the classic Kiarostami mannerism of extended conversations in cars: that interesting and intimate space which is neither entirely public nor private. As the action progresses, the dramatic mystery deepens, and the film becomes more engaging: the audience is invited to ponder Takashi's backstory. A nosey neighbour hints at family worries. And we wonder about Akiko's own troubled past.
But this is all taken away from us. The movie is cut off so sharply, I almost wondered if, like Tarantino's Kill Bill, there is some second part still to come. The enigma of its sudden stop doesn't seem, on the face of it, to be a particularly rewarding one. It is just opaque. When Akiko arrives in his apartment, Takashi is playing Ella Fitzgerald's recording of the song Like Someone in Love, by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. But is he in love? Is she? These ideas are not explored. It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.
The first trailer for Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond movie, has a curious role to fulfil. On one hand, as the first Bond outing for four years, it has to meet a certain amount of expectation. Then again, since Quantum of Solace was so unapologetically woeful, the Skyfall trailer could simply consist of Daniel Craig clattering into the side of a shed again and again and it'd invariably be seen as an improvement.
Until now, the only information we've had has come in the form of promotional images (teaching us that Bond's penchant for horrible swimwear has now been augmented by a fondness for creepy leather gloves) and a poster (telling us that Bond still likes to dress up in his Sunday best to shoot people in tunnels). However, the Skyfall trailer is now with us, which means we now know more than ever about what the film holds in store.
The trailer opens with an awkward, po-faced game of Mallett's Mallet between Daniel Craig and an unidentified government psychologist behind a two-way mirror. "Country?" the psychologist asks. "England," replies Bond. Then "Gun?" "Shot." Then, as we catch our first glimpse of Bond without a top on: "Agent?" "Provocateur." For a moment, you suspect that Skyfall might in fact be a terrible James Bond/Rocky Horror cross-dressing hybrid.
But then Bond is asked "Skyfall?" and one of his eyes momentarily narrows, making him look like Thom Yorke if Thom Yorke was a nightclub bouncer. Just as the psychologist is about to smack him across the head with an oversized foam hammer, Bond gets his act together and replies: "Done."
The question of the trailer, then, is: what is Skyfall? A place? An operation? The rest of the trailer commits itself to offering clues. We cut to Shanghai, where a woman in a nice dress is gazing at the Bund. Then Bond walking into a room firing a gun. Then some coffins. Then a fiery river parade. Could Skyfall be Chinese? Before we have time to figure it out, we see Naomie Harris tenderly shaving Bond's face – perhaps because he's been crying in the shower fully dressed again, as he's done an awful lot since Daniel Craig started playing him.
A few quick impressionist shots of helicopters and men falling into water later and – because this is a trailer for a film to be released in 2012 – the dubstep kicks in. There's a tube crash. Another fall. A shot of Bond and Judi Dench peering at a hill. And then a man in silhouette – presumably Javier Bardem's villain – doing his best Joker impression as he strolls away from a fire.
The Skyfall trailer ends with Bond intoning, "Some men are coming to kill us. We're going to kill them first," before we're hit by a final barrage of explosions and gunfire and more dubstep and some Volkswagens being smashed up. And that's all there is, at least until the next trailer comes along to offer us a little more in the way of exposition.
So what is Skyfall? On the basis of this trailer, it might be Asian in origin. Or it could just as easily be Scottish. Or the name of a particularly hard-to-find Skrillrex remix. There's honestly no way of knowing at this point.
Still, at least James Bond is finally back. And, if nothing else, he can't be as bad as he was last time.
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