The Cannes Film Festival has gotten underway for its 67th glamour-filled year. Steven Spielberg heads the jury for the main competition while Kiwi Jane Campion heads the jury for the Cinéfondation and Short Film sections. Films in contention for this year’s Palme d’Or include Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, Roman Polanksi’s Venus in Fur, the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, François Ozon’s Young & Beautiful, Takashi Miike’s Shield of Straw and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive among others.
In no danger of winning a Palme d’Or, but potentially featuring the segments “P is for Palme d’Or”,”S is for Schmoozefest”, or “F is for Forty Thousand Dollar Hookers” is a film announcement that’s the biggest of Cannes so far – the news that there’s going to be ABCs of Death 2 with the first directors announced being Alex de la Iglesia (The Last Circus), Rodney Ascher (Room 237) and animator Bill Plympton. “Everyone had a lot of fun doing it the first time out and financially the film did well so it was a no-brainer really” Ant Timpson tells us. “It’s a great way for me to form relationships with cool directors and then have fun killing people with them.”
Our friends at Vendetta are at Cannes, swanning around with the stars, partying on yachts, trashing 5-star hotel rooms and probably having to squeeze in a little bit of work here and there. Their first report back on Facebook this morning sets the scene:
Today was the first official day of the biggest film festival in the world, Cannes. The rain is pouring down and the streets are virtually empty after the star-studded premiere of The Great Gatsby earlier this evening. On the market side of things, soccer great Pele was in town today to promote a new biopic of his life and tomorrow The Hoff arrives!
Everyone likes arguing over a good list, and here’s a perfect example – Film.com has ranked all 66 Palme d’Or winners from worst to best in a totally subjective exercise that would be fascinating to see the same writer repeat in another decade or two in order to see how much the rankings change.
wright at end of world
Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s apocalyptic pub crawl comedy The World’s End was supposed to still be months away from general release. but Edgar Wright has announced the film now opens on July 18th – and check out this bit:
Don’t worry, Australians – he/they/the movie is/are heading your way too…
Bloody big monster skull
Man, can Pacific Rim just hurry up and open? As well as the robot vs alien fighting awesomeness we’ve been seeing in the trailers, expect Guillermo del Toro’s imagination to shine through in lots of other ways. Here’s one of ’em, an image of an immense kaiju skull, presumably in some kind of memorial to the people it squished, chomped or decimated in some other way.
Elysium viral site
Speaking of epic sci-fi flicks on the horizon, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium is also a way off but has launched a viral site in which you can apply for residency at the elitist space colony depicted in the film. We were rejected. Awesome, stuck on this overpopulated decaying Earth for good… See how you fare at www.itsbetteruphere.com
