Damon Wayans tries on Bill Cosby’s old Cliff Huxtable sweaters in the new sitcom My Wife and Kids (8 p.m., ABC). Wayans and Tisha Campbell-Martin play a successful two-career suburban couple raising three kids, one of whom is into gangsta rap. Two episodes air back to back. Ed represents a coach being sued by a student’s parents on Ed (8 p.m., NBC). Fox fills the “Temptation Island” slot with another brilliantly trashy curiosity, Boot Camp (9 p.m., Fox), in which eight men and eight women compete for $500,000 as they undergo the rigors of military training with actual drill instructors. The West Wing (9 p.m., NBC) hasn’t got a prayer opposite it. (“West Wing” is a rerun of the Thanksgiving episode, where Bartlet has to decide what to do with a boatload of illegal immigrants fleeing China.) The Drew Carey Show (9 p.m., ABC) has its annual April Fools’ episode; viewers are supposed to keep track of all the intentional mistakes to win big prizes. On The Job (9:30 p.m., ABC), McNeil is held hostage in the bathroom by an escaped prisoner who speaks only Spanish. Lily has to work with Graham on a project and Judy is reunited with Will on Once & Again (10 p.m., ABC).
Sports
Basketball: Magic at 76ers (8 p.m., TNT)
Hockey: Blues at Red Wings (7:30 p.m., ESPN2) Avalanche at Oilers (10 p.m., ESPN2)
Talk
Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Rosemary Clooney, Mark Harmon David Letterman (CBS) Johnny Depp, Train Jay Leno (NBC) Denis Leary, Bill O’Reilly, Lifehouse Politically Incorrect (ABC) Tom Bergeron, Eddie Cibrian Conan O’Brien (NBC) Jason Priestley, Julie Bowen (rerun)
The great recession is not Johnny Depp’s fault. Johnny Depp did not decimate your 401K and your children’s college savings plans. He did not foreclose your home. He did not take away your health insurance when you got laid off. He did not start charging you new monthly banking fees while awarding himself a hefty bonus. All the guy’s ever done is dress like a pirate and entertain people.
Johnny Depp is not the problem. But the entertainment industry is so bloated and reckless that it can pay him $50 million in the last year alone. Depp just shrugs: “If they’re going to pay me the stupid money right now, I’m going to take it.” But in the midst of economic collapse, it’s time to stop paying Johnny Depp stupid money. It’s time to Occupy Hollywood.
Depp isn’t the only wildly overpaid person in America, of course, and actors aren’t the only mega-earners. Tiger Woods’ salary and endorsements will earn him about $62 million this year – which is actually a stunning comedown of nearly $30 million in the wake of his marital implosion. And thanks to hefty album sales and a smash tour, Lady Gaga will pull in roughly $90 million. That’s a lot of lobster shoes.
Our stars provide us something that Goldman Sachs never will. They’re not moving money around or playing games with high-risk securities that look a lot like fraud. Stars entertain and fascinate us; they unite us through a common love of their work; they offer every kid who ever sang into a hairbrush the dream of attaining similar fame and wealth. That’s free enterprise, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t want Johnny Depp to stop making movies, or Lady Gaga to stop banging on the piano. But at a certain point, we as consumers need to consider what it means when any industry throws that much money at so few people.
As David Cay Johnston spelled out Wednesday, in 2010 “There were fewer jobs and they paid less, except at the very top where the number of people making more than $1 million increased by 20 percent over 2009.” Meanwhile, half of American workers earned less than $26,400. In other words, everybody is making less, except the millionaires.
We like to think of the 1 percent as evil bankers — oh, and they totally are. But it is also our movie stars and television icons, and their fans are making that inequity possible. As Brent Cox explained for the Awl last month, even adjusted for inflation, Hollywood has never before paid the kind of psycho money it’s hemorrhaging on its stars now. In 2011 money, Marilyn Monroe would have clocked in at a modest under $2 million for “The Misfits.” Leonardo DiCaprio, in contrast, stands to make $50 million for “Inception.”
To pay for the stars, studios have gutted the number of movies they make by 20 percent. And while Depp earns enough to buy himself a small planet, Jack Sparrow’s home at Disney is laying off hundreds of employees. This is the same studio whose sense of proportion is so out of whack that it prides itself on sticking to a $215 million budget for a remake of “The Lone Ranger,” starring, of course, Johnny Depp. In a harrowingly grandiose statement of out-of-touchness, Jerry Bruckheimer told the Hollywood Reporter this week, “For the smaller scenes [we] laid off the extras, the effects people, the makeup people … We bunched together scenes with Tonto and the Lone Ranger, so we had a much smaller crew. We saved about $10 million just by doing that.” Wait, that’s how you saved money? Laying off effects people?
Now imagine a studio looking at its bottom line and saying to a star, “Yeah, maybe $10 million bucks and a small cut of the profits is plenty for this one, pal.” Honest to God, what, aside from Will Smith’s or Angelina Jolie’s pride, would make that insulting? And in the meantime, with more funds freed up, Hollywood could go about the business of taking risks and nurturing new talent and making more movies. That we audiences might even support. With our money. Because we’d have some freaking jobs.
And what if we invested in ourselves once in a while, too? If we put the price of a movie ticket toward helping someone in need? You can text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10, right from your phone. What if we gave that ticket price to Donors Choose, to help a school fund a dream project or get needed supplies? What if, instead of spending an hour watching “NCIS,” for which Mark Harmon will earn $13 million this year, we spent that hour working with the local outpost of Habitant for Humanity?
It’s crazy, I know. But haven’t the last few weeks shown us that this business of wild ideas is catching on? That too many of us are hurting, and we need no longer accept that we’re powerless to change that? It’s not all or nothing. It’s not bleak austerity. It’s a few drops in the bucket, an acknowledgment that the things that connect us are not just the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. And if the choice as a consumer comes down to crazy or Johnny Depp’s “stupid” money, I’ll take crazy.
The durable myth of the Lone Ranger -- pictured here in a comic by
Brett Matthews and Sergio Cariello -- will be the subject of a $215
million Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp. (Credit: Dynamite)
Apparently Disney has given “Rango” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gore Verbinski and his star, Johnny Depp, a greenlight to shoot a new feature film version of “The Lone Ranger,” budgeted at $215 million. That might seem an exorbitant price tag for a concept that ran for years on TV in the 1950s, despite Ed Wood-level production values. But it’s a reduced price compared to what Verbinski originally envisioned; Disney pulled the plug on the project a couple of months ago because its initial price tag, $250 million, was deemed too high.
Where is the money going, you ask? Well, originally it was going to pay for all the werewolves.
Yes, werewolves. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were going to fight werewolves.
When Disney spiked the project, citing worries about recouping its massive cost, there was an online outcry about how mind-bogglingly inappropriate it was to add frickin’ werewolves to the Lone Ranger myth, Verbinski and Depp agreed to salary cuts and went back to the drawing board, and supposedly the new film won’t have any werewolves.
But it will, apparently, have $215 million worth of production values.
My question is: Why?
I haven’t read the new script, but I’m having a hard time imagining why “The Lone Ranger” would need to cost $215 million. Are Depp’s Tonto and the Masked Man (played by “Social Network” costar Armie Hammer) going to extinguish the great Chicago fire at the end of the movie? Or battle a giant mechanical spider? Or defend Pandora against a military counterattack?
As a boy, I was enthralled by reruns of the 1950s TV version of “The Lone Ranger.” It had no production values to speak of. It didn’t need them. The show — like creators George W. Trendle and Fran Striker Jr.’s original radio plays and comics scripts — weren’t deep, but they were tremendously exciting, and their excitement had nothing to do with scope.
They were all about plot, characterization and in-the-moment decisions. They were action-packed morality plays that pivoted on choices. The Ranger and Tonto were the moral rocks that the bad guys dashed themselves against. The heroes and villains were surrounded by supporting characters and bit players who fell somewhere along the good-evil continuum; much of the suspense in the “Lone Ranger” stories came from the sight of people wrestling with whether to do the right thing or succumb to intimidation or greed.
If filmmakers have a firm grasp on all that, they don’t need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars envisioning the driving of the golden spike or the battle of Little Big Horn, or a tussle between Godzilla and Megalon in the foothills of South Dakota, or whatever they think they need $215 million for. Especially not when they’re making a western, for crying out loud.
Westerns are not about production values. They are about their western-ness, and the filmmakers’ ability to satisfy or subvert the genre’s familiar images and situations. And that’s it.
Mr. Verbinski, if you’re reading this, did you ever see “Tombstone”? A hugely entertaining film, with legs; it replays on TV constantly and millions of people own it on DVD. It cost $25 million in 1993; today it would cost $40 million, and it would still be exactly as much fun, even if you didn’t spend another dime on it. Go down the list of successful modern westerns, or neo-westerns, and you can see the same production cost-to-dramatic payoff ratio repeating itself. “Dances With Wolves,” a visually spectacular and very long movie with a big cast and several stirring action scenes, cost about $22 million back in 1990 — about $40 million today. “Unforgiven” cost $14 million in 1992, and from the looks of it, most of the money went to pay for a rather small and muddy town set; in 2011 money, that’s $23 million. Would “Unforgiven” be a better western, or a better film, period, if it had cost five times as much? What about Joel and Ethan Coen’s most financially successful film, their 2010 remake of “True Grit”? It cost $38 million and grossed a staggering $171 million. Do you know anyone who came out of “True Grit” saying, “I would have liked it better if they’d spent more money on it”?
Some films rise or fall based on the quality of their special effects, sets, costumes and so forth. But would anyone think that “The Lone Ranger” would be one of them? The 1981 feature film version “The Legend of the Lone Ranger” cost as much as that summer’s other retro serial, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — $18 million, or about $44 million at today’s prices. It flopped. Why? Because even though it looked great, it was a tedious, nonsensical film, and untrue to the spirit of the character.
The TV show consisted of little more than footage of the Lone Ranger and Tonto delivering exposition, arguing ethics with other characters, galloping through scrubby ranchland and having fistfights in the same nine sets over and over again, but because it was made with sincerity and energy, viewers loved it. Disney could bankroll a similarly unfussy new movie version of “The Lone Ranger” — a film with a Coen brothers- or Clint Eastwood-level budget, meaning lean — and as long as it was well-cast, well-written, imaginatively photographed and edited, true to the spirit of the character, and featured at least one action sequence scored to “The William Tell Overture,” it could be a “True Grit” or “Unforgiven”-level hit. A $215 million “Lone Ranger” movie would have to make over $700 million — and join the list of the all time biggest box office draws — to be considered a success. I can’t see that happening, even if the film is great. We no longer live in a world in which big-budget westerns make that kind of money, unless they’re transposed to another galaxy and titled “Avatar.”
And here’s the most depressing irony of all: If a hyper-expensive “Lone Ranger” film somehow does become a huge success, it will have everything to do with the appeal of the story, characters and plot, and zero to do with the scope of the production.
But apparently no one involved with the production agrees with that thinking. Story and character are for indie film — and television. Hollywood’s bloated-is-better culture has reached the point where filmmakers and a major studio think that a “Lone Ranger” movie has to be budgeted at roughly half the cost of “Avatar” for it to be considered a worthwhile endeavor. It’s a property, a possible franchise, a toy and video game-generating machine — another thing to be packaged and sold, with or without a personal stamp. It’s also a signifier of personal clout, which means if it’s not staggeringly expensive, it’s not a “real” movie, and thus not worth making.
We live now in a world where you can talk about vaginas in prime time, where elementary children go to school wearing shirts declaring that homework “sucks.” Yet certain words still have the power to shock and outrage. “Retarded.” Some racial and sexual epithets. A derisively uttered “gay.” And the word “rape” — when it’s not about rape.
When Johnny Depp blabbed in the new issue of Vanity Fair that he loathes doing photo shoots — “You just feel like you’re being raped somehow. Raped. The whole thing. It feels like a kind of weird, just weird, man” — the actor opened up a fat can of worms. Turns out some people don’t believe getting your picture taken by Annie Leibovitz is very much like sexual assault at all. “Whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it’s like — you just feel dumb,” he said. “It’s just so stupid.” Yeah, rape is so dopey.
Unsurprisingly, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) promptly took issue with those remarks, sending out a statement that “While photos may feel at times intrusive, being photographed in no way compares to rape — a violent crime which affects another American every two minutes.” RAINN added, diplomatically, that the group “welcomes the opportunity to speak with Mr. Depp and educate him about the real-life experiences faced by survivors every day, and ways that he can work with RAINN to help.”
Even a man who earned roughly $100 million last year — and admits that “if they’re going to pay me the stupid money right now, I’m going to take it” — is entitled to dislike certain aspects of his job. Likewise, just because an actor makes a living in front of cameras doesn’t mean they enjoy being photographed off the set. And Depp, unlike a lot of big stars, is no insensitive motor mouth. He was a tireless advocate for the release of the West Memphis Three and has been a generous benefactor to worthy causes and facilities.
So why did he flub this one? And make no mistake, he did. We use the terminology of both sex and violence all the time to make a point, so perhaps an extreme metaphor didn’t seem extreme when it was leaving his million-dollar lips. We say that we feel screwed over or reamed or stabbed in the back. We say a job is killing us. Everybody knows it’s not meant literally.
Rape is different, though. It’s a crime that still imposes far too much stigma and shame upon its victims, and for that reason alone it’s a word loaded with powerful and harrowing associations. It’s a word that describes the crime that keeps giving — in both the initial attack and in the often dismissive, accusatory way that law enforcement and the victim’s own social circle respond. And unlike getting your picture taken, it’s an act devoid of consent. Bottom line, if you haven’t been raped, maybe you should think before saying any experience you’ve ever had is like being raped.
But though he bungled it with Vanity Far, Depp, to his credit, gets it now. And when met with a reasonable, articulate explanation of why what he said was not cool, he responded in kind. On Wednesday, Depp issued a statement saying that “I am truly sorry for offending anyone in any way. I never meant to. It was a poor choice of words on my part in an effort to explain a feeling. I understand there is no comparison and I am very regretful. In an effort to correct my lack of judgment, please accept my heartfelt apology.” Well played on both sides — no outrage, no backpedaling. Just simple, clear and heartfelt communication — and the hope that others may learn a little something from the whole affair as well. Indeed, when thought through carefully — and deployed with tact and empathy — that’s the power of words.
CANNES, France — So, yeah: I flew thousands of miles across an ocean to crash in an apartment full of Polish people in a party-hearty beachfront town where the neighbors segued sweetly from Björk remixes to “Sweet Home Alabama” at 2 o’clock in the morning, just so I could get up really early with more than 1,000 other masochists and go see a moderately entertaining action-adventure fantasy that will be playing at every shopping mall in the United States come Friday. I guess you won’t be getting the French subtitles below Johnny Depp’s face, and that was so worth it. “On s’empare du navire!” (Loose translation: We kicked your asses!) But you may have noticed that amid that tangled sentence I applied the words “moderately entertaining” to Rob Marshall’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which had its world premiere on Saturday amid a sardine-crush mad scene at the Cannes Film Festival. (I saw a woman pulled out of the crowd of photographers and hauled away in an ambulance.) That’s already a big win for a Disney franchise that had slipped from baroque CGI decadence deep into the Rococo period under previous director and all-around mad scientist Gore Verbinski.
“On Stranger Tides” is something short of a full series reboot, but Marshall — best known for big-budget musicals like “Chicago” and “Nine” — has shed most of the supporting cast and almost all of the super-duper creature effects of the Verbinski trilogy, and that’s mostly a good thing. (The French subtitle is “The Fountain of Youth,” by the way, which is clearer and better, but I guess the writers are crediting Tim Powers’ novel for inspiration.) Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom, Bill Nighy, Stellan Skarsgård and others have departed for Davy Jones’ locker (well, Nighy was already there) or other exotic ports of call. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio focus tightly on Depp’s dapper, roguish Capt. Jack Sparrow and his alternately ferocious and respectful rivalry with the scabrous Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), now a pirate-gone-straight commanding a Royal Navy warship in pursuit of Ponce de León’s rumored Fountain of Youth. Arguably there’s not much to see in Depp’s performance this time around. We’ve seen an awful lot of the fey Keith Richards shtick, and he dials it down a little, intermittently allowing himself to be the decent, likable hero.
Even more important, Marshall delivers old-fashioned swashbuckling action-movie thrills more than computer-engineered grotesquerie. He kicks off the film, for instance, with a fast-moving, cleverly constructed (but not confusing!) chase scene through the streets of London — via chandelier and rope and Judi Dench cameo and horse-and-carriage and exploding coal wagon — that might be the best such sequence in the whole series. We certainly get a couple of new characters during the trans-Atlantic race for the mythical Fountain, which of course begins to resemble a video-game quest (you need two silver chalices, a mermaid’s tear and the blood of Donkey Kong) and the results there are “comme ci, comme ça,” as they say over here. I don’t know what it is about Penélope Cruz acting in English; she speaks the language well enough and she’s still plenty attractive, but something’s missing, whether it’s confidence or psychological fire or fundamental Espanish-ness. Anyway we’re supposed to accept her as Angelica, a convent girl Jack seduced and abandoned years ago who also turns out to maybe, possibly, be the long-lost daughter of the infamous pirate Blackbeard (Ian McShane).
Yes, I said that Ian McShane, whose character on “Deadwood” may go down as the most profane in the medium’s history, plays “the pirate all other pirates fear,” as Jack puts it, captain of the dreadful black ship called Queen Anne’s Revenge, with its skeleton figurehead and its zombiefied crew. (They aren’t zombies, in the usual movie sense; Elliott and Rossio use the term in its anthropological-historical meaning, which may be a first for this franchise.) Handsome but decayed, evil down to the roots of his soul and a few meters below that, McShane’s Blackbeard is the best special effect in “On Stranger Tides,” which also features a bunch of sexy-scary mermaids with long glistening fishtails and a final MacGuffin-destination at the fabled Fountain of Youth itself, which resembles a Roman ruin from an 18th-century English landscape painting.
Indeed, if there’s a problem with the fact that this movie is marginally more realistic than the preceding three, it’s because it made me think a little bit, and that’s never a good idea in a movie that’s based (OK, at several removes) on a Disneyland ride. So we’re somewhere around the year 1720, and Jack, Blackbeard, Barbossa and the Spanish fleet are all chasing the Fountain of Youth discovered two centuries earlier by the conquistador Juan Ponce de León, right? Great. (Let us note that later chroniclers claimed that Ponce de León was actually seeking a cure for impotence; he was 500 years too early for Viagra and in need of the Fountain of Whoomph, if you know what I mean and I think you do.) But the place the dude actually explored was Florida. Is that where we’re supposed to be when all these characters go trekking through the jungle and climbing over mountains and plunging into canyons? The primeval mountains and canyons and jungles of Florida? Is that closer to Boca or to West Palm?
OK, I’m getting distracted, and if I go on any longer in this vein I’ll start asking whether the Fountain of Youth in this movie, with its Roman Empire bathhouse look, supports some kind of crackpot, hyper-diffusionist archaeological theory. The main point, I guess, is that while a lot of people are predicting a disappointing summer for Hollywood (and I generally concur), “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” injects new vigor into a megabucks franchise and makes for a perfectly acceptable night out. Now, the movie’s too long and you can only watch so much swordfighting and the repartee’s really not that great and if you see it that’s two and a half hours of your life you’ll never get back, just because you wanted to see Ian McShane and some cute mermaids. I report, you decide.
CANNES, France — Sunlight is glistening off the distant blue-and-white breakers, and vaguely famous-looking young women with impossibly high heels pause in their stroll down the Boulevard de la Croisette to watch workmen tacking down the red carpet outside the Palais des Festivals. It is time once again for the beautiful, the pseudo-beautiful, the brooding and the parasitical to reconvene on the Côte d’Azur for global cinema’s greatest carnival. The Cannes Film Festival, whose 64th edition launches on Wednesday evening with the premiere of Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” does not command the same level of worldwide attention as the Oscars and probably never did. But as an annual celebration of the movies’ marriage of art and commerce — and as a trashy, glamorous, nosebleed-snobbish and ultra-populist spectacle — Cannes remains unlike any other event on the planet.
As is customary, this year’s Cannes lineup features the world premieres of enormous Hollywood productions aimed at an audience in the hundreds of millions, intimate personal films that may almost literally never be seen again, and nearly everything in between. Early on Saturday morning, the horde of journalists will pack into the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the legendary main auditorium here, to see “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” with Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz, a movie we could have seen at home with less glitz but a great deal more comfort. A couple of days later we’ll do it again for Terrence Malick’s long-awaited “The Tree of Life,” with Brad Pitt and Sean Penn (which was initially expected at Cannes last year).
Those two films may well be the biggest news events of the next week — but in all honesty it isn’t those movies that make Cannes so great. It’s the fact that I can see those movies and also see, say, the newest film from little-known Japanese director Naomi Kawase (a personal fave) or “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” the debut of young Canadian director Sean Durkin. There seems almost no end to the potential riches on the Riviera beachfront this spring; picking just 10 films to spotlight in advance has been tough. (There, I’ve gone and jinxed it.) I’ve selected five movies with reasonably high star quotients, name directors and obvious audience appeal, and five more that are just as exciting (to me, anyway) but are flying a bit more under the radar, at least from the perspective of ordinary American moviegoers.
Of course this is all guesswork. Here’s what we actually know, so far: 1) It might sound lame to open Cannes with a 21st-century Woody Allen movie. OK, it actually is lame, but one of the most inexplicable things about Europe is how much people here love them some Woody. I guess it’s part of the love-hate relationship with America that plays such an enormous role in this continent’s cultural life, but even in those terms it doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, good, bad or indifferent, the Woodman’s cinematic postcard to the French capital will be a huge deal here. 2) Some things proclaimed here as masterpieces will be ignored by the world, while other things mocked by the Cannes critics will make zillions. 3) When you hear about a movie here that provokes booing and widespread walkouts? Seek it out and see it, when you get the chance; it’s probably good. 4) I will spend almost two weeks in a beach resort adjacent to one of the world’s great food and wine regions, and will dine largely on sandwiches and pizza and come home without a tan. The suffering! It’s hard to bear sometimes.
BIG NAMES
The Tree of Life A personal, family-based film that stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn and is also, somehow, about the evolutionary history of life on earth. A beautiful if utterly inscrutable trailer. A legendary director (Malick, still best known for “Badlands” and “Days of Heaven”) viewed by some as a visionary master and by others as a pretentious ass, whose filmmaking career appears half-paralyzed by indecision and procrastination. These are the mysterious ingredients of “Tree of Life,” which is almost guaranteed to be a major debate topic here.
Melancholia Any Lars von Trier film is guaranteed to be a media circus at Cannes, and whether you like the guy or hate him, give him credit: He gets people to pay attention to small-audience art-house movies, and that’s not easy. “Melancholia” appears to be an odd, Trier-ian blend of the country-house wedding movie with a “Donnie Darko”-style story about the end of the world, and presumably won’t horrify and galvanize audiences quite the way “Antichrist” did two years ago. No genital mutilation! A box-office plus but a P.R. minus! An intriguing transatlantic ensemble includes Kirsten Dunst, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Charlotte Rampling.
Drive Take cult director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose last two movies (“Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising”) established him as a prodigious, visionary, almost uncontrolled talent while barely making a nickel. Add rising star Ryan Gosling of “Half Nelson” and “Blue Valentine.” Mix with an implausibly large budget and some fast cars and you have an action-adventure movie that’s almost certainly the most unlikely competition entry at Cannes this year, and an object of worldwide yearning by film geeks. There doesn’t seem to be an embeddable online trailer yet, but here are the first two minutes. Sold!
The Skin I Live In Longtime art-house fave Pedro Almodóvar returns to Cannes without recent muse Penélope Cruz — but with Antonio Banderas, star of several of his groundbreaking ’80s flicks. Banderas plays a plastic surgeon with a bizarre Frankensteinian obsession in what’s described as a 1940s-flavored horror melodrama. Despite numerous premieres here, Almodóvar has still never won the Palme d’Or, and yes, that’s a hint and a hunch.
Restless Gus Van Sant’s latest is an intriguing-looking outsider love story, starring Mia Wasikowska as a cancer patient and Henry Hopper (son of Dennis) as an alienated young man whose best friend is a WWII Japanese ghost. But is it a commercial Van Sant movie in the “Good Will Hunting”/”Finding Forrester” vein, or a Euro-friendly art-house oddity in the “Elephant”/”Paranoid Park” vein? Either way, it’s the opener in Un Certain Regard, Cannes’ slightly artier second-string competition, which is often where the most exciting films are found. And Van Sant is a contender for the Jerry Lewis-Woody Allen awards, which convey the undying loyalty of European culture-vultures upon American filmmakers who are all but forgotten at home. (Other recent nominees: Jim Jarmusch, James Gray, Abel Ferrara, Lodge Kerrigan.)
MIDSIZE AND BELOW
We Need to Talk About Kevin It’s taken a long time for Scottish director Lynne Ramsay (“Morvern Callar”) to bring Lionel Shriver’s acclaimed novel about a troubled teen and the aftermath of a school shooting to the screen, but Ramsay has a rep as Britain’s undiscovered secret and expectations are huge. Indie heroes Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly — an unlikely but irresistible pairing — star as the estranged parents of the titular Kevin (Ezra Miller).
Hara-Kiri: The Death of a Samurai Coming hard on the heels of ultra-prolific Japanese genre maniac Takashi Miike’s samurai opus “13 Assassins” comes his next samurai movie — and it’s the first 3-D film ever included in the Cannes competition! (To be clear: Other 3-D films have been shown at Cannes in non-competition slots, including the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” entry this year.)
This Must Be the Place Hardly anyone in America saw Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s dazzling “Il Divo,” an Oliver Stone-meets-Scorsese political phantasmagoria that was one of the genuine cinematic breakthroughs of recent years. Now Sorrentino turns to English-language film with this eagerly anticipated fable about an aging rock star (Sean Penn) who’s hunting for a Nazi war criminal. We definitely haven’t seen that movie before. Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch and Harry Dean Stanton co-star.
Oslo, August 31st Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s “Reprise” is one of the terrific undiscovered movies of the last decade, an exhilarating comic fable about art and life that splits the difference between Godard and, say, “High Fidelity” with tremendous cinematic craft, an irrepressible sense of humor and genuine heart. (Fun fact: Trier is indeed a cousin of Lars von Trier.) Trier’s new film “Oslo, August 31st” — that’s when and where the main character intends to kill himself — screens in the lower-wattage Certain Regard competition, and I will happily skip other things to catch it.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia He has a subzero commercial profile in the United States, but Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (“Climates,” “Three Monkeys”) has developed a modest but intense international following for his brooding, Bergmanesque urban dramas. (Which are never officially even a little bit about such “Turkish” questions as the role of Islam or the ambiguous, intercontinental status of his country, by the way, but may indirectly wind up being about those things after all.) If this story about a doctor living on the rural steppes (I’m guessing it’s meant to recall Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”) is the masterpiece Ceylan hasn’t quite made yet — well, OK, no, it won’t change much of anything. But people in Cannes and in Turkey will sure be excited, and you’ll be able to watch the movie on VOD in like six months.
I am Dreaming of Dreaming 
Thoughts on a Word: Handsome 
A new breed of porn CEO — female 
The Oscar favorite no one really likes 
My Facebook angst 
He was our eyes 
Painting as Paris burned 
Quick Hits: Yuja Wang plays live 
How to solve the boomer retirement crisis 
The science of rubbernecking 
38 years of self-love 
TV’s golden age of opening credits 
