Elizabeth Debicki Cannes Film Festival 2013

The Bold and the Beautiful: Cannes 2013

Gentle reader,

The Cannes Film Festival has finally ended and I don’t know about you but I’m completely clueless about any of the films that were screened other than the bombastic Gatsby adaptation and the critically more successful bio-fiction about Liberace.  I did outfit a few clients for the festival and consider myself extremely fortunate that they were all working more or less behind the scenes, selling films and handling press, rather than navigating the endless red carpet events. 

The Girl With The Orchid Medallion

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough

Shortly after his disastrous foray into animation with Arthur and the Invisibles in 2006, semi-auteur Luc Besson announced he was retiring from directing.  Steven Soderbergh did the same thing last year.  Both have been directing since they were in their mid-twenties, and the process has clearly long since lost its appeal.  As Marcello Mastroianni, playing an uninspired director in Federico Fellini’s autobiographical 8 ½, says in a panic to his lading lady Claudia Cardinale, Ma non c’ho niente più da dire!”  But I have nothing left to say!

"Next motherfucker tells me I have a 'bootie like Beyoncé,' I'll blow a hole in his groin with the Mossberg 500. How's my hair?"

Or, as Michael Bay’s putative natural father John Frankenheimer—who was so furious that Bay claimed to be his son that he tried to disprove it, but failed—said in an NPR interview shortly before he died, “Directing is for younger men.”  What Frankenheimer, who directed the seminal thriller French Connection, was referring to was the sort of hyper-kinetic action adventure films he helped pioneer with Connection, and which his natural son took to an extreme that I am not alone in considering unwatchable, despite the fact my dog Henry co-starred in Bay’s graduating student film at Wesleyan University.

The Dead Shall Rock The Earth

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

Zombies are dead.

Well, of course they’re dead, but I speak in terms of pop culture trends. The second season of AMC’s TV series The Walking Dead is alleged to return in the fall, and Milla Jovovich threatens a fifth Resident Evil movie for 2012, proving that audiences in overseas markets will watch anything that’s filmed in English. So that’s something. Right?

Milla will eat your brains, too.

Maybe not. An IMDb scan of this summer’s wide-release movie titles doesn’t turn up a single case of the zed word. Hell, when George Romero, the guy who invented the modern zombie film, can’t get an undead flick into wide release, it’s time to shoot this genre in the head. His 2009 entry, Survival of the Dead, grossed a massive $54,000 in its opening weekend. That’s less than Charlie Sheen spends on hookers every Saturday.

Good God, I just made a Jay Leno joke. Is this what rock bottom feels like?