The Screengrab : marjane satrapi

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:00:00 GMT

The Best:

SPIDER-MAN 2 (2004)

An expansive entertainer with a midnight movie background trying to break into the grown-up big-studio world, Sam Raimi was a good boy while directing the first Spider-Man movie; he delivered the origin-story installment of the franchise with as much imagination and style as it could handle, all while maintaining the clear, easy-to-read line of a man trying to get a job done. The sequel gave him more of a chance to cut loose, and good man that he is, he availed himself of it. Tobey Maguire remains a perfect Peter Parker, but the real surprise here is Alfred Molina, who, assigned the role of one of the most repulsive supervillains in the union, renders him scary, understandable, and weirdly likable in about equal measure, a fit character for a tragic opera if tragic operas had chain saws in them. It remains the most successful movie not just in this particular franchise but in the brief history of Marvel Comics movies, and it deserves to be.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

Marjane Satrapi’s alternately charming and harrowing memoir of growing up in Iran after the fundamentalist revolution may have seemed like an odd choice for a successful movie adaptation. But it’s really not that hard to figure out: her simple, descriptive lines and curves proved to be perfect for animation. Persepolis also showed the wisdom of allowing the original author of a comic to take the helm of a film adaptation; Satrapi proved to have excellent instincts as a screenwriter, and as an animator, she knew just when to keep it simple and when to make it more elegant and elaborate. It’s a beautiful-looking movie, considering how little it cost and how simple it comes across on screen. But the story at the heart of it all is what sustains Persepolis; despite its setting at such a grim and tumultuous time, it’s still very much the story of a little girl who grows too quickly into a young woman, with all the pains and pleasures that could happen to such a woman anywhere in the world. Satrapi leavens the story (acted with top-shelf casts in both the English and French versions) with humor and historical perspective, and she nicely embraces sentimentality when remembering her family while refusing it for herself. It must have been quite difficult to pull off all these complex balances in such a short running time, but Satrapi and her collaborator Vincent Parronaud accomplish the feat nicely.

The Worst:

THE PUNISHER (2004)

Movies and comics have long had an incestuous history -- the original Batman comics drew on memories of Zorro, Robin Hood, The Cat and the Canary, and Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs just for its basic character designs -- but few major comics characters have so clearly been the result of the comics companies trying to keep pace with changing standards in movie heroes as the Punisher. First appearing in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1974 -- a time when action stars such as Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were redefining the American tough guy as a remorseless vigilante and blood murderer -- the Punisher doesn't have super powers. Instead, he has an arsenal of weapons, a black muscle shirt with a skull logo on it, and a chip on his shoulder. He's a killer -- which at the time of his debut set him apart from traditional superheroes -- but he only kills gangsters, which is supposed to complicate things. Even so, the powers that be were uncomfortable enough with him that they could never quite make up their minds whether he was supposed to be an edgy good guy or a conflicted villain. (His mere presence on the cover of a comic book guaranteed monster sales, though, so he was assured of many, many opportunities to return and make the bosses uneasy. Even so, it would be a dozen years before the company swallowed deep and gave him his own series.) Starting with the first, direct-to-video version in 1989, starring Dolph Lundgren sans skull T-shirt, there have been three attempts at a Punisher movie, with three different actors playing the Punisher, and they all just look like grade-B killing-machine flicks. As for which of them is the worst, well, there's really not a lot to choose from, but I'm giving the second one, starring Thomas Jane, the nod over the first one and last year's Punisher: War Zone, starring Ray Stevenson (of the HBO series Rome), if only because it probably got seen by the most (unlucky) people and wasted the time of some talented actors. That last category is not one that the colorless lug Thomas Jane belongs in, but even after all these thousands upon thousands of hours spent watching rotten movies and rottener comic books, we're still human enough to blanch at the sight of the late Roy Scheider getting a paycheck for being gunned down at a family picnic or a flailing John Travolta being dragged by a bumper through an exploding car lot.

SUPERMAN III (1983)

This was the third and last of the Superman films produced by the father-and-son team of Ilya and Alexander Salkind; after it was released, the Salkinds unloaded the franchise onto the notorious team of Golan and Globus, which produced a cut-rate entry, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, having obtained Christopher Reeve's continued participation by agreeing to shape the script around a timely anti-nuclear weapons message. That movie is, conceivably, even worse than this one, but at least it's an underfunded, half-assed Superman movie. This is an overblown, ill-conceived Richard Pryor movie with Superman along for the ride. Or maybe it's a Superman movie that was hopelessly twisted out of shape by the effort to shoehorn Pryor into it after he'd agree to do it. (Pryor was just coming off a year where he was listed as the number one box office attraction in America; if he'd agreed to it, he'd have been shoehorned into The French Lieutenant's Woman.) The filmmakers never did figure out how to use Pryor; they might have worried that audiences wouldn't want him to be the bad guy, so they cast him as an employee of the bad guy (Robert Vaughan), and never fully made the leap to having him switch sides and become Superman's friend. Other plot developments and details, such as having Superman turn bad after exposure to near-beer Kryptonite (requiring an intervention by the spirit of Clark Kent), and the jazz singer Annie Ross' role as Vaughan's sister, suggest that the Salkinds tried to economize by hiring the writing staff one morning, firing them at the end of the day, and assembling the script from notes that they'd scribbled down on their lunch wrappers.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Rep Report (February 27 - March 5)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster. The retrospective, which runs for a couple of weeks, also includes Alan Rudolph and writer Bud Shrake's joyously entertaining Songwriter, in which Rip demonstrates that he may be the only man alive who can turn Willie Nelson into his straight man; the little-seen 1970 Tropic of Cancer, starring Rip as Henry Miller; Milton Moses Ginsburg's Coming Apart, a virtual one-man show with Rip as a demented psychiatrist filming himself in a mirror; Beyond the Law, another Mailer psychodrama; and the more recent 40 Shades of Blue, starring the grizzled older Torn as a legendary Southern music producer. There's also a special program labeled "A Rip Torn Miscellanea", consisting of "rare footage of Torn, including documentation of some of his renowned stage performances, forgotten talk-show appearances, excerpts from some of his lesser-known film and TV work," including a half-hour TV film from 1976 in which he plays Walt Whitman.

SAN FRANCISCO: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Fearless: Strand Releasing Turns 20" is in full swing and continues through Saturday and continues from March 6 through March 8. This celebration of the risk-taking distributor's films includes a double feature from the neglected French director-actor Jacques Nolot, Before I Forget and Porn Theater.

BERKELEY: "Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran" at Pacific Film Archives (March 1 - April 29) is a "celebration of women filmmakers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as the diaspora in Europe" that offers "a remarkable geographic, cultural, and stylistic range. In documentaries, features, and experimental works, the directors depict urban attitudes and rural traditions, the dream of escape and the isolation of exile, and the comforts and entrapments of family." Director-actress Niki Karimi will be present at the opening-day screenings of her One Night and A Few Days Later... The program also includes Iranian director Marziyeh Meshkini's wrenching The Day I Became a Woman and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's animated memoir Persepolis.

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI: The True/False Film Festival, which kicked off last night and runs through the weekend, is an international documentary festival with a fast-growing reputation based on the breadth and quality of its selections, which last year included this year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature, Man on Wire. indieWIRE has an interview with festival founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz.

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

In the same way graphic novels like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis have expanded the thematic possibilities of pen and ink comics beyond run-of-the-mill superhero adventures and the romantic entanglements of the gang at Riverdale High, so too does this pristine cinematic adaptation demonstrate the ability of animation to lend a necessary artistic distance to depictions of events that would simply be too grim or painful to watch otherwise. Satrapi’s autobiographical tale (which she co-scripted and co-directed with her graphic novel collaborator Vincent Paronnaud) tackles big subjects like the Iranian Revolution, Islamic fundamentalism and the agony of adolescence with visual flair and heartfelt humanity, while the voice performances (by an effervescent Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve and her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni (as Satrapi) are far more three-dimensional than many of 2007’s live action female roles.

WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? (1988)

On the one hand, the inclusion of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a bit of a cheat, since parts of the movie are live action...on the other hand, there’s a long tradition of films that combine ‘toons with real people, from Gertie the Dinosaur and Mary Poppins to Paula Abdul’s timeless duet with MC Skat Cat in her video for “Opposites Attract.” More important, though, is the unique and historic worlds-colliding nature of the project, which brings together a veritable who’s who of animation's golden age gliterrati in a mainline pleasure shot of pop culture ecstasy equivalent to a Star Wars sequel (NOT written by George Lucas) where Han, Chewie, Luke, Leia, R2D2, C3P0 and Yoda somehow team up with Captain Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard and all the rest of the Star Trek gang on Babylon Five to help Ellen Ripley battle Aliens. Or, to put it in slightly less embarrassingly geeky terms: the scene where Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse appear together on screen for the first and only time kicks the historic Robert De Niro/Al Pacino summit in Michael Mann’s Heat right square in the keister. I remember watching Roger Rabbit for the first time in a theater and hearing an audible gasp from the audience at the moment in the film when a live-action studio exec pulls up the shade in his office, only to find Dumbo hovering just outside: just the kind of giddy, weightless moment of gleeful surprise that animation was made for...plus, the controversy surrounding the public’s laser-disc discovery of a single-frame image of Jessica Rabbit with no panties was a perfect farewell joke from animation’s salty past as it passed its torch to the gleaming digital age.

THE INCREDIBLES (2004)

Brad Bird has developed a reputation as nothing less than a one-man Coen Brothers of the animation world. Like the Coens, his movies are crammed full of homages and references to other films; like the Coens, he’s proven adept at handling films in a wide variety of genres; like the Coens, he loves camera pyrotechnics and visual tricks of all sorts; and like the Coens, his idiosyncratic personality comes through in every project he tackles. The ex-Simpsons staffer has grown into the most immediately recognizable directorial presence in American animation, and this stunning (and often hilarious) take on the mythology of superheroes is possibly his greatest achievement. It’s almost pointless to praise the astonishing visuals, which, even four years down the road, don’t seem to have been surpassed by the ever-changing technology curve; but the real treat here is the deft blend of a solid action story featuring plenty of physical humor and rock-‘em-sock-‘em fight scenes for the kids with a fantastically sophisticated storytelling style for the adults, including visual callback to everything from Saul Bass and James Bond to the Fantastic Four. It’s also a movie well worth owning on DVD, with a ton of bonuses including kid-pleasing animated shorts and a whole cornucopia of hidden jokes for the grown-ups. The Incredibles is that rare breed of movie that really does have something for everyone.

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)

1988 was a banner year for Japanese animation. While Akira was opening up new vistas for the possibilities of “Japanimation” to convey dark and heavy sci-fi/action themes, Isao Takahata was showing the world that the same medium was capable of telling small, quiet, emotional stories that had just as much power and impact. Based on a tragicomic memoir by Akiyuki Nosaka, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of a young Japanese boy who, along with his sister, faces the massive changes and upheavals that came with the Second World War. Takahata had himself survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and the book struck a particularly personal chord with him; he decided he would make his animated adaptation – produced by Studio Ghibli at the same time as Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro – as realistic as possible, including the decision, unusual in animation involving children, to cast age-appropriate voice actors in all the roles. One of the most shocking things about the film is that it begins on a jarringly tragic note, with the death of the narrator: the rest of the film chronicles the inevitable events that lead up to it, devastatingly portraying how, in trying times, even those with the best of intentions can make irrevocably bad decisions. An incredibly moving, terrible sad, and beautifully made film, and an unsparing portrait of the eternal costs of war.

Click Here for Part One, Part Two, Part Four, & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce

DVD Digest for June 24, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings the release of several new Criterions, the latest DVD from a blogosphere favorite, and a box-set tribute to a late, great British director.

For many DVD fans, this is the week that Criterion releases Anthony Mann’s The Furies and Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain in stories. But while both of these titles are certainly worthy, the new DVD that most interests me this week is actually Zeitgeist’s Derek Jarman Glitterbox, containing four of the maverick filmmaker’s works. The best-known title in the box is his 1986 film Caravaggio, which features early performances from Sean Bean and Jarman friend/frequent collaborator Tilda Swinton. But also justifying the price are 1993’s Wittgenstein and 1985’s The Angelic Conversation, the latter of which is only available in the box set. Finally, there’s the strange case of Blue, Jarman’s final film, also included here. While watching a film that consists entirely of a blue background accompanied by various voiceovers and sound effects, it’s nonetheless a must for Jarman fans, or even those who are curious about his life. Made as he was losing his eyesight due to AIDS-related illness, Blue is almost certainly the closest Jarman came to making a cinematic confession. You may not watch it again and again, but it demands to be seen at least once, and thanks to DVD, now everyone has that opportunity. Of course, if you’re looking for a more upbeat gay-friendly DVD, there’s always Xanadu: Magical Music Edition (Universal).

This week’s most noteworthy new release comes to us from our friends at Benten Films, Matthias Gleisner’s The Free Will. A prizewinner at the 2007 Berlinale, The Free Will tells the story of a convicted sex offender who finds himself struggling with life following his release from prison. The first foreign-language release from Benten, the DVD also includes a commentary by Gleisner and star/co-writer Jürgen Vogel, along with the film’s original theatrical trailer and a new essay on the film by critic David Fear. As always, it’s good to see what the Benten boys (Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis) have in store for us, and The Free Will should be no exception.

Other notable recent releases coming to DVD this week include Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which features both French- and English-dubbed versions; Martin McDonagh’s agreeably salty In Bruges (Universal); Ryan Reynolds romancing a trio of hotties in Definitely, Maybe (Universal); Roland Emmerich’s latest assault on storytelling coherence and subtlety 10,000 B.C. (Warner, also Blu-Ray); The Spiderwick Chronicles (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), Hollywood’s latest failed attempt to create a new Potter-like franchise; John Sayles’ barely-released Honeydripper (Universal); and the strident Ferris Bueller wannabe Charlie Bartlett (MGM).

Finally… like surfing? Own a Blu-Ray player? Then we’ve got good news for you, as Step Into Liquid (Lionsgate) receives a Blu-Ray only release this week. Otherwise, if you’re looking for non-recent releases on Blu-Ray this week, I’m afraid you’re rather stuck.

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten (Part 2)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

ERIN BROCKOVICH (2000)

Julia Roberts’ breakthrough film, Pretty Woman (about the magical romantic possibilities of being a whore) was a monster hit, if not exactly a high water mark in the history of feminism (be sure to look for it on our upcoming Girl Dis-Empowering Top Ten). Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, was the flipside of the equation: a realistically desperate woman who succeeds in spite of, rather than because of her prominent cleavage...and in this quasi-true story, the prize at the end of the fairy tale isn’t a rich millionaire, but a million dollars the single-mother-turned-investigative-paralegal earns for herself (as a bonus from Albert Finney's lawyer/mentor Ed Masry) through brains and tenacity during the course a battle royale with an evil...uh, utility company. And talk about empowering: Roberts went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress, she and director Steven Soderbergh got to hang out with George Clooney and screenwriter Susannah Grant went on to write and direct...Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner and Kevin Smith. Which must have been nice for her.

ALIENS (1986)

There were kick-ass female action heroes before Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, of course. Sigourney Weaver in the original Alien comes to mind, for instance, as does Linda Hamilton in the original Terminator, Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and so on and so forth, all the way back to real life ass-kickers like Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra. But the Ripley of James Cameron’s Aliens really redefined the female action star for the modern age. For one thing, she’s the star of the movie, and she’s tough all the way through, taking command of a doomed rescue mission to an alien infested colony when the indecisive (male) space marine commander in charge of the mission literally falls down on the job, then later rescuing her man-sel in distress potential love interest, Michael Biehn’s Corporal Dwayne Hicks. But Weaver’s heroine isn’t just a muscled, monosyllabic Rambo with tits: she’s a deeply human character who draws superhuman strength not from extra testosterone or the bite of a radioactive spider, but from the sweet maternal bond she forms with an orphaned girl in the midst of all the gunplay and explosions of the masculine world...at least, that is, until David Fincher went and fucked everything up in Alien 3...but I’ll save that rant until our Top Ten list of great movies with incredibly aggravating unnecessary sequels.

MEAN GIRLS (2004)

Mean Girls began with a book by Rosalind Wiseman, Queen Bees and Wannabes, about high school social hierarchies and how they shape the lives of those who pass before them. It is a serious journalistic-sociological study, which apparently came as a bit of a surprise to Tina Fey after she agreed to take on the job of adapting it into a movie. Fey, who appears in the movie as the math teacher Ms. Norbury, came up with a story about Cady (Lindsay Lohan), who moves to Chicago and enters her first American public school at 16 after being home-schooled in Africa by parents who emphasize the value of learning, and so has to endure the culture shock of discovering that "education" in the States is all about bureaucratic rules on one side and social anxiety and status on the other. Out of a mixture of anthropological fascination and a half-conscious but real desire to fit in, Cady "infiltrates" the top clique of pretty girls -- a process that involves her pretending to be dumber than she is in order to snare a boy she likes -- and begins to maneuver her way to the lead position by outbitching them in ways that suggest a Machiavellian Heather. The movie's official mouthpiece is Fey's Ms. Norbury, who ultimately gets Cady to embrace her better side by forcibly inducting her into the school's "Mathletes" team. She also has a strange but deeply felt scene where she hustles all the girls together in the gym and lectures them about why they behave the way they do and why it's not good, though the whole point of Cady's character would seem to be that it's possible to know all that and still find the seductive pull of the status sirens impossible to resist. A mere four years since its release, the most poignant thing about Mean Girls now may be that it serves as a reminder of a more innocent time when it was possible to cast Lindsay Lohan as a sensitive brainiac who, after a brief slumming phase, manages to get herself under control.

WAITING TO EXHALE (1995)

This episodic drama about the rocky-but-hopeful romantic lives of four black women in Phoenix (get it, Greek mythology buffs?) shocked the shit out of the industry by becoming one of the major sleeper hits of the '90s. It also surprised movie critics, who tended to notice that it kind of sucks. It's also arguable whether it merits inclusion in any discussion of movies with positive female role models: all of the members of its central quartet come across as a little brain-damaged, and not just because of how eager they are to define themselves as failures or successes depending on whether they've managed to land a man. (The director, Forest Whitaker, managed to wangle some money from HBO after the premiere of Sex and the City, claiming that the network had ripped him off, and it's true that the movie shares most of what's objectionable about the TV show.) But the public embrace of the movie, and the way it cowed professional opinion makers, marks some kind of landmark moment in empowering the audience, especially if you define empowerment as doing the hucksters' jobs for them. Viewers who loved the movie, especially black women, hit back at criticism of it so hard that newspapers and magazines actually started publishing editorials and what amounted to counter-reviews denouncing the people who had been so insensitive to the entertainment needs of those who wanted overplayed, demented soap operas geared to their own demographic group. The movie helped get a number of movies starring black women greenlit, but its real lasting influence can best be seen in the critical reaction to a movie like Dreamgirls, which inspired many mumbly, mealy-mouthed reviews by writers who clearly thought that it stank but also thought that it was going to be another phenomenon and were afraid of being seen as coming down too hard on the wrong side of it. For an example of what this looks like in practice, compare the Dreamgirls review that Slate critic Dana Stevens wrote when the movie was released , and her review of Hairspray, where she led off by revealing what she really thought of Dreamgirls -- six months later, when she thought no one was looking. Waiting to exhale can take many forms.

PERSEPOLIS (2007)

It’s one thing to talk about how women are empowered by watching the adventures of a fictional female space marine, lady cop, or teenage devil-slayer. But it’s quite another to consider the triumph over sexism and oppression represented in the animated big-screen adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful, powerful graphic novel, Persepolis. Satrapi was born in Iran, not too long before the Islamic revolution against the corrupt and brutal Shah by the fundamentalist Ayatollahs. Her father was a respected civil engineer and her mother was an international journalist – living symbols of the new, modernized Iran that hoped to take its place among the elite nations. This aspiration was crushed with the Islamic revolution and the subsequent war with Iran, both of which Satrapi lived through as she and the women of her family (liberated all, three generations back) struggled to adjust to a new reality where they could be imprisoned for letting too much of their faces show in public. She managed to escape to Europe, but it was never home to her, and she eventually returned, hoping to balance her need to be in the country that was her true home with her need to be respected and taken seriously as a woman. Satrapi has always made it a point to illustrate the fact that there is more to Iran than the caricature of out-of-control religious fundamentalists, and in the scene where Satrapi, as a college art student, stands up to a panel of men who insist that her education take a back seat to their sexist dogma, it gives a stirring picture of a country that bristles at its every restriction.

Click here for Part One!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

Tehran as Toon Town

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Marjane Satrapi, the brains and heart behind Persepolis, the animated film based on her autobiographical comics about growing up in the wake of the 1979 Iranian rvolution, talks to Nancy Ramsey about turning her life into art, and about not knowing just how her home nation's government might like to reward her for it. "First of all, I'm not revealing stuff that nobody knows, there have been hundreds of documentaries on this. I'm against all fanatics -- Muslim, Jewish, Christian, secular, Communist fanatics. This is about repression, the idea of, 'If you don't think like me, you are my enemy and so I have to kill you.' This idea doesn't belong to a special place." Satrapi had a personal trumph when the film was shown in a Paris suburb where "most of the population there are Muslim, and they're poor. A thousand people came, and they were applauding for one hour. They saw the humanity in the story, its personal point of view. They understood I'm not judging. I'm asking questions." The film, which was a French entry at Cannes last spring and is now the French submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, has been protested by the Iranian government, and Satrapi, who hasn't been home since 2000, has no plans of going back to act them what the problem is. "The problem is, there's no rule book. They don't tell you, 'No, you can't do this.' But they throw you in jail for doing it."

Pop Goes the World

Peter Smith — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Wherever the name of Iggy Pop appears, a bit of bizarre film casting is sure to follow. While The Passenger, a biopic of young Iggy (supposedly to be played by bug-eyed hobbit Elijah Wood – speaking of bizarre casting) seems to be in development limbo, the punk legend himself is keeping busy. Fresh off of playing a six-year-old version of ex-Defense Department maniac-in-chief Donald Rumsfeld on Comedy Central’s dismal Li’l’ Bush: Resident of the United States, Ig has decided to stick with animation, playing, of all things, the politically active uncle of Marjane Satrapi in the American version of her coming-of-age film Persepolis. Pop’s brother (and Satrapi’s father) will be voiced by Sean Penn. Go figure. — Leonard Pierce