The 64th Festival de Cannes has officially been taken over by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. In addition the world premiere of The Tree of Life, the Hollywood power couple is also celebrating the purchase of Jolie's directorial debut. Click ahead to find out the title of her controversial Bosnian war drama, and what other major future releases found possible distribution in the French Riviera over the weekend.
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The Tree of Life press conference this morning was almost as hot a ticket as the screening itself. I wandered by to see if there was any chance of funneling myself in, à la française, but nothing doing. It's now clear, though, that the reclusive Malick did not show up for the press conference with stars Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, as much as his many fans here had hoped he would.
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Every day, critics and journalists exiting the Palais must fight through throngs of onlookers holding up hopeful hand-drawn signs, begging for invitations to the evening's highly restricted screenings (not that most of us are able to provide them). This morning, as I was leaving the screening of Tree of Life, I saw a young man holding a placard on which he'd scrawled, "I would die for an invitation to Tree of Life." Oh, my dear boy, I certainly hope not.
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Despite what you may be thinking, the most elusive and sought-after figure on the Croisette hasn't been Johnny Depp. Here at Cannes, where film-geekery runs high, everyone is wondering: Will the notoriously reclusive Terrence Malick emerge from the shadows for a personal appearance? He's become the "Where's Waldo?" of the festival.
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In a curious but pleasant development, a latecomer to the Cannes competition lineup, announced just a week before the festival began, has suddenly become a possible front-runner for the Palme d'Or. Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist, a silent film shot in Hollywood in black-and-white, screened this morning, and its sly charms seemed to win over a sizable portion of the audience -- including me.
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Rob Marshall's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the most modest picture in the Pirates franchise since the 2003 Curse of the Black Pearl -- which doesn't mean it's necessarily modest. On Stranger Tides, shot in 3-D, offers more muted special effects, more swashbuckling and swordplay and perhaps fewer needless plot twists than either the 2006 Dead Man's Chest or the 2007 At World's End. Both of those movies took everything that was casual and fun about the first picture and shackled it with million-dollar handcuffs. They were expensive-looking and clumsy, out to impress us rather than settle for anything so mundane as to simply entertain us.
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If you've seen even a modest number of European art-house films in your lifetime, you're familiar with the following formula: Act I, child with problems (emotional problems, family problems, what have you) is introduced. Act II, said confused, troubled child gets into big trouble by seeking out the wrong kind of father figure, committing a misdeed in a fit of frustration, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time; luckily, a kind someone comes to the rescue, offering the troubled child some respite and a dim ray of hope. Will it last forever? Do you even need to ask?
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A Cannes-style queue has a curious shape. It's not really a line at all, but more of a funnel -- you can stay at the end for ages, while unassumingly pushy types creep forward from the sides in a barely discernible kind of Brownian movement. The festival staff -- no-nonsense guys in matching taupe suits, notorious for being cranky -- try to stem the pushing from the front, but have no control over how it happens from the back. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, or at least about 20, here's a visual aid:
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A colleague and I spilled out of our last screening for the evening at 9:30, insanely hungry after eating nothing all day but what my friend calls "squirrel food" -- that would mean nuts, fruit and biscuits, a staple of festival sustenance for critics on a budget. We marveled at the throngs of people crowding the sidewalks and open cafes. Cannes is bustling during the festival, but it had never looked this crowded. Then we realized what everyone else had figured out hours ago: It was Friday night. Days and nights filled with movies (and writing in between) can turn you into a creature of the perpetual night. Daylight hours rush by in a blur, seemingly with little demarcation in between.
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In the '70s New York Magazine ran occasional contests, in one case asking readers to submit greeting cards for unlikely occasions. Nanni Moretti's Habemus Papam -- or We Have a Pope -- screening in competition here at the festival, could use one of those entries as its tagline: "Saw your smoke, now you're Pope, congrats!"
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Though I've covered lots of film festivals before, today at Cannes I had a staggering, if obvious, revelation: Going about your regular daily duties as a critic back home, there's no way you'd see one film about a teenage wacko who goes on a murder spree in his high school (We Need to Talk About Kevin), another about an adorable Aborigine kid who idolizes a local gangster-drug dealer (Toomelah, screening here in Un Certain Regard), and yet another about police officers who deal with sexually abused children in Paris, all in the same week. Here at Cannes, that's all in a day's -- maybe even an afternoon's -- work. Which is just one reason that single late-night glass of red Sancerre sometimes seems like the Holy Grail.
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The Cannes Film Festival is an extremely glamorous place to be. So glamorous that thieves and pickpockets abound, and some of the stories I've heard in the past few days -- first-hand from the victims themselves no less -- are enough to make this Cannes first-timer want to call up Amazon and express-order one of those hideous Rick Steves money belts that grannies wear on holiday.
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Overheard in the mad crush to get into this morning's overcrowded screening of Gus Van Sant's Restless: Woman A says to Woman B, in French-accented English, "What is your problem?" Woman B says to Woman A: "Your being a bitch is my problem!" Ah, Cannes! Where the weather is warm, the selection of movies is vast, and film journos and critics are ready to kill each other by Day 2.
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Yesterday I needed to visit the press office to request a copy of the press-screening schedule. I asked the friendly Cannes staffer at the Palais information desk where I should go. She asked me whether my outlet was "written" or "broadcast," but I couldn't quite understand her French-accented English. When I told her I was with an online outfit, she nodded and said, "Written." Our eyes met. "Hopefully," I said. And we both had a good laugh.
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Opening ceremony red carpet events are cursed things, much better enjoyed -- I find -- via the wire photos that start popping up online mere hours after the fact. But I will confess that even just standing amid a crowd of onlookers outside the Palais des Festivals -- where the big premieres are held and where Woody Allen's sweet-natured, slightly melancholy Midnight in Paris made its debut on Wednesday -- I did feel a vague frisson of excitement.
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