Jessica Alba took the night off from her fiery culinary adventures to join the rest of the Tribeca Film Festival's random jurors on awards night. The festival handed out more than $150,000 in cash prizes to an international array of filmmakers, with the German entry When We Leave picking up the top narrative award and additional hardware for best actress Sibel Kekilli. The superb relationship drama-surveillance thriller (really!) Monogamy won the prize for Best New York Narrative; watch for it if/when it comes to a festival/theater near you. The full list of winners is after the jump -- congrats to all.
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A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do to get attention down at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jessica Alba thought she'd taken care of business with her recent festival jury appointment, only to see her Killer Inside Me co-star Kate Hudson upstage her with a rumored (and highly secretive, for some reason) boob job. From there, Alba's strategy might have gotten a little desperate.
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Alas, not Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's elusive mindbender. This little bit of headline rope-a-dope is instead brought to you by The Tree, a French-Aussie co-production announced today as the Cannes Film Festival's closing-night film. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a mother whose child thinks her late father talks to her via a tree, it will screen May 23, most likely following Doug Liman's stirring Palme D'or win. [indieWIRE]
Joan Rivers hasn't made much of a secret about her hatred for NBC, from which she says she was banned 25 years ago after striking her doomed late-night hosting deal with Fox. Save for her triumphant return to the network on Celebrity Apprentice, she has been virtually off its air since the Carson era. Furthermore, she told an audience Monday at the Tribeca Film Festival, she's a late-night pariah across the board. As you can imagine, she wasn't happy about it.
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Maybe it was the rain. On a night when the Tribeca Film Festival's packed hometown premiere of the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work glowed with the promise of its post-screening conversation between Rivers and her catty confidante Rex Reed, the atmosphere was overtaken by a more subdued, contemplative mood between the pair. At least until the point when Rivers called out that 88-year-old "bitch" Betty White.
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Robert Duvall visited New York today for the Tribeca premiere of his drama Get Low, and Movieline sat down for a few minutes to talk about the Oscar-winner's typically superb work opposite Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black. (The film opens July 30 in limited release.) But Duvall also has an eye on the future -- or specifically, a long-accursed Terry Gilliam project that he previously confirmed he'd take on when (or if) the director can pull it together. Perhaps not surprisingly, Duvall explained today, that could take a while.
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It's hard to believe that nearly 25 years into his pioneering career as the world's most influential, ambitious and successful BMX athletes, Mat Hoffman didn't have a film made about him until now. Perhaps harder still to believe: That it would take Jackass partners in crime Johnny Knoxville and Jeff Tremaine to finally get it done.
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My first full day of Tribeca Film Festival duty really came down to the what's already the hottest-ticket item of the entire week ahead: Untitled Eliot Spitzer Film, director Alex Gibney's work-in-progress documentary about the career and eventual disgrace of the former New York governor. Being unfinished, reviewers are forbidden from writing especially in-depth about it. But here's one nugget: It's not untitled at all, even though to hear Gibney tell it in his introduction to a packed house, the working title Client-9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer may yet lose out to that more abstract, curious namelessless in the festival program.
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Oscilloscope Labs today announced its pick-up of Howl, the Sundance-opening (and generally underwhelming) adaptation of Allen Ginsberg's famous poem and the First Amendment showdown it spurred. O-Scope plans a September release, likely with an awards campaign in mind for star James Franco. [Oscilloscope]
Ask anyone what the difference is between the scandal-plagued tandem Eliot Spitzer and Tiger Woods, and they might think you're about to deliver a punchline. Ask Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, however -- whose new documentary about the disgraced New York governor will appear this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival as a work in progress -- and the distinctions are no joke at all.
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Last year at Cannes, the Directors' Fortnight sidebar opened with a film by a director you may have heard of...some up-and-comer named Francis Ford Coppola? This year is a little different; the lineup was announced today, and it's teeming with new faces. (Among those missing: Vincent Gallo, who we've heard is still seeking money to complete Promises Written in Water.) Still, you may recognize a few.
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Remember 2009? That commercial and critical breakthrough year for women directors including Lone Scherfig, Anne Fletcher, Nora Ephron, Jane Campion and Nancy Meyers, culminating in Kathryn Bigelow's historic Academy Award victory? Even the 2009 Cannes Film Festival had a record-tying three women filmmakers -- Campion, Isabel Coixet and Andrea Arnold -- in its prestigious competition lineup. Good times. They feel like they're forever ago, though, particularly considering this year's Cannes competition, where there's not a woman to be found. A browse through recent history suggests maybe we shouldn't be surprised.
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The line-up for the 2010 Cannes Film Festival was announced this morning from Paris, and first things first: There is no Terrence Malick on this list. His Brad Pitt/Sean Penn-starring cosmic mindblower Tree of Life won't be finished in time and/or the famously publicity-shy filmmaker just doesn't want to deal with the world media, so instead you get slouches like Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard, Stephen Frears and Oliver Stone (out of competition) and Mike Leigh, Abbas Kiarostami, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (in competition). Doug Liman is the only American vying for the Palme d'Or, premiering his Valerie Plame film Fair Game, while his countrymen Lodge Kerrigan and Gregg Araki occupy spots in the Un Certain Regard and Midnight sections. Oh, and Blue Valentine is going -- sorry, France! Click through for the complete line-up, which will unspool in the week or so following Robin Hood's May 12 opening-night premiere.
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Answer: Pretty totally random! Tribeca today sent over a release announcing 35 jurors for its 2010 festival, ranging from Oscar winners to a Twitter co-founder to a State Department member to Jessica Alba, Zach Braff Aaron Eckhart, and Alicia Keys -- in no particular order, and not quite where you'd likely expect them to show up. It hardly seems right that they'd snub Movieline's distinguished staff on our birthday, but there's always next year. Speaking for myself, I'd give up a chair for Brooke Shields or America Ferrera any day. The rest, though... you really must see it to believe it.
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We're exactly a month away from opening night of the Cannes Film Festival, and aside from that evening's screening of Robin Hood, speculation and conjecture regarding the fest's competition selections remain heading into this week. So when Movieline's "Cannes" alarm filled the office this morning with its customary accordion jig, I raced to see what putative masterpiece of world cinema had triggered it. My only reaction was two words -- and they weren't "false alarm."
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