There's big stuff on the horizon at the 64th Cannes Film Festival: Sunday will bring competition screenings of "The Artist," which has been acquired (but not quite confirmed) by the Weinstein Company, and of "The Kid With a Bike" from the Belgian arthouse faves the Dardenne brothers, while Monday will finally lift the veil on Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life."
But Friday's competition screenings, "Polisse" and "Habemus Papam" ("We Need a Pope") weren't as high-profile as the films that screened on Wednesday and Thursday, "Midnight in Paris" and "Sleeping Beauty" and "We Need to Talk About Kevin." So lots of attention turned to deal-making in the marketplace, while critics continued to mull over the virtues of those earlier films and hipsters turned their attention to shindigs like the (BELVEDERE)RED party, which supported the AIDS charity initiative with a concert from '80s popsters Duran Duran (above; Getty Images photo by Ian Gavan).
Also read: Cannes Reviews: Of Gods and Women
For instance, you can add the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan to the roster of supporters of Lynne Ramsay's film "We Need to Talk About Kevin," which premiered on Thursday to mixed (though largely positive) reaction. "A tragedy in multiple keys, difficult to watch but impossible to turn away from, 'Kevin' reinforces Ramsay's reputation as a director in complete control of all aspects of the medium," he wrote.
Turan also talked to Ramsay about the film, and about her approach to the story of a mother's complicated relationship with a son who goes on a murderous rampage at his high school. "It's one of the last taboo subjects," said Ramsay. "You're meant to instantly love your baby from the moment he's born, but what if you don't?"
The director also explained why it's been almost a decade since her last film, "Morvern Callar": because she spent years trying to get a film version of "The Lovely Bones" off the ground, before "Peter Jackson started sniffing around" and she left the project: "I thought I was writing something darn decent and I felt a bit betrayed at the end."
With the projects announced at Cannes in recent days including new films from Lee Daniels and Martin Scorsese, and films featuring Matthew McConaughey and Jack Black and Colin Firth, you might think little attention would be paid to a press conference by a little-known Norwegian actor named Ryan Wiik (little-known in these parts, at any rate), who's planning to turn a 10-year-old Norwegian series of books, "Morgan Kane," into an action-adventure franchise he's describing as "the James Bond of Westerns."
But that announcement got almost 500 words in the New York Times – not because Melena Ryzik and her editors are fascinated by the prospect of a series of films about Teddy Roosevelt's bodyguard, but because the announcement illustrated what she said is a Cannes truism: you'll get more attention if you make it on board a yacht.
