Word: oscarization
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...future looks cloudy. With a director and star who are both Oscar winners, it was the most eagerly anticipated film in the competition. But as a 4-1/2-hour, two-part recounting of Guevara's rebel campaigns in the Cuban and Bolivian jungles, it was also the most dreaded. Neither prediction was quite accurate. The movie doesn't enthrall, nor does it outrage. It simply disappoints, at great length. Except for one zesty confrontation at the United Nations, the film is doggedly antidramatic. At a reported $60 million budget, Che is too expensive to be relegated to art houses...
...capable of making something as funny as the great cross-dressing farce, Tootsie, or as dark as his take on depression-era America, They Shoot Horses Don't They? But his filmography is marked most indelibly by the lush romanticism of Out of Africa (for which he won the Oscar) on the one hand, and by taut thrillers like Three Days of the Condor and The Firm on the other. It can be argued that the contradiction between those two modes is more apparent than real. High romance disorders the spirits of those who succumb to it; the implicit paranoia...
Eastwood, who directed Penn to an Oscar in Mystic River, and del Toro, who co-starred with Penn in 21 Grams, were the only two stars of the American film industry to be given awards. Cannes counts on Hollywood to bring glamor to the Riviera, with non-competition movies like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. But when the Jury gets down to business, art wins out over entertainment. Indeed, for the second year in a row, not a single English-language movie was honored at Cannes...
Since then, Soderbergh has won an Oscar (for directing Traffic), guided Julia Roberts to a statuette of her own (for Erin Brockovich) and launched an action-movie franchise (Ocean's), while Tarantino, a slower worker, created the vertiginous, voluminous Kill Bill. Today both gents were back on the Riviera, Soderbergh for the world premiere of his Che Guevara bio-pic, Tarantino to give a film "master class" - essentially a 2hr. interview, plus clip show, with the eminent French critic-historian Michel Ciment...
...night he will stride across the red carpet, accompanied by that nonpareil paparazzi magnet Angelina Jolie, for the screening of Changeling. The speculation is that Eastwood has a better shot at winning this year because the head of the festival Jury is Sean Penn, who won the best actor Oscar for Mystic River and may think he owes Clint a favor. It's also the consensus that this session of Cannes, where more than half the competing films have already been shown, is a relatively weak one, and that Eastwood's most acclaimed competitor so far is the Israeli animated...