Dark side of the festival

Then came the verdict. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called it the “festival’s real clunker”. Agreed Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times: “The greatest disappointment so far this year is an easy choice.” Seconded Time Out London’s Geoff Andrew: “Morally and metaphysically confused, unfunny, heavy-handed and as prone to waste, excess, idiocy and decadence as the emphatically allegorical world it imagines, it comes across as the dopehead nerd hipster’s alternative to The Da Vinci Code.” Ray Bennett hit below the belt in the Hollywood Reporter declaring that when one of the film’s characters “places a gun to his temple and says, ‘I could pull the trigger right now and this whole nightmare will be over,’ …every impulse screams: Do it!”

This is the horror of Cannes. There are 4,000 journalists and critics here. There are 10,000 film buyers and sellers. When they love you, the festival is caviar dreams and champagne wishes. But there is another Cannes, the bad Cannes, and when there is garbage in the pail, it can get downright insectoid out there on the Croisette.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the film will tank at the box office. The critics hissed at Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. They didn’t much embrace Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, nor his Scanner Darkly.

So what will happen to Southland Tales now? Universal Pictures owns the international rights to the movie, but it has not yet sold the film to a distributor in the US. For that to happen, Kelly has been told by his producers, the $20 -million film will very likely have to be recut.

Says Kelly says. “A distributor would make me cut it to 90 minutes, that’s what I’ve been hearing.”

Do the math: 162 minus 90. That’s Cannes effect.

Myanmar

No room for democracy

Turning down appeals from all over the world, the military junta of Myanmar extended the house arrest of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi for another year. This after UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a televised appeal to Senior General Than Shwe to release Suu Kyi and allow her National League for Democracy to participate in rebuilding the country.

Suu Kyi, 60, has been under house arrest or imprisoned on and off since 1989. Her party won more than 80 percent of the seats in Parliament in 1990 and she would likely have become the country’s leader, but the military regime refused to honor the election.

The military has ruled Myanmar for most of the past 44 years. In 1988, troops gunned down thousands of anti-government demonstrators and arrested thousands more. The regime is holding more than 1,100 political prisoners and has launched an military offensive against the Karen ethnic group, which is seeking independence.

Aid groups have withheld assistance because of the difficulty of working under the regime’s restrictions. The country recently lost $87 million in health-care assistance, even as the country’s rates of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis have soared. Charles Petrie, head of the UN mission in Myanmar, confirmed he and Annan’s envoy Ibrahim Gambari had raised the possibility of increased financial assistance if Suu Kyi was freed. But the junta is unresponsive to outside pressure. Buoyed by trade with China and other neighbours, Myanmar has refused to capitulate to economic sanctions imposed by the US after Suu Kyi’s 2003 arrest.