20,000 Links Under the Sea

Daily Transom Ebert to pen memoir in high six figure deal.
In Contention looks at how Robin Hood (2010) got all mucked up in development.
Guardian an explicit erotic drama starring Emmanuelle Béart and her husband shunned by Cannes. Ugh. How will we ever see it now? They are so so pretty.
Movie|Line suggests that executives pounce on the Cannes hot ticket 101 year-old Manoel de Oliveira.


The Atlantic a tale of two comebacks: Mickey Rourke and Robert Downey Jr.
Cinema Blend Lana Wachowski and Andy Wachowski (of The Matrix fame) may be making a hard R gay military romance drama? Interesting.
Just Jared Tarsem Singh on Henry Cavill (in his new picture The Immortals) "Hey, I'd f*** him."
A Socialite's Life Tom Munro's celebrity portrait book. If I had a gajillion dollars I'd always have these big glossy photo books lying around.
Quiet Earth nsfw clips from the new Gregg Araki flick Kaboom.
i09 Every time i even see a new clip from a Twilight movie I want to see them even less. How is this possible? Here's Dakota Fanning all red eyed and quietly evil if you're into that.

Finally, The Hollywood Reporter shares yet another project for David Fincher. This time he'll be remaking the adventure film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. 20,000... brings Fincher's future features in development to a grand total of 12 (according to IMDb). I guess that $125 domestic gross for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button got Hollywood all horny. The first of the dozen we'll actually see is the Facebook story The Social Network which should be completed anytime soon. Remember when David was still making music videos. Or when people thought his feature career was doomed before it began due to Alien³'s reception (so underrated) or when he couldn't get arrested at the Oscars despite making films as good as Zodiac and Fight Club. Ancient history!


Wonder how much money the studio will give Fincher for the octopus alone? Water movies are notoriously expensive to make (Waterwold... Titanic... The Abyss...) so I bet this gets an even crazier budget than Button to begin with and then we'll hear endless internet reportage about it's ballooning disastrous budget during production.

Cannes Review: Heartbeats, Chatroom, Kaboom

Robert here, scouring the internet to give you the latest on the films premiering in Cannes.

Un Certain Regard

• Heartbeats Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan (he's 21) directs this film about a youthful love triangle which is getting a bit of a mixed reaction, though most critics seem to agree, it's a film by someone who is, as The AV Club puts it "a born filmmaker, with the potential for greatness" though this film is more of a stepping stone.  Eric Kohn at IndieWIRE says it's "as hip as he intends it" but "occasionally feels too entangled in its own cool maneuvers"  Rounding out the mixed notices are Alex Billington of FirstShowing.net who declares "I'm in love with this film as much as I possibly can be" and Time Out Chicago who calls it, "a slight case of sophomore jinx."
• Chatroom Anyone waiting for the first stinker of the festival should note that this Hideo Nakata's thriller is getting a resounding "LOL" from critics.  Over at In Contention, Guy Lodge doesn't appreciate the dated concept saying, "expect Nakata's equally brain-dead and cruddy-looking MySpace thriller to drop sometime around 2019."  Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet is equally unamused, calling the film "a disastrous effort."

Special Screening

• Kaboom Greg Araki's directs this film about a young slacker who thinks he's witnessed a murder while high.  It's being called "a back-to-his-roots, candy-colored cult thriller" by Anthony Kaufman of IFC who also suggests "for all of Kaboom's silliness, it never transcends it."  The Hollywood Reporter seems to agree calling the film "a case of a movie giving itself a little too much credit."  But Mike D'Angelo of The AV Club likes it. "It’s the kind of movie that finds you massaging your jaw afterward because it hurts from 90 straight minutes of grinning like an idiot" says he.

A Link is Born

Instructables build an Iron Man arc reactor of your own
SF Gate "Is this the end of Downey Jr's greatness?" interesting peace from Mick LaSalle on taking up residents in franchises.
/Film yet another shortening of the theatrical release to home viewing window. The end is nigh and...
David Poland, always in touch with the business end, responds to this FCC ruling


flick filosopher 'damn those high society film critics!' I love it when MaryAnn gets pissed off at stupid people
Just Jared with new Inception poster and stills
Only the Cinema pays tribute to the just departed cinematographer William Lubtchansky (RIP)
Cinematical Rachel Weisz on the upcoming gender bending body horror film Invisible X
MNPP gets excited 'bout the new Gregg Araki movie Kaboom

Finally, I don't know how I missed this news in April (but then again that month. argh) but A Star is Born has been reborn again. If you've never seen this grand Judy Garland musical epic, you MUST mark June 22nd on your calendar and get the Blu-Ray of the restoration (from the original negative). Sadly, though,there's still a big chunk of it missing from the 1954 chainsaw edit it got when distributors complained that the film was too long. Damn you Hollywood powers-that-be (at the time), damn you retroactively!

I love what Robert Osbourne of TCM says

"As effective as Judy Garland is singing 'The Man That Got Away' in any medium, there's nothing like seeing her singing that song three stories tall, in Technicolor."

I can only imagine. I've only seen it on DVD and it's already one of my top five favorite song performances in the history of the cinema.