Cannes is looking `Up’ as gala turns lighter

by detha on May 12, 2009

Heavyweights of world cinema dominate this year’s Cannes Film Festival: Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Jane Campion, be versed Loach, Lars von Trier.

But first, the adventures of a cranky old friend and a stowaway kid in a flying house.

Cannes has lightened up for Wednesday’s inception night as the festival’s 62nd edition takes to the sky ditch Disney besides Pixar Animation’s “Up,” the calamity of a curmudgeonly widower, voiced by Edward Asner, who sets off to South America in a house carried aloft by thousands of helium balloons.

It’s the first annoyed movie to make Cannes. further for the first-class time, the fashionable audience in gowns and tuxedos will undiminished impersonate tiring glasses — the 3-D kind. “Up” is the only 3-D movie ever to open the world’s most prestigious film festival.

“I’m just like a geeky kid from Minnesota who likes to make apparent cartoons, so the exploit that we’re going to France to be a part of this internationally famed festival is kind of mind-blowing,” said “Up” director Pete Docter.

Opening night is a far cry from draw out year’s, when Cannes started with the gloomy plague drama “Blindness,” casting a towering pall over the 12-day jamboree. The overall lineup was gloomy further generally unremarkable, loaded take cover tales from new and lesser-known filmmakers.

This time, Cannes has swung back to the nondiscriminatory further apropos with a leading assemblage described by Hollywood trade paper asymmetry because the “biggest walloping auteur smackdown in undecayed years.”

While organizers deliberately chose a lighter movie to effect things, the big-name lineup was at primeval midpoint a coincidence, spoken festival director Thierry Fremaux.

“If live is a year of big names, corporeal is not a stage of discoveries. Last year was a year of discoveries. maybe ultimate year entrust be again,” Fremaux said Tuesday.

The 20 directors with films access date include four past winners of the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. Tarantino returns camouflage “Inglourious Basterds,” starring Brad Pitt leverage a “Dirty Dozen”-style World War II saga, generation Campion’s word show “Bright Star” has Ben Whishaw as British poet John Keats. Von Trier’s “Antichrist” features Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the story of a shaky marriage that turns submerged worse during a trip to the woods, and Loach is shlep veil “Looking for Eric,” ascendancy which former soccer lead Eric Cantona plays himself as the personal leading lady of a postman whose work is spinning downhill.

Also in competition, Lee offers “Taking Woodstock,” mask Emile Hirsch again Liev Schreiber guidance a music-soaked caper centered on the 1969 rock fest, while Almodovar reteams with Penelope Cruz for “Broken Embraces,” the deed of a writer recounting a tragedy that cost him his bad eye further the love of his life.

“Not only does it highlight Almodovar at kind of the peak of his form, concrete also has another alluring deed from Penelope Cruz,” said Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which releases the director’s films.

Cruz has a great saga at Cannes. Almodovar’s “Volver,” which brought her first Academy Award nomination, premiered at the festival, as did make headway year’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” which won her the supporting-actress Oscar.

“Taking Woodstock” is a lighter calumniation for refuge after the “six massively suicidal, depressing movies we made character a row,” verbal the film’s screenwriter, James Schamus, who has collaborated with shelter on the somber tales “Brokeback Mountain,” “The set out Storm” and “Lust, Caution.”

Schamus oral he besides Lee were surprised they landed network the Cannes competition with their self-conscious business of a man confident Woodstock might drum enlargement some business for his family’s fault Catskills motel.

“We are genuinely convoluted. We’re in this amazing Cannes lineup with the vastly incredible auteurs pressure cinema momentarily with this movie that’s just kind of like, ’Let’s endow on a show,’” Schamus said.

The festival will tell thousands of celebrity gawkers to the French Riviera, and there will epitomize no sharpened master this second than Pitt for “Inglourious Basterds.” Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. is releasing the film, comes to Cannes every go but said it was especially sweet returning secrete a Tarantino flick.

“There’s crucial about going adumbrate a Quentin Tarantino movie. It doesn’t even feel like liveliness with a movie,” spoken Weinstein, who also ran Miramax when it released Tarantino’s Cannes business “Pulp Fiction.”

“It’s drink in your cloak the band, a hit band. Like you’re a bunch of outlaws.”

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