Nicole Kidman returns to Cannes, playing another Festival icon

J. Sperling Reich reports from Cannes on Nicole Kidman's press conference for her festival opener, Grace of Monaco.

The list of personalities inextricably linked to the Cannes Film Festival during the course of its 67-year history is filled with many of the movie industry's most legendary figures. Filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and François Truffaut are or were favorites of the festival, regularly premiering their films here. The same is true of actors and actresses like Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Robert De Niro, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson and Elizabeth Taylor.

Nicole Kidman is without a doubt the most current example of Cannes royalty. She has visited the festival at least eight times over the last 20 years, including participating in last year's jury presided over by director Steven Spielberg. In 2001, several months after her divorce from actor Tom Cruise was announced, Kidman was forced to speak with the press for the first time during an eagerly anticipated press conference to promote the opening night film, Moulin Rouge. It is a moment still discussed by Cannes veterans to this day.

"Obviously, this would not be my choice," Kidman replied at the time when asked how she felt about having to finally confront the media. "If it was under different circumstances, I would not want to sit in front of everybody and have questions about my personal life. So thank you for not asking one."

So it is rather fitting that Kidman is back in Cannes this year to promote the opening-night movie Grace of Monaco, a drama directed by French filmmaker Olivier Dahan about another beloved Cannes actress, Grace Kelly, depicting her transition from Hollywood actress to an actual European princess.

Kelly herself had many ties to Cannes. In 1955, she made her first appearance at the festival in The Country Girl, for which she would go on to win an Oscar. That was also the year she shot Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant, a film set partly in Cannes and along the Côte d’Azur. While at the festival, Kelly would meet Prince Rainier III of Monaco, who she would marry the following year in a wedding watched by 30 million people around the world.

The many similarities between Kelly and Kidman are not lost on the actress herself, as she explained during a press conference for Grace of Monaco. "She was a major American movie star. At a very early age she won an Academy Award and she then said I'm actually going to leave it all because I want a marriage, I want a family," Kidman recalled. "There are so many layers to this when an actress is playing an actress and I have similarities in my life to some of the things that happen to Grace. I obviously did not marry a prince."

Upon hearing the laughter and gasps from the 400-odd journalists in attendance, all responding to what she had just said, Kidman laughed and added, "Well, I am married to a prince. A country prince." A reference to her husband, country singer Keith Urban.

And much like the princess she portrays on screen did in real life, Kidman says she would absolutely give up acting for love and family. "I wouldn't even think twice about it," she proclaimed. "I think love is the core emotion and I've certainly existed without that in my life. It's a very empty life. When I won the Oscar, I went home and I didn't have that [love] in my life. That was the most intensely lonely period of my life. Strangely for me, the greatest highs have coincided with the greatest lows. During my professional highs a lot of times I've had personal lows and they've kind of collided and that's always aggravated me that it's gone that way. I'm hoping one day I can have professional high and a personal high. I don't know whether that's ever possible."

For Kidman and Dahan, the first day of the festival provided the exact kind of contrary emotions the actress alludes to. Before headlining the opening-night gala in Cannes, Grace of Monaco went through eight months of turmoil behind the scenes, starting last September when one of the film's distributors, The Weinstein Company, pushed back the release date into 2014. There were rumors that the head of the company, Harvey Weinstein, was not pleased with Dahan's cut of the film and wanted to make changes. This was all but confirmed this past January when Weinstein delayed the release indefinitely. However, the very next day he was blindsided when Cannes selected Grace of Monaco to open the fest.

Distribution plans for the film, at least in the United States, remained up in the air until just before Grace of Monaco debuted at the Palais des Festival on Wednesday evening. Yash Raj Films, the India-based company that financed the production, came to an agreement with The Weinstein Company which reportedly lowered the price of the film for the U.S. from its original $5 million.

Dahan, who had previously bashed Weinstein publicly, tried to dispel any such discord, though he wound up contradicting himself. "There's only one version of the film," said the filmmaker. "Harvey will use that version. If some changes need to be made, we'll do them together. There's no longer any dispute. Everything has been totally resolved. We work well together and I'm very pleased with the current situation."

While Dahan may have been pleased to secure a U.S. release for Grace of Monaco, he could not be happy about some (read: all) of the poor reviews that appeared shortly after the film screened earlier in the day. As if that weren't bad enough, Monaco's royal family, specifically Prince Albert II, has criticized the film for being "historically inaccurate" and complete "fiction.” Needless to say, like Weinstein, they were absent from Wednesday evening's red carpet festivities.

Kidman said she was saddened to hear the royal family was boycotting Grace of Monaco. "The film has no malice towards the family or particularly towards Grace or Rainier," she explained. "It's fictionalized, obviously, it's not a biopic. There's the essence of truth, but as with a lot of these things you take dramatic license at times. I understand the protection of the privacy of their mother and father. I still have respect and I want them to know the performance was done with love and that ultimately if they ever did see it, they would see that there was an enormous amount of affection for both their parents and the love story of their parents."

Dull 'Grace of Monaco' booed at Cannes

FJI critic Jon Frosch is in Cannes, reporting for France 24. The fabled film festival got off to a rocky start with its opening-night attraction, Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman. According to Frosch, the scene at the Grand Hotel bar the night before was much more entertaining. Check out his first report here.

‘Neighbors’ may swing past ‘Spider-Man’

Between positive word-of-mouth and largely favorable reviews (76 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), the Universal release Neighbors is poised to earn the top spot at the box office this weekend. Holdover The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the only film that could pose a significant threat to the Seth Rogen and Zac Efron comedy, but, given tepid responses from audiences and critics alike, Spidey seems fated to suffer a steep dropoff from the $92 million it earned last weekend. It should gross between $35 and $40 million.

Interestingly, pundits and Universal differ greatly in their expectations for Neighbors. The latter believes its film is tracking in the mid $20-million range, while industry insiders spy an opening weekend gross of $40 million or more. These pundits base their claim on data from Fandango, according to which advance ticket sales for the film are at their highest for an R-rated comedy since 2012’s Ted, which opened to $54 million. So far, 2014 has been good to distributor Universal, which has already seen three of its movies open at No. 1: Ride Along, Lone Survivor and Non-Stop.

Another major release, the animated kids film Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return, also opens today. The movie may boast some big-name talent, including the vocal stylings of Martin Short, Bernadette Peters, and “Glee’s” Leah Michelle in the titular role, but reviews have been terrible and previews for the flick have been greeted with dismissals of “cheap-looking.” Still, it’s been a few weeks since the last family film, Rio 2, opened, so there’s certainly a niche to be filled. Oz could gross around $5 or $6 million.

Mom’s Night Out is one of two new specialty releases bowing this weekend, along with Jon Favreau’s Chef. Out targets the same Christian or faith-based crowd that made successes of recent films Son of God, God’s Not Dead and Heaven is For Real. Also, timing is everything: Mother’s Day is this coming Sunday. The bar for the film is set between $6 and $7 million.

Chef is opening in limited release, screening in just six locations in NYC and LA. Critics like the film (it’s 80 percent fresh on RT) that is on track to earn a solid per-theatre average of roughly $30,000.

Marco Bellocchio Retrospective: Two Approaches to Screening Specialty Movies

The recent Museum of Modern Art series Marco Bellocchio: A Retrospective was a case study in divergent approaches to screening movies.

A collaboration between MoMA and Instituto Luce-Cinecittà, the retrospective covered Bellocchio's remarkable 50-year career through eighteen of his features, from his directorial debut Fists in the Pocket to his latest release, Dormant Beauty.


Toni Servillo and Alba Rohrwacher in Dormant Beauty. Courtesy Studio PUNTOeVIRGOLA

Almost all of the films were shown in new, 35mm prints, assembled and restored from the best available elements, a two-year process under Bellocchio's direct supervision.

Bucking a worldwide trend, Luce-Cinecittà did not digitize Bellocchio's films. Instead, the retrospective, which will be traveling to other cities, is primarily 35mm prints. (Dormant Beauty, the newest title, is being screened digitally.)

Speaking in Manhattan during the retrospective, Camilla Cormanni of Luce-Cinecittà admits that working with 35mm prints can be difficult, especially since the simple act of projecting can damage them.

"We had an earlier retrospective of Pier Paolo Pasolini movies, also 35mm prints. They've been touring for two years now, after opening at MoMA in 2012 and going to the BFI in London and several other cities," she said. "Now we will take them back to the lab and see the damages and try to repair, it's what happens with film prints. But the experience you have watching his movies in his black-and-white, without pixels, is incredible."

Finding technicians who understand film prints, especially black-and-white, has become so difficult that Luce-Cinecittà is forming its own school. "We want to have a sort of artisinal lab, so young people can learn from the experts who are still working on our restorations."

Money is a constant problem—a 4K restoration of worn elements can cost 160,000 euros—but Luce-Cinecittà receives some government support, and has been able to attract sponsors like Gucci.

Cormanni's next project is a restoration of Cinema Paradiso under the supervision of director Giuseppe Tornatore. "It's wonderful to see how memory and reality collide," Cormanni says. "Even for the filmmakers themselves, sometimes they remember a scene as darker than you see in the print. Sometimes it's not as dark, it's not as red as you remember, so restoration becomes a more artistic, creative process."

Cormanni admits that for mainstream moviegoers, digital is quickly becoming the only option. "We can screen 35mm prints in museums in Turin, Rome, Bologna, places like that," she says. "But for movies in general, I think they are becoming a niche medium. Even if younger people watch movies on TV—well, really you have to worry if they're watching on their computer or iPad or iPhone, and then they watch for ten minutes and switch to something else.

"And  I'm reading that the younger generation won't go to movies anyway. Going to a theater where you have to pay attention for two hours—it's too much like going to a class in school."

Luce-Cinecittà is partnering with Emerging Pictures to distribute Dormant Beauty in the United States. The Bellocchio movie is part of a five-film series, "Cinema Made in Italy." Dormant Beauty will open on June 6 in theaters equipped with Emerging Pictures servers.

The "Cinema Made in Italy" series started with The Great Beauty, the Paolo Sorrentino film that won last year's Best Foreign Film Oscar. Honey by Valeria Golino was released to strong reviews in March. Following Dormant Beauty, the series will offer Me and You, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, and L'intrepido, directed by Gianni Amelio.

As co-founder Ira Deutchman explains by telephone from his office in New York, Emerging Pictures was designed for independent films, not studio releases.

"We actually make it easier and less expensive to get films into theaters," Deutchman says. "We send out encrypted digital files by broadband to our servers in theaters, which then show them through digital projectors.

"By last count we have about 130 theaters, in major and minor markets. In some cases we're dealing with an art house that might be in a small town, in some cases we're dealing with a single screen in a large multiplex, sometimes we're in a stand-alone art house that might have our system and a DCP system side-by-side."

Deutchman estimates that Dormant Beauty will play in 40 locations. The series is supported in part by Italy's Ministry of Economic Development, which offered producers incentives provided their films played in at least five US cities. The Great Beauty spread to 25 cities after its Oscar win.

Distributing movies through the Internet, with no physical prints, was a pipe dream just a few years ago. Emerging Pictures offers theaters a secure way of exhibiting specialty movies that otherwise might not be seen at all.

On the other hand, Luce-Cinecittà brings classic movies to viewers the way their filmmakers originally intended. As Cormanni put it, "The best way to see these movies is on film, on a big screen, surrounded by people you don't know."

‘Spidey 2’ makes solid, if not quite stellar, debut

For almost any other film, an opening weekend gross of $92 million would be considered just cause for celebration. And while execs at Sony surely aren’t wringing their hands over The Amazing Spider Man 2’s debut, it's nonetheless the weakest of the five Spider-Man films (including the Sam Raimi trilogy) to date. That being said, Spidey 2 has already grossed $277 million overseas. In China, which, as the world’s second-largest film market, Hollywood insiders are watching closely, the film opened on Sunday and earned $10.4 million, the top gross ever for a workday in the region. The movie could well match its predecessor’s $460 million worldwide total.

Back here in the States, audience demographics broke down as expected: 61 percent of attendees were male and 51 percent were under the age of 25. These viewers awarded the movie a B+ CinemaScore grade, which is all right but not great; anything less than an A generally portends a quick dropoff. Some pundits are predicting a total domestic gross of $230 million or so.

With a gross far below that of Spidey 2, The Other Woman took second place at the weekend box office. The femme-targeted comedy earned $14.2 million and has raked in $47.3 million thus far. It may not be the best example of the comedic heights of which female comedians are capable, but Woman’s success does prove (once again) ladies will turn out for films that are, even vaguely, about them. (Here’s to more female offerings that do not need to be qualified by the phrase “even vaguely.”)

Third and fourth place went to Heaven is for Real ($8.7 million) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($7.7 million), respectively. With $7.6 million in earnings, Rio 2 earned the weekend’s fifth-place slot and officially crossed the $100 million mark. The animated sequel’s total now stands at $106.5 million.

The specialty division saw a solid debut for the well-reviewed Belle. Screening in four locations, the period romance opened to a $105,000 per-theatre average. Elizabeth Banks comedy Walk of Shame performed as expected, that is, not too hot: The movie earned just $38,000 from 51 theatres. It did, however, reportedly earn the top spot on iTunes for a time.

Week in review: 4/28 - 5/2

The world mourned the death of another talent this week with the passing of Bob Hoskins. The 79-year-old British actor and father of four children, whose most beloved roles include an Oscar-nominated turn in the noir film Mona Lisa as well as children's' films Hook and the classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit, had been ill with pneumonia. He was 71.

Classics were much discussed throughout the week. Cult favorite Mean Girls celebrated its 10th anniversary on Wednesday, to the tune of many retrospective pieces and memes touting the line, "On Wednesdays we wear pink!" The NYT spoke with screenwriter Tina Fey, director Mark Waters, stars Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Lizzy Caplan, and Daniel Franzese (but not heroine Lindsay Lohan), as well as author Rosalind Wiseman, whose book Queen Bees and Wannabes inspired the film, about their memories of the project.

Development on the latest addition to the canonically classic Star Wars franchise is well underway, per the announcement, made on Tuesday, of seven new cast members. Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis), Adam Driver ("Girls"), John Boyega (Attack the Block), Daisy Ridley (the short Blue Season), Domnhall Gleeson (About Time), Max von Sydow (The Exorcist) and Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings) are the lucky stars joining original cast members Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and the awesome Carrie Fisher in Star Wars: Episode VII.

Like that film's director J.J. Abrams, Steven Spielberg is no stranger to playing the blockbuster game. But will he be able to match his own past box-office successes? As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, the director will helm an adaptation of Roald Dahl's The BFG, as well as a Cold War thriller starring Tom Hanks. The two projects announced simultaneously are Spielberg's first since 2012's Lincoln. The latter testifies to the director's competent handling of classic (or at least historical) material, but as concerns the success of his latest endeavors, only time will tell.

As it will concerning the box-office prospects of arthouse darling, Ida. The Twitterverse is awash in praise for the Polish film directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Interview magazine got the scoop on Ida's beautifully rendered, if emotionally fraught, world, straight from the creator himself.

Ever wonder why it's so difficult for Hollywood to successfully dramatize the life of the writer and her process onscreen? Author and GW prof Thomas Mallon and Slate film critic Dana Stevens weigh in.

Ever wonder why "A113" seems to crop up in almost every one of Pixar's films? "Today" satisfies the curiosity of those most observant of Pixar fans.

Prospects for ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ uncertain

What with prevailingly cool temperatures, and that onslaught of April showers through which most of the East Coast recently suffered, it certainly doesn’t feel like summer outside. But try telling that to Hollywood. The movie industry is eager to kick off its slate of summer blockbusters, the first of which opens today in a whopping 4,323 theatres: The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Spidey 2 is an interesting case. It’s the first Spider-Man film, including the Sam Raimi trilogy starring Tobey Maguire, to garner mostly negative reviews. The consensus has top marks for lead Andrew Garfield and the chemistry he shares with off-screen girlfriend Emma Stone, but has decried the movie’s bloated runtime, stuffed to the 2.5-hour hilt with villains and a busy, read: dull, string of setpieces.

To be fair, the franchise has been on the decline for years and through most of its run. The first two Sam Riami Spider-Mans performed the best, but each offering since 2004’s Spider-Man 2 has earned less than its predecessor. The 2012 Amazing Spider-Man grossed $262 million, which was down 22 percent from the first Tobey Maguire film.

Sony, which, as has been widely publicized, is in great need of a lucrative tentpole, is attempting to recapture the success of a few Spideys past by opening the film this first week in May. Sam Raimi Spider-Mans one and three set opening-weekend records when they debuted over this same weekend in 2002 and 2007, respectively. Box Office Mojo, however, believes Captain America: The Winter Soldier may have preemptively stolen some of Spider-Man’s thunder by performing as well as it did in April. Spidey may be the first of the summer blockbusters, but it isn’t exactly filling a dearth of blockbuster fare.

So, what does all this mean in cold, desirable dollars and cents? Depends whom you ask. Some pundits believe an opening north of $100 million is likely. Others have more tempered expectations, and see the film shooting for $95 million at most. But these are provincial concerns. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has already earned $155 million overseas and is poised to open in several more international markets this weekend, including the world’s second-largest, China. Look for China to play a major role in the movie’s success: The first Amazing Spider-Man grossed $48 million from the region, and there’s little reason to believe this second outing should prove any different. In terms of worldwide gross, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 could certainly match its predecessor’s $490 million haul.

For non-superhero fans (despite the current Hollywood fixation, they do exist), the specialty film Belle opens in four locations today. This second feature from director Amma Asante has positive reviews and a star turn by newcomer Gugu Mbatha-Raw to recommend it. Comedy Walk of Shame, starring Elizabeth Banks, is screening in 51 locations this weekend, and is also available on VOD.