Norah film opens Cannes Fest
2007-05-16 12:44
Cannes - The Cannes Film Festival celebrates its 60th edition on Wednesday with an opening movie that blends an indie sensibility and a glittering cast: Wong Kar-wai's Route 66 road trip tale starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and Norah Jones.
Sultry-voiced singer Jones makes her acting debut in My Blueberry Nights playing a woman who hits the road to cure her broken heart. For Hong Kong director Wong (In The Mood for Love), the movie is his first English-language feature.
The festival also includes Cannes favourites Michael Moore, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, and it pays homage to the festival's glamorous history.
A photo exhibit along the beach shows Cary Grant in black tie; Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty hailed by paparazzi; and Kim Novak in a limousine, with raindrops sparkling on the window like diamonds.
But the festival is not celebrating its anniversary with nostalgia alone. For a feature-length homage to the movies, it commissioned 35 shorts from directors including Wong, Roman Polanski (The Pianist), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel), the Coen brothers (Fargo) and Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire.)
Host of Hollywood talent for stargazers
Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese (The Departed) has been enlisted to give a master class on moviemaking.
And a host of Hollywood talent will be on hand for the stargazers who wait in the sun with ladders all day to stake their place near the red carpet.
Al Pacino, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt will promote threequel Ocean's Thirteen, Leonardo DiCaprio brings his environmental documentary The 11th Hour, and celebrity super couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will appear - he for Ocean's Thirteen, she for A Mighty Heart, in which she plays the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The main competition involves 22 films from countries including Israel, South Korea and Mexico, as well as movies from four directors who have already been crowned with Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or: Tarantino's gory Death Proof, the Coen brothers' Rio Grande thriller No Country for Old Men, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park and Sarajevo-born Emir Kusturica's Promise Me This.
Michael Moore's Sicko
Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 9/11 won the top prize at Cannes in 2004, is not competing for awards this year. But Sicko, his look at the US health care system, has already won more attention than any film in the festival.
The US Treasury Department opened an investigation into a trip Moore took to Cuba - accompanied by a group of ailing September 11 rescue workers - during the film's shooting.
Cannes was founded in 1939 as an alternative to the Venice Film Festival in Mussolini's Italy - but almost as soon as it opened, the festival was cancelled because World War II broke out. The festival did not get going in earnest until the 1950s.
Past winners of the festival's top prize include Rome, Open City, The Third Man, Blowup, M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver and Apocalypse Now.
- AP