The Band's Visit has just swept Israel's Ophir Awards (the equivalent to that country's Oscars) so this means it should be Israel's submission for the Academy Award's Best Foreign Language Film. But even with the Kodak Theater ceremony still 5 months away, there's already controversy in this category. Rivals are claiming that the political movie, about an Egyptian police band that mistakenly ends up stranded overnight in a small Israeli town, has more than 50% English dialogue and therefore must be ruled ineligible for the nomination. 
Israeli film critic Yair Raveh has been following the scandal on his blog (alas, in Hebrew) and reports that The Band's Visit producers, backed by Sony Pictures Classics (who bought the Cannes award winning film's foreign rights) insist the English dialogue is less than 50%. The Israeli motion picture academy says it's the producers' call, not theirs. That has infuriated rivals who are calling on the local academy to check into the matter before the film is officially submitted. Sony Classics may also enter the pic's Israeli writer and director Eran Kolirin in the Best Original Screenplay category. The Band's Visit, of course, just had its North American premiere at Telluride and Toronto. "As someone who's been following Israeli cinema for the past 15 years," Raveh emails me, "I've yet to see a local film getting such glowing international reviews." If it does become one of Oscar's Foreign Language nominees this year, it will be the first Israeli film to do so since 1984's Beyond the Walls. To date, six Israeli films have been Oscar nominees, but an Israeli movie has yet to win. Interestingly, The Band's Visit will participate in the Middle East International Film Festival held in October in Abu Dhabi.
The movie is a World War II thriller set in Shanghai featuring long and sometimes violent sex scenes which Lee has hinted were real. "It is overwhelming, because this movie has taken me to some very difficult places," Lee told the red carpet award ceremony. Brian De Palma, whose Redacted shocked Venice with its brutal reconstruction of the real-life rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers, won the Silver Lion For Best Director. Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, one of six U.S. productions in the 23-strong main competition, took one of two Special Jury Prizes for his conceptual biopic about singer-songwriter Bob Dylan featuring Cate Blanchett who won the Volpi Cup For Best Actress along with Brad Pitt as the surprise winner of the Volpi Cup For Best Actor for his portrayal in The Assassination of Jesse James. The other Special Jury Prize winner was Tunisian-born director Abdellatif Kechiche's drama The Secret of the Grain about immigration. Also awarded was the Golden Lion of the 75th Anniversary to Bernardo Bertolucci. 
UPDATE: A devastating Romanian film about back-alley abortion and daily despair in the communist era tonight won the 2007 Cannes Film Festival's top award, the Palme d'Or. As I was tipped this morning, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, directed by Cristian Mungiu and made for only $800,000, was celebrated, 
along with NYC artist Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell And The Butterfly which was awarded the Prix de la Mise en Scene for Best Director, and Fatih Akin's German-Turkish The Edge of Heaven which was given the Prix du Scenario for Best Screenplay. American director Gus Van Sant won the Prix du 60th Anniversaire for his Paranoid Park. And the Grand Prix, considered the runner-up prize, went to The Mourning Forest helmed by Naomi Kawase. At this hotly contested 60th anniversary Cannes, the Coen brothers' highly regarded No Country For Old Men was blanked as was Quentin tarantino's Death Proof (1/2 of Grindhouse). Meanwhile, the much hyped and well received Sicko, Michael Moore's documentary about the U.S. health care system, was not entered into competition. 
Was wily Harvey Weinstein's people charging journalists $1,500 apiece for a seat at the Cannes Death Proof junket? This and other matters are explored by my Village Voice Media brother Rob Nelson in his wonderfully subversive Cannes Film Festival coverage. (Read it 
Tuesday, May 15th
8:30pm: Go West Dinner Party (Wild Bunch)
How nice that the U.S. government is cooperating with Harvey Weinstein's plans to promote the heck out of Michael Moore's new documentary Sicko about the HMO crisis in this country. Just in time for the Cannes Film Festival, news leaked out today that the Academy Award-winning filmmaker is under investigation by the Treasury Department for taking about 10 ailing 9/11 Ground Zero rescue workers to Cuba for treatment in the film that debuts May 19th at the Cannes Film Festival. The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control notified Moore in a letter dated back on May 2 that it was conducting a civil investigation for possible violations of the U.S. trade embargo restricting travel to Cuba. But, suddenly, this week a copy of the letter was obtained by the AP. What wonderful timing! It shows that Moore applied on October 12th for full-time journalists' permission to go to Cuba but didn't wait for the U.S. government's response. "This office has no record that a specific license was issued authorizing you to engage in travel-related transactions involving Cuba," Dale Thompson, OFAC chief of general investigations and field operations, wrote. But fear not: the penalties for this aren't a big deal. When Oliver Stone was busted for traveling to Cuba to make his controversial Fidel Castro documentary, his Ixtlan production company only had to pay the feds $6,322.20 in chump change.
column, 
May 4: Not only did Warner Bros. wait to release the Curtis Hanson–directed Lucky You two years after it wrapped, but they dumped it opposite that man-boy in a spider suit. The execs obviously share my opinion that a Drew Barrymore–Eric Bana combo can’t open a movie. As for Spider-Man 3, its 140-minute running time is ass-numbing, even though director Sam Raimi ties up loose ends from SM1 and SM2. On the other hand, For the U.S. market, Sony Pictures has made 11,000+ prints and rounded up 4,000+ theaters to show the film as well as sneak it in major cities around the country with Thursday midnight showings. (At Pacific’s The Grove Stadium 14 in Los Angeles, screenings will start at 12:01 a.m., 12:05 a.m., 12:10 a.m., 12:15 a.m. and 12:20 a.m.) Obviously, the studio is doing everything it can to ensure that the threequel makes over $100-plus mil its opening weekend, before any bad word of mouth sets in. (SM1 took in $114 mil and SM2 $88 mil.) But privately, Sony dreams of a greedy $150 mil debut, given the pic’s hefty $300-plus-mil unofficial price tag.
Thumbs up to America's foremost film critic. Tomorrow night, recovering cancer patient Roger Ebert will demonstrate he's the class act of journalism when he attends his 9th annual "Overlooked Film Festival" at the University of Illinois at Urbana. He awaits another surgery to restore his speech. But the Chicago Sun-Times and TV film critic won't have to say a word to demonstrate his tremendous courage not to hide his illness. "I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the festival," he 
It was just a matter of time before the Virginia Tech massacre was linked to the movie industry. So it turns out that one of the school's professors, Paul Harrill, alerted The New York Times to the similarity between the most inexplicable of the images that murderer Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC News, and an "art" film from his native South Korea that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The prof hoped it would shed some light on what led Cho to kill 32 on Monday before turning the gun on himself. In a blog item, the NYT shows how the self-shot photo of Cho, and a still from the Web site of the pic Oldboy (aka Old Boy), look eerily similar, down to the poses. Certainly, Oldboy is a dark and disturbing movie about a seemingly ordinary businessman who, after being mysteriously imprisoned, goes on an extensive, exhausting rampage. 
NYT reviewer Manohla Dargis noted the film’s “body count and sadistic violence.” Even so, the pic received amazingly good and even great reviews from critics in the U.S. and around the world who (for reasons that escape me) loved its unsettling and terrifying tale of revenge told with relentless energy. Wrote Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times: "It says something when you come out of a film as weird and fantastical as Oldboy and feel that you've experienced something truly authentic. I just don't know what. I can't think of anything to compare it to." Well, now we know to compare it to real life, don't we? I just don't understand how critics with even a shred of humanity keep supporting films that celebrate violence in all its awfulness. Makes me nauseous.
EXCLUSIVE (refresh for latest): It's very early, still. But I'm told the first round of tracking for Spider-Man 3 is better than the first pulse that was registered for either Spidey 1 or 2 pics in this all-important Sony franchise. Remember: the first two had a combined worldwide theatrical gross of $1.6 billion: $821.7 million for Spider-Man 1 and $783.7 mil for Spider-Man 2. "The early awareness and indicators are through the roof," one box office guru told me. Said another expert: "With so many other movies struggling for attention this year, SM3 came on [tracking] with over 90% awareness and over 20% first choice a month out." The big upside for Spider-Man 3, I'm told, is that moviergoers are responding like crazy to director Sam Raimi's dark and disturbing "Black Spidey" very cool iconography that characterizes the third installment along with its tag line "The Greatest Battle Lies Within." With great trailers, aggressive Internet and TV promotion, and a storyline which the other two films seemed to building towards, Spider-Man 3 should amass a $100+ million opening weekend in the United States beginning May 4th because, based on tracking, "the number is massive," I'm told. 
(SM1 had a $114 mil opening weekend and SM2 $88 mil.) The new pic's release will be a global event. Spider-Man 3 will debut first in China before it officially opens in North America. Since comic book caper kicks off the 2007 summer movie season, this is clearly going to be a banner year at the box office -- probably the biggest in cinematic history -- given all the sequels, prequels and tentpole pics being released. (See my LA Weekly column 
Certainly U.S. moviegoers can't get enough of Bollywood movies. Last year was a record-breaker for Hindi films at the U.S. box office: of the 14 foreign language films that grossed over $2 mil here in 2006, seven have been in Hindi. Until then, no more than two Hindi films made over $2 mil here in the same year. No company has benefited more from this run than BODVOD Networks, the NY-based media company that holds exclusive rights to popular Indian movies from top studios such as UTV and Adlabs. BODVOD was created in 2004 to acquire, package, market and distribute Bollywood and other South Asian films, TV shows and music on all on-demand media platforms through over 30 major distribution partners. The result is that North American cable companies are making deals left and right for Bollywood product with BODVOD -- in Toronto with Canada's largest cable provider Rogers Communications, in San Diego and Orange County with Cox Communications, and in Los Angeles for the annual Indian Film Festival with co-sponsor Time Warner Cable. Recent hit Bollywood films available on cable include Deewane, Huye Pagal, Lakshya, Chup Chup Ke and Krrish. Later this season come premieres of Shah Rukh Khan’s action blockbuster Don, the New York-set comedy Jaan-E-Mann, and the epic Moghul-era romance Umrao Jaan starring the newly engaged Bollywood power couple Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan.
So you think no one in Hollywood ever reads those cruel public forum and blog posts written by filmgoers just to torture movie people? Well, the guy behind Knocked Up does because clearly he's neurotic to the extreme. Judd Apatow, the writer/director/producer (whom I just 
"I like to put my name in the Google news and blog alerts and receive every single thing written about me and my work on the Internet. Then I can go home and stew on all of it, feeling both good and ashamed in quick succession. There is really no limit to the amount of time I can spend looking for any madman's rambling about something I have been a part of. Time never moves faster than those hours I spend after midnight sitting at the computer searching for criticism and insults, which inevitably leave me feeling soiled to my core. I feel just as bad when I get a negative review in The Village Voice as I do when some kid blogging in Thailand says I suck." So, flame away.
There's more to indie marketing than just Sundance and Toronto. Just because that rotten actor Arnold Schwarzenegger is the state's governor is no reason not to enter or attend one of Southern California's 
3. Pan African Film & Arts Festival (mid-February): Global event showcases about 150 films about people of African descent. Runs during Black History Month in the U.S. based at the Magic Johnson Theaters and the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles.