On the day after his big triumph here with "
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,"
Julian Schnabel (actress Anne Consigny with Schnabel at the Cannes Film Festival. Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE) received a small group of reporters poolside at the Hotel Martinez, probably the most deluxe of all the overpriced hotels along the
Croisette. He wasn't wearing his trademark bathrobe. It was pretty hot for that here on Wednesday, so he was just in pajamas.
Schnabel is a theatrical, larger-than-life character who invites a degree of dislike and ridicule, and even seems to thrive on it. He stays in fancy hotels (while rarely dressing in actual clothes), makes and spends large sums of money, and has become a controversial but unavoidable artist in
two different media. When the hordes of paparazzi and gawkers outside the fence began screaming at some celebrity entering or leaving the Martinez during our interview,
Schnabel stood up and called out at them, "Shut up! Fucking cocksuckers!" (Click
here to listen to a podcast of the interview.) Earlier, he had told us that his wife had given him a Xanax before the Tuesday night premiere, so that he could barely stay awake through his own movie, and actually fell down during the 20-minute standing ovation that followed it. That's vintage
Schnabel, following the urge to play the buffoon at the apex of his directing career. During the interview, he recalled a memorable critic's quote from the '80s, when his oversize, crockery-encrusted paintings first made him famous: "
Julian Schnabel knows how to make garbage out of garbage." ("I thought that was pretty good!" he crowed.)
Whatever you make of
Schnabel as a painter or a self-invented celebrity -- his previous jobs have included short-order cook and New York cab driver -- it's time to consider the once-unlikely proposition that he's a really important filmmaker. "
The Diving Bell and the Butter
fly," based on a remarkable memoir of severe paralysis written by the late
Jean-Dominique Bauby (photo, l.), formerly the editor of French Elle, is definitely not garbage out of garbage. It's an exhilarating, heartbreaking, wonderfully visual big-screen translation of an inherently uncinematic premise: a man so trapped in his own body he can only control one eye. Many of the things one could say about Schnabel's film border on hackneyed phrases, but the movie itself never does. It's about the prodigious mystery of being alive, and about facing the terror of death with honesty and integrity. It's about the impossible, alchemical magic of artistic creation, and about the ways all of us, like Jean-Do (who
is amazingly played by elfin French actor
Mathieu Amalric (photo, r.), are trapped in our own subjectivity and yearn to communicate with the world outside.
Bauby's title ("
Le Scaphandre et le papillon," in French) stemmed from his realization that while his body had become a prison, like a deep-sea diving suit in which he was permanently trapped, his imagination and his memory could fly wherever he wanted to go.
Schnabel and
cinematographer Janusz Kaminski begin the film from Jean-Do's stringently limited point of view as he wakes from a three-week coma, unable to move his head and seeing the world through one blurred eyeball. He begins to talk to his doctors, only to realize: They can't hear him! Gradually, as Jean-Do comes to grips with his radically transformed body and self, and with the fact that his interior monologues can't come out, the movie opens up like a newly sprouted plant finding the sun.
There's a severe kind of poetry to Jean-Do's long struggle to communicate, thanks to
a special alphabetic system devised by his speech therapist (played by
Marie-Josée Croze, photo, r.). But we've seen that kind of thing in other films dealing with severe disability. Schnabel balances Jean-Do's nearly unbearable diving-bell reality with his colorful dreams, fantasies and memories, which assume an explosive, liberatory, sometimes terrible power. As in Schnabel's earlier films,
"Basquiat" and
"Before Night Falls," he's put together a wonderful soundtrack, ranging from Nino Rota's classic film scores to
U2, Tom Waits and
the Velvet Underground.Many people here have asked Schnabel why he chose to make this film in French, thereby reducing its commercial prospects by many orders of magnitude. At first it does sound like some kind of egotistical Europhile stunt, an attempt to establish his own cosmopolitanism on a grand scale. When a reporter from Boston asked him about this at the festival's official press conference, Schnabel made a point of answering in perfectly capable French. At the Martinez he stuck to English, but insisted that casting Amalric and shooting in France was a question of integrity. "Nobody wanted me to make this movie in French," Schnabel told us. "When the people from Pathé [the French studio] spoke to me, I said, 'I want to make a French movie.' They said, 'We want you to make an American movie!'"
After visiting the hospital in Berck-sur-Mer, on the bleak but impressive coast of Normandy, where
Bauby spent his last year,
Schnabel decided he could only shoot the film there. "You can't manufacture a landscape like that, and architecture like that," he said. "This man sat in that place, and when the tide went out, it looked like he was sitting on the moon. To try to reconstruct that in California somewhere, or to send Americans and English actors to France and have them speak with a French accent -- and then have French people watch the movie with subtitles -- that seemed absurd to me." Even when
Johnny Depp was attached to the film,
Schnabel says, the idea was that "Johnny was going to be with me in France, and we would have surrounded him with French people." When Depp apparently decided that a third "
Pirates of the Caribbean" feature was a safer bet, Schnabel says that
his producer, Kathleen Kennedy, had grave doubts about ever making the film. She was interested in other name actors, including
George Clooney and
Eric Bana. "
Clooney has never had a role like that, and that could have been interesting,"
Schnabel said with underwhelming politeness. "He's a nice man." Much of the drama and comedy in "
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" arises
from the group of women that surround Bauby before and after his accident: the still-loyal mother of his children (
Emmanuelle Seignier, photo, l., Tony Barson, WireImage), the girlfriend who may be the lo
ve of his life (
Agathe de La Fontaine) who finds herself unable to face him, Croze's speech therapist, the physical therapist played by
Olatz López Garmendia,
(photo, r., Tony Barson, WireImage) who happens to be Schnabel's wife. This almost farcical situation -- a group of attractive women clustered around a guy who can only move one eye -- becomes to some degree the film's central subject.
"Ultimately, I think I ended up making a film about women,"
Schnabel said. "There's something about
Fellini's '8 1/2' here. I didn't think about that until I was casting the movie, and then I thought, 'God, there's a lot of women in this movie!' If people thought I was a homosexual when I made
'Before Night Falls,' with all those gorgeous guys in the movie, maybe they'll think I'm a sex maniac now. But I figured, why not? I made a film about a black man and his difficulty in the white art world in New York ['
Basquiat'], and then about the Cuban revolution through the eyes of a homosexual person. So I might as well make a film about women from the perspective of a one-eyed paralyzed guy."
Schnabel also says that "
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is his most autobiographical film, both in that it's about the inherent difficulty of all artistic creation -- Jean-Do's version of that problem being the most extreme you can imagine -- and that it's about confronting his own fear of death. Making films, he observes wryly, isn't his day job. "I can make more money in one afternoon when I make a painting than I did the whole year making this movie. I didn't do it for the dough. I did it because my father was terrified of death when he died, and I thought, if only I could have done something to help him."
I suppose there's something perverse or affected about sitting around the pool in
Cannes talking about death with a famous painter in his pajamas (who's mooching cigarettes from his interviewers), but I'll tell you what, it didn't feel that way at the time. Schnabel's movie thrilled me, reduced me to tears, made me feel re-energized and profoundly grateful to be alive. It was as close to a life-changing experience as you can have at a film festival. So if
Julian Schnabel wants to behave like a ridiculous character from a
Hemingway novel, I say more power to him. Just make more movies, dude.
Jean-Dominique Bauby lived only about a year with his severe disability, but he was able to complete his memoir, which became an international bestseller. (He died just 10
days after its French publication.) As
Schnabel (r.) observes, it was a book written by a man on the very edge of human life, almost literally a message from beyond. "What he was able to do -- he was kind of talking to us from the grave," said
Schnabel. "That's unusual, because most people don't. He was able to talk about the things he regretted, and about how to grab onto the present and make something out of it. If I could have shown this to my dad, he might have thought, 'OK, you know what? I'm going to pass through this thing. I'm going to go back up into the side of the glacier and be part of everything. I'm not going to be so scared.'"
Former socialist Hitchens (photo, r.) and presently an ardent atheist, author of "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" takes on the devout Hedges, author of "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" in a pitched battle of wits and intelligence in Berkeley, a most secular place, yet an epicenter of American belief in free sp
eech.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley by Ken Loach.
Memorial Day is our national day of honoring the nation's military and the sacrifices they have made, and in the midst of what is being universally regarded as the worst foreign affairs disaster in US history with the NeverEndingWar in Iraq. Not fully grasped is the impact of the US military having officially 737 bases world-wide, which omits the estimated 250-300 more "secret" ones, the garrisons, bunkers, phantom Pentagon-speak "lily-pads,” and the failed civilian leadership that has designed it. 
unless you are weighing options for contractors and assessing corporate "risk", to see the vast scope and penetration as a juggernaut for a perverse "growth" industry. More like a cancerous and out of control abscess. According to the National Priorities Project, as of February this year, the cost of just the Iraq war to Key West's 25,000 residents is $44.2 million, almost $1800 per person. For the urban core of Miami-Dade the cost of war soars to $3.3 Billion. $25 Billion for Florida. For the nation, it's over $11 million Per HOUR. The cost is only going to accelerate as long as the current policies of the Bush Pentagon remain unchallenged. 
A low-budget British film about the late JOY DIVISION frontman IAN CURTIS (photo, l.) has won the Best European Film award at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The film, entitled Control, was directed by famed Dutch still and music video photographer Anton Corbijn and stars former warehouse worker Sam Riley (photo, r.) as troubled Curtis in the years leading up to his
suicide in 1980.On granting the award the Cannes jury said, "This is a very impressive and assured debut from a renowned photographer, but he never allows the look of the film, beautiful though it is, to detract from the powerful story and character development."The performances are all excellent, not just the leading characters. We feel that this is a film that will strike a real chord with audiences around Europe, and not just with music lovers."
Here is the first of the closing action from the 60th Cannes Film Festival. First, from Indiewire!
Cristian Mungiu's (photo, l., by Eugene Hernandez, indieWIRE) "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" from Romania won the Palme d'Or as the 60th Cannes Film Festival came to a close on Sunday night with winners taking their bows. The prizes were presented prior to the closing night screening of Denys Arcand's "L'Age Des Tenebres," marking the end of the 2007 festival. Selecting the winners in the '07 Cannes competition were jury president Stephen Frears, along with fellow jurors: actress Maggie Cheung, actress Toni Collette, director and actress Maria de Medeiros, director and actress Sarah Polley, director Marco Bellocchio, writer Orhan Pamuk, director and actor Michel Piccoli, and director Abderramane Sissako.
(l.) Julian Schnabel, winner of the best director prize in Cannes.
Expressing excitement at winning their Camera d'Or prize for best first feature, Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen (photo, r., Eugene Hernandez, indieWIRE) called the experience "a dream." The directing duo also won 
the SACD prize in the festival's International Critics Week section. Playwright, theater director and actress Geffen summed up the excitement in Cannes Sunday, "It's like a dream...like in a movie."
Cannes Closes on Light Note With Comedy
e, photo, r., with Diane Kruger, at Cannes), a civil servant with a house in suburbia, a boring job, a high-powered wife who does not listen to him and two daughters who do not look up from their video game when he walks into the room.
(This blog is from Fred Reed, "a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, who has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times.
Jane Fonda given career Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 
is daughter to uphold the humanist values he defended in his movies. "He had a sense of duty but not political courage, while you, you have the unshakable stubbornness of someone who has figured out where justice lies and how to defend the oppressed, and who follows through," Jacob said. "He played that in his movies, you did it in life." Jane Fonda, visibly moved, put the focus back on her father, responding in excellent French, "For my father, his films were his way of representing justice, quality and d
emocracy."She added her hope that one day, "the United States will again become the country that he stood for".
After Jimmy Carter caved to the Republican noise machine and took back his blast at President Bush, it's no surprise the party wimped out on the war.
esidents have sucked in their own individual ways, Bush is like a smorgasbord of suck. He combines the corruption (Teapot Dome Scandal, which was all about payoffs inside the Republican administation over oil leases-MS) of Warren G. Harding, the abuse of power of Richard Nixon and the warmongering of James K. Polk. 
inexplicable reason Republicans have taken to comparing Bush to Harry Truman -- a comparison that would make sense only if Harry Truman had A) started World War II and B) lost World War II. Harding sucked, but he once said, "I am not fit for this office and never should have been here." So at least he knew he sucked. He never walked offstage like Bush does after one of his embarrassing press conferences with a look on his face like, "Nailed it." Bush still acts like every failure is just a friend he hasn't met yet.
y an orangutan with a Magic 8-Ball. And that's why it's so depressing that when the right-wing noise machine pretended to get upset at what Jimmy Carter said, he did what Democrats always do and backed down. He said his remarks were careless and misrepresented and the sun was in his eyes and his hearing aid went out and he was molested by a clergyman.
On the day after his big triumph here with "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," Julian Schnabel (actress Anne Consigny with Schnabel at the Cannes Film Festival. Photo by Eugene Hernandez/indieWIRE) received a small group of reporters poolside at the Hotel Martinez, probably the most deluxe of all the overpriced hotels along the Croisette. He wasn't wearing his trademark bathrobe. It was pretty hot for that here on Wednesday, so he was just in pajamas. Schnabel is a theatrical, larger-than-life character who invites a degree of dislike and ridicule, and even seems to thrive on it. He stays in fancy hotels (while rarely dressing in actual clothes), makes and spends large sums of money, and has become a controversial but unavoidable artist in 
two different media. When the hordes of paparazzi and gawkers outside the fence began screaming at some celebrity entering or leaving the Martinez during our interview, Schnabel stood up and called out at them, "Shut up! Fucking cocksuckers!" (Click here to listen to a podcast of the interview.) Earlier, he had told us that his wife had given him a Xanax before the Tuesday night premiere, so that he could barely stay awake through his own movie, and actually fell down during the 20-minute standing ovation that followed it. That's vintage Schnabel, following the urge to play the buffoon at the apex of his directing career. During the interview, he recalled a memorable critic's quote from the '80s, when his oversize, crockery-encrusted paintings first made him famous: "Julian Schnabel knows how to make garbage out of garbage." ("I thought that was pretty good!" he crowed.)
fly," based on a remarkable memoir of severe paralysis written by the late Jean-Dominique Bauby (photo, l.), formerly the editor of French Elle, is definitely not garbage out of garbage. It's an exhilarating, heartbreaking, wonderfully visual big-screen translation of an inherently uncinematic premise: a man so trapped in his own body he can only control one eye. Many of the things one could say about Schnabel's film border on hackneyed phrases, but the movie itself never does. It's about the prodigious mystery of being alive, and about facing the terror of death with honesty and integrity. It's about the impossible, alchemical magic of artistic creation, and about the ways all of us, like Jean-Do (who 
is amazingly played by elfin French actor Mathieu Amalric (photo, r.), are trapped in our own subjectivity and yearn to communicate with the world outside.
a special alphabetic system devised by his speech therapist (played by Marie-Josée Croze, photo, r.). But we've seen that kind of thing in other films dealing with severe disability. Schnabel balances Jean-Do's nearly unbearable diving-bell reality with his colorful dreams, fantasies and memories, which assume an explosive, liberatory, sometimes terrible power. As in Schnabel's earlier films, "Basquiat" and "Before Night Falls," he's put together a wonderful soundtrack, ranging from Nino Rota's classic film scores to U2, Tom Waits and the Velvet Underground.
from the group of women that surround Bauby before and after his accident: the still-loyal mother of his children (Emmanuelle Seignier, photo, l., Tony Barson, WireImage), the girlfriend who may be the lo
ve of his life (Agathe de La Fontaine) who finds herself unable to face him, Croze's speech therapist, the physical therapist played by Olatz López Garmendia, (photo, r., Tony Barson, WireImage) who happens to be Schnabel's wife. This almost farcical situation -- a group of attractive women clustered around a guy who can only move one eye -- becomes to some degree the film's central subject.
days after its French publication.) As Schnabel (r.) observes, it was a book written by a man on the very edge of human life, almost literally a message from beyond. "What he was able to do -- he was kind of talking to us from the grave," said Schnabel. "That's unusual, because most people don't. He was able to talk about the things he regretted, and about how to grab onto the present and make something out of it. If I could have shown this to my dad, he might have thought, 'OK, you know what? I'm going to pass through this thing. I'm going to go back up into the side of the glacier and be part of everything. I'm not going to be so scared.'"
which the lives and emotional arcs of six people -- four Turks and two Germans -- criss-cross through love and tragedy takes the German-born Turkish writer-director's ongoing interest in two seemingly divergent cultures to a humanist level that's way beyond the grungy romanticism of his 2003 "Head-On" or the dreamy dramedy of "In July" (2000). Robust upscale biz looks a given. 
y Bremen, where his father, sprightly septuagenarian Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz, photo, l.), still visits hookers as a cure for his loneliness.
Abel Ferrara has a ball with "GO GO TALES" a puckish and perpetually lively night out at a New York strip club that's faring no better than its sweaty, stressed-out impresario. Ferrara is in a wonderfully loose and comedic mood after the complex spiritual dramatics of "Mary," expanding his fascination with big American dreams and corrosive addictions while filling the screen with a wild panoply of characters. Given some star power and ample, undulating flesh on view, fest and market value are upward after Cannes midnight non-competish platform, though helmer's usual problems with Stateside theatrical play will continue.
Competition Heats Up With Seidl, Van Sant, and Schnabel
Angelina Jolie with "A Mighty Heart." (photo, l. with Pearl, Winterbottom, Jolie, and Futterman). 
an Sant's "Paranoid Park" is also a visual - and aural - feast, with lush cinematography by Christopher Doyle and loopy, evocative sound design from Gus Van Sant regular Leslie Schatz. Van Sant returns to the teenage milieu of "Elephant" with a simple story about a young skateboarder who is involved in a gruesome murder. Despite what it sounds like, Van Sant's film is significantly different from the work of Larry Clark ("Bully," "Wassup Rockers"). Instead of hanging out with skater-punks verite-style, we get a highly subjective experience of a young man's guilty conscience.
quietly startling finale, clearly influenced by Carl Theodore Dreyer's masterpiece (photo, l.) "Ordet," "Silent Light" lacks that film's profound humanity and catharsis. And yet, even though the bold young director of "Japon" and "Battle in Heaven" may have stumbled with "Silent Light," his exquisite sensibility still shines through.
-directed), Michael Winterbottom's gripping thriller "A Mighty Heart" feels like a refreshing blast from the real world. (What, no war films this year?) Despite the potential sentimentality of the subject matter - the film is told through the perspective of Mariane Pearl, the five-months pregnant wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl - "A Mighty Heart" tells a complex, suspenseful tale of political intrigue, Pakistani-Indian relations, journalistic ethics, torture and yes, the emotional turmoil of losing a loved one. 
the case for impeachment and also why it probably won't happen, despite all the evidence to bring such indictment against George W. Bush. As Jerry Ford said about Richard Nixon, after Dick flew away from the White House lawn that fateful day in August, 1973, "the long national nightmare is over". In our current state of affairs, we can't make such a declaration. Not quite, and not soon enough. To the right, a flyer for a rally, today, to Impeach Bush, at the submarine yards in New London. - MS
He is extraordinarily unpopular. His approval ratings, which have been abysmal for about 18 months, have now sunk to their lowest ever, making him the most unpopular president in a generation. His 28 percent approval rating in a May 5 Newsweek poll ties that of Jimmy Carter in 1979 after the failed Iran rescue mission. Bush's unpopularity has emboldened congressional Democrats, who now have no qualms about attacking him directly and flatly asserting that his Iraq war is l
ost.
number of cities, including 
Detroit and San Francisco, have passed impeachment resolutions. Reps. John Murtha (photo, r.) and (photo, l.) John Conyers and a few other politicians have floated the idea. And there is a significant grassroots movement to impeach Bush, spearheaded by organizations like After Downing Street. Even some Republicans, outraged by Bush's failure to uphold right-wing positions (his immigration policy, in particular), have begun muttering about impeachment.
Bush's approval of illegal wiretapping and torture, to his unparalleled use of "signing statements" (Bush, r., signing Patriot Act) to disobey laws he disagrees with, to the outrageous Gonzales (photo, below) and 
U.S. attorneys affair.
Why was Clinton (photo, with Lewinsky), who was never as unpopular as Bush, impeached for lying about sex, while Bush faces no sanction for the far more serious offense of lying about war?
even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It's a national myth. It's John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. And we're not ready to do that.
s a reason Bush kept repeating, "I'm a war president. I'm a war president." It worked, literally, like a charm. 
tes to reach out and smash someone. Pundits like Henry Kissinger (photo, r.)and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also called for America to attack the Arab world. Kissinger, according to Bob Woodward's (photo, l.) "State of 
Denial," said that "we need to humiliate them"; Friedman said we needed to "go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something." As Friedman's statement indicates, who we smashed was basically unimportant. Friedman and Kissinger argued that attacking the Arab world would serve as a deterrent, but that was a detail. For many Americans, who Bush attacked or the reasons he gave, didn't matter -- what mattered was that we were fighting back.
it made no sense for those Americans to turn on him. Truth was never their major concern anyway -- revenge was. And if we took revenge on the wrong person, well, better a misplaced revenge than none at all.
lizabeth de la Vega's book on impeachment, framed as a fictitious indictment of Bush for conspiring to defraud the United States, she argues that from a legal standpoint it doesn't matter that Bush may have believed his lies were in the service of a higher good -- he's still guilty of fraud. In a brilliant stroke, de la Vega compares the Bush administration's lies to those told by Enron executives -- who were, of course, rightfully convicted.
Scooter Libby (photo, r.) case represented the "criminalization of politics," so the conventional wisdom holds that distorting evidence to justify a war may be slightly reprehensible, but is not worth making much of a fuss about, and is certainly not impeachable.
ndrew Johnson and the disgrace of Richard Nixon. But he's not hom
e free yet. The culture of spin is also the culture of spectacle, and a sudden, theatrical event -- a lurid accusation made by a former official, a colorful revelation of a very specific and memorable Bush lie -- could start the scandal machine going full speed. Even the war card cannot be played indefinitely. If Bush were to withdraw the troops from Iraq, and the full dimensions of America's defeat were to become apparent, all of his war-president potency would backfire and he would be in much greater danger of being impeached. Congress and the media both gain courage as the polls sink, and if Bush's numbers continue to hit historic lows, they will turn on him with increasing savagery. If everything happens just so, the downfall of the House of Bush could be shocking in its swiftness. 
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