The British filmmaker Terence Davies doesn't come out with new work very often -- he's only made five features in 24 years -- so "Of Time and the City" is something of an event. And even though it runs a brief 72 minutes, this documentary memory play about Davies' hometown of Liverpool is so rich with emotion, nostalgia, clarity, and love that it feels epic. Davies himself narrates over the inspired onrush of historical and archival footage, and his hoarse, whispered cadences have the urgency of the confessional and the scornful humor of the outsider. Hear him sneer delightedly at the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II, aka "the Betty Windsor Show," or mock "the British genius for creating the dismal" over images of post-war housing projects and their awful decay.

"Of Time and the City" (here's the offical website) uses music brilliantly, especially in a section that stitches together a day in post-WWII Liverpool from archival footage and sets to achingly beautiful medieval polyphony (Perotin's "Beata Viscera," to be particular). Note to rockers: Davies could care less about the Beatles. No idea if the film will get picked up for U.S. release, but it's easily the most haunting work I've seen at Cannes. "We love the place we hate, we hate the place we love," Davies narrates. "Come closer now and see your dreams. Come closer now, and see mine."

What does a 100-year-old working filmmaker do? Anything he wants, obviously. Today Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira received a Golden Palm at Cannes for his body of work -- 46 features and short films that are challenging, frustrating, mystical, and very much alive. Clint Eastwood was a few rows behind me (that's him above shaking hands with de Oliveira), and Cannes jury foreman Sean Penn was in the hall along with other jury members. It isn't often you get to stand up for a living legend.

A short tribute video was screened (in which de Oliveira casually mentioned that the first films he saw, "hand-in-hand with my father," were the earliest of silent films), as well as the director's first work: the 1931 "Labor on the River Douro," a poetic and playful aquatic example of the "city symphony" documentary genre then in vogue. In between, de Oliveira hopped up the steps to the stage -- really, we should all be this spry at 100 -- and spoke to the crowd about how he much preferred receiving an award this way because he doesn't like competition.

Here's some video of the standing O and the director's beaming response, with a quick climpse of Clint in the audience. The man on stage in white is the great French actor Michel Piccoli, the bald gentleman is Cannes festival founder Gilles Jacob, and the compartive kid is current festival director Thierry Fermaux.

By the way, de Oliveira's currently at work on his 47th movie.

I didn't spend yesterday just watching the new "Indiana Jones" movie and filing copy -- in the morning I caught "Gomorra," a very good Italian film about the Mafia in daily life (based on a non-fiction book that's a sensation in-country, telling tales and exposing how deeply rooted corruption is at every level of Italy). With dozens of characters bulleting around (most of them male, most of them not terribly bright, many of them dead before too long), it's not an action or crime movie so much as a pesudo-documentary on interspecies aggression. With rich, real characters. Sort of like if Robert Altman had directed "The Godfather." (And I mean sort of). I haven't read the book, but Glenn Kenny has, and he says the scene in the film where the exploited tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo, weary and terrific) sees the dress he made being worn by Scarlett Johansson on TV was in reality the Dolce & Gabbana dress Angelina Jolie wore to the Oscars.

After Indy, I schlepped to "Ashes of Time Redux," Wong Kar-wai's remix (photo, above) of one of his earliest films and certainly his only martial arts movie. The original 1994 "Ashes," which I haven't seen (it's available in a poorly done DVD version) apparently didn't make much sense, and it certainly doesn't now, but, lord, is it a vision to behold -- a wu xia film turned into an abstract expressionist action painting. I believe the only redux-ing that has been done is a digital clean up, some trimming, and a new score with cello solos by Yo-yo Ma. In that case, what Wong and cinematographer Cristopher Doyle (who were present at the screening, along with the cast) created 14 years ago is either a masterpiece of in-camera wizardry or a triumph of lab work. After all the Indiana Jones madness, I felt like I was tripping. Ended up sleeping through my morning screening, too.

By Ty Burr
Globe staff

*** (three stars)

No, it?s not as good as ?Raiders of the Lost Ark.? Don?t be silly. Lightning can?t be bottled twice, no matter how skilled the vintners.

Instead, Steven Spielberg's ?Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? is merely grand old-school fun ? a rollicking class reunion that stands as the second best entry in the venerable series. Premiering Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival and opening worldwide on Thursday, the new movie is leagues better than 1984?s nasty ?Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? and blessed with more snap and heart ? more fun ? than 1989?s pro forma ?Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.? All that's lacking is a genuine sense of surprise. It's very possible that was left out on purpose.

The emphasis in ?Crystal Skull? is on old-fashioned stuntwork rather than the shiny chimeras of modern digital effects. When Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) catapults from the back of a motorcycle through the window of a speeding car, out the opposite window and back onto the motorcycle ? his feet nervously skitching along the roadbed ? at least half the excitement is knowing that motorcycle, car, Ford, and road are real.

Thankfully, the approach goes only so far. Character and star may have aged two decades since the last installment, but bullets still miss the good guys with astonishing regularity, and Indiana Jones may be the only person who could escape a desert nuclear test site with an A-bomb due to land in ten seconds. How he manages this makes no blessed sense, but it?s a hoot anyway.

That scene occurs in the movie?s first fifteen minutes, in the sort of fast-charging prologue Spielberg and producer George Lucas know we?re expecting. The sequence also establishes the time (1957), the enemy (Russian Communists), and the stakes (power over all of mankind ? the usual).

Better, it reintroduces Indy as a believably older but still absurdly capable figure out of a Saturday matinee serial, and it brings on Cate Blanchett as Irina Spalko, a Red menace with a sword, a Louise Brooks bob, and a nifty accent by way of Natasha in the old ?Rocky and Bullwinkle? cartoons. ?Drop dead, comrade,? the hero sneers at Irina, and that?s a good description of the best ?Indiana Jones? villain yet: She?s a drop-dead comrade.

To sum up the plot of ?Crystal Skull? requires dancing around a number of spoilers, so stop reading now if you want to go in with a clean slate. What Spalko and her KGB minions are after is a rare and very strange crystal skull that legends say was stolen from El Dorado, the lost city of gold in Peru. One of Indiana?s colleagues, Professor Oxley (John Hurt), has set out to find it and disappeared, and a young man named Mutt (Shia LeBeouf) arrives to beg Jones to rescue his old friend.

This being the 50s, Mutt is first seen riding a motorcycle with his cap akimbo just like Marlon Brando in ?The Wild One.? He?s a preppie who has dropped out to become a greaser instead of a beatnik, and the sequence in which he and Indiana careen through the college campus (inside the library and out) with Russians in high-speed pursuit is an early high point.

It?s bookended later in the film by a delirious action set piece involving multiple jeeps, a sheer cliff face, monkeys, vines, and a ravenous army of giant ants. (This last leads to one of the few gross-out scenes in ?Skull,? which is noticeably less gruesome than the other sequels. It?s still a bit too spooky in places for young children.)

The basic structure of these action scenes hasn?t change in 20 years, but camera technology and Spielberg?s skill at deploying it have. There?s an organic smoothness to the mayhem that can take your breath away, so much so that the less inspired aspects of ?Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? stick out more clearly.

It?s wonderful, for instance, to see Karen Allen reprise her role as Marion Ravenwood from ?Raiders,? since her warmth was precisely what was missing from the first two sequels. (Let us now officially forget all about Kate Capshaw and the unfortunate Alison Doody.) The script doesn?t give Allen quite enough to do, though, and the family dynamics that take over the last third of the movie feel overly familiar.

Indeed, a number of Spielberg career threads are woven into ?Skull,? including a climactic shot that blatantly rehashes the finale of one of the director?s best-loved early films. While Ford wears the fedora with believably weathered panache, on some level this Indy seems smaller, less archetypal than his younger incarnation. Where the character once towered over these movies, now he?s just the leader of the pack.

The rest of the cast keeps pace ? Ray Winstone as an accomplice who may or may not be a betrayer, Jim Broadbent taking over for the late Denholm Elliott as Indy?s college friend. LeBoeuf has an interesting alertness that he still hasn?t figured out how to use as an actor, but he throws himself into the stuntwork like a proper student at the feet of the masters.

It bears asking, though: What do we want from an ?Indiana Jones? movie in 2008? Engaged nostalgia, I think, and on that level ?Crystal Skull? delivers. Some may be disappointed that Spielberg and company haven?t invested the series with the latest in computer boffinry or that the new movie treads comfortably (sometimes too comfortably) in the footsteps of its forebears. This isn?t a reinvention but a reunion, of characters, creators, even techniques. ?Same old same old,? Jones says at one point, and that?s what we get. The action may have been updated to the 1950s, but in ways both inspired and unexamined, ?Indiana Jones? remains happily stuck in the 80s.

So. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Maybe you've heard of it? The 800-lb Hollywood gorilla of this year's Cannes showed at the Palais at 1 pm today to a jammed house and cheers for the opening credits. By the end credits, the applause was noticeably less enthusiastic and I heard some sniping from the more jaded media folk -- how easy and how much fun to dismiss something so hyped as irrelevant. Me, I had a very good time with the movie, divining early on that whatever was on the menu, surprise wasn't going to be part of it. My review's running in tomorrow's paper and it's posted here, too; the gist is that it stands, for me anyway, as easily the second best in the series.

The jaded media folk of course swamped the ensuing press conference to shout "Steeeven!" and "'Arrison!" Here's a video clip of Cate Blanchett and Harrison Ford responding to a few questions about their roles:

All right, 10:43 to be precise. But the server gods have accepted my votive offerings of small French cheeses and allowed me to upload videos, so I'm just going to dump them all into one big post. Forgive the occasional shaky-cam; there wasn't a budget for a tripod this year. (Actually, I'm using a digital photo camera I borrowed from Wesley; I don't think there's any place to put a tripod.)

So here's Mike Tyson introducing the documentary "Tyson" on the evening of the 16th; he looks and sounds quite stunned. I got to sit down with director James Toback earlier today, and probably the most wrenching comment he made was reporting Tyson's response upon his first viewing of the film: "It's like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is that I'm the subject." "Last night was the first time he started embracing the movie," Toback continued, "and stopped considering it an unsettling provocation. He said to me after the audience response 'I've never experienced anything like this,' and I thought, how is that possible? But these strangers responding that way were different from the strangers he knew from the ring."

Here's Woody Allen's response to being asked whether the menage a trois in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" reflects his personal fantasy. It's pretty rich.

And here's Woody on why he'll probably never make a movie anywhere in the former USSR.

That's it, I'm going to bed. Tomorrow's an "Indiana Jones" day, all day.

Filed under: Documentary, Sports, Cannes, Theatrical Reviews, Festival Reports, Celebrities and Controversy

"They'll make hypocrite judgments
After the fact
But the name of the game
Is be hit and hit back ... "

-- Warren Zevon, "Boom Boom Mancini"

Boxing is a brutal sport. Does that mean you have to be a brute to succeed in it? Mike Tyson was the youngest ever heavyweight champion in the world; when he stepped into the ring, it was as if he was in absolute control over everything that happened. And when he stepped out, it was as if he had no control over anything that happened. He had a marriage implode in public. He served three years in prison for rape. He became a nightmare-parody of himself, pathetic and terrifying, telling challengers he would eat their children. And now, as seen in James Toback's documentary Tyson, he is older, sadder, sober, off drugs and out of the fight game, trying to battle things you cannot simply strike with your fists.

Continue reading Cannes Review: Tyson

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