maradona

So in the end, how was Cannes? As I’m writing this, at 36,000 ft. somewhere above Greenland, I realize I’ll need a response for that question by the time I get back. The short answer: the weather sucked, and it wasn’t a banner year for films, but there were some good ones. They still need time to settle. As much as critics grumble about the quality of the films when we’re racing around the festival, by the end of the year, they’re usually starting to look pretty good. Some final reflections:

It’s well past midnight, as usual. I still seem to be writing on Toronto time, blogging when I should be sleeping. Just passed by a crowd cheering for soccer god Maradona as he mounted the red stairs with filmmaker Emir Kusturica for the late-night premiere of Maradona by Kusturica. As the title indicates, the Serbian auteur gives himself almost equal as Maradona in this documentary, which serves as a mutual admiration vanity project for both. Makes a curious companion piece to Tyson. They’re both stories of athletes who abused massive celebrity, tumbled into drugs, then salvaged some sort of redemption by bonding charisma with revolutionary icons like Mao and Che. Both these docs are essentially self-portraits, but Tyson is far superior, because its subject is so much tougher on himself.

Walking back to the hotel, I ran into a pedestrian traffic jam on the Croisette, a thicket of outstretched arms holding up cameras in front of a Gucci store, from pro TV types to cellphones. When you run across this kind of feeding frenzy in the street, you can’t see who’s there behind the mob, so you look up at all the LCD screens trying to decipher something.