jack black

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Why does the famous literary classic inspire so many bad movie adaptations?

Gabourey Sidibe isn’t exactly on the road to becoming an “American Cinderella”

Comedian Russell Peters talks to Kenneth Whyte about ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and some of the more curious Oscar performances

The Iron Man of acting delivers the world’s first DVD commentary in verbal blackface.

For two weeks each May, a quaint town on the French Riviera becomes a Hollywood fantasy in the flesh. Throughout the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, I blogged video clips. In the aftermath, I’ve edited a montage of highlights, an impressionist trip through the beauty, vulgarity, hysteria and chaos that is Cannes.

The weekend’s big movie for fully grown children isYou Don’t Mess With the Zohan, the new Judd Apatow-branded comedy starring Adam Sandler as an Israeli commando who becomes a Manhattan hairdresser. But your faithful correspondent hasn’t seen it. Blame it on Cannes. The film was screened while I was flying home. Then my immune system promptly crashed and burned, leaving me too ill to attend a second Toronto screening. Lesson learned: I vow to never again attempt surviving on four hours sleep a night for two weeks running. I did find the time to watch the Zohan trailer, however, and it seems to require no further explanation. Word on the street from friends who did preview the entire movie: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is more of an Adam Sandler movie than a Judd Apatow movie.

The Cannes Film Festival got underway at 10 a.m. this with its split personality on full frontal display. At one end of the beach, in the Palais, some 1,600 journalists packed the Lumiere Theatre for the first official press screening of the opening night gala, Blindness, a Canadian co-production based on a Nobel laureate’s novel: a serious allegory about the human condition. I’d already seen it. So I was down the beach watching an allegory of a different colour, along with a horde of photographers and TV cameras. The occasion was a Hollywood stunt on the Carlton Hotel pier. Last year Dreamworks sent Jerry Seinfeld down a zip-wire from the roof of the Carlton in a bee suit to promote Bee Movie, a movie that turned out to be less entertaining than the stunt. This year Dreamworks trotted out Jack Black and a legion of dancing pandas to flog Kung Fu Panda, an animated kids’ movie that premieres in Cannes tomorrow, safely out of competition. And in case anyone is worried that Cannes is going soft, and just humouring the Hollywood dream merchants, cheek-by-jowl with the Kung Fu Panda gala tomorrow is the the premiere of an animated documentary about a horrific massacre of Palestinian civilians in Beirut during the early 80s.

Twenty minutes after this force landed at Cannes, the French military proclaimed its unconditional surrender. New President Jack Black immediately installed Jerry Lewis as Minister for the Status of Layyyy-deeees.