Cannes Day 3

Here's Day 3 in which I mostly watch films. I get a bit miserable at the end of this one - I did start cutting the more negative bits out, but then realised the whole point of this was to give an honest depiction of my experience so here goes...

17/05/09 - 01:15AM

Spent most of today watching films which was ace, particularly as they were all really good.

Got up too late to see the 3D sci-fi promo we intended to see, but as a result made it to a screening of Shinjuku Incident - Jackie Chan in a dramatic role as a Chinese immigrant who gets tangled up in the Japanese underworld. Here's the trailer:



Excellent performances from Chan (who is surprisingly good as a serious and often unsympathetic character), Daniel Wu and Masaya Kato plus a really awesome script with some of the most complex characters you'll ever see in a gangster film. I've only ever seen one Derek Yee film before, One Night in Mongkok, which was great but I think this may be his masterpiece.

Had lunch, then went to a screening of Salvage - couldn't find a trailer but there's a website here. This was the film we had tried to see the previous day but been turned away from. The same person was on the door and glared at us as we approached, but the distributors had given us invitations this time which we waved victoriously in the door-person's face (well, we talked about doing that but were really just grateful to get in). It was worth it - a neat little British horror film set in a cul-de-sac. Shows what you can do on a low budget when the script is good and you have some great actors. Won't say too much as I don't want to ruin it, but it is one to look out for.

On the way to the next screening we got stuck behind Sophie Marceau and Monica Bellucci on their way to a press conference for Don't Look Back and got pulled along with a mob of photographers. Also saw a handful of screaming fans outside a shoe shop earlier in the day, but there were so many people we couldn't see who was inside. Struck me that it might actually be quite annoying causing this much chaos when you just want to buy shoes.

Next film was Blood and Bone, a straightforward martial arts films that does exactly what it's supposed to do and does it very well indeed:



Great fights, Michael Jai White is ace and there was a superbly creepy villain performance from Eamonn Walker that stole the film for me - one of those bad guys who's so cool I secretly wanted him to win.

After that we took a chance on a screening of Eyeborgs which had no info on it in the dailies at all so for all we knew could have been an obscure art film about artificial eyes or something. It wasn't:



It turned out to be a rather effective sci-fi thriller with some excellent special effects on what I presume was a modest budget. The lead actor, Adrian Paul (most well-known for the Highlander TV series but also excellent in The Breed), was sitting in the row behind us and we got to chat to the director afterwards (although he seemed quite keen to move us on so he could speak to the buyers).

It was great to spend the day doing fun stuff and seeing films. I do feel like maybe I'm missing out a bit on the networking side, but as the director of Eyeborgs pointed out I'm not a buyer and I get the impression that's all people here are interested in - buying and selling product. I mean I know that's why people are here, writing it down it seems kind of obvious, but faced with the reality of it has changed my perspective a bit. I'm hoping I'll have it changed again tomorrow...