Potato I have

From a short profile of an actor I like a lot, Forest Whitaker, who’s just finished playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland:

On the whole, though, I think we’re dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?

Ghost Dog is one of my favorite movies, and while it is solidly Jarmuschian, I can’t imagine the film without Whitaker. This year he’s taking his first-ever ongoing TV role, in The Shield; maybe I’ll dig around to see if French cable has picked it up.

(via rw)

I found a fine article about Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, one of the few people to manage to interview him. Along the way, I discovered the New America Foundation, which looks like a place where I could seriously spend a lot of time reading; check out the list of the best articles of 2005. Its Board of Directors is chaired by James Fallows. And from its mission:

Now, more than ever, our nation needs a robust public debate, one that does justice to the complex challenges and opportunities of this unfolding era. […] The purpose of the New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum.

The Talbot article was originally published in the New Yorker, but they seem to have very perishable links.

It’s been out for six months in France, but we three just finally saw the new Miyazaki film, Le Chateau Ambulant (Howl’s Moving Castle, Hauru No Ugoku Shiro) on Saturday. It’s the fifth Miyazaki title we’ve seen; if anyone knows of anything as wonderful as his films, please do share. The things sticking with me right now include: the collapsing of age through the shifting presentation of Sophie (somehow cubist for me); the crumbling, petering-out of the castle going up the mountain; the hilariously diminished Witch of the Waste (Sorcière des Landes); the green sticky ooze of pouting; the interdependence of the cursed.

Before seeing Miyazaki, but as an adult, I saw several animated films that I liked, that impressed me with their production qualities, that gave me a good laugh. But none that I wanted to watch more than once or twice, certainly none that left me moved and preoccupied in the way his more complex films do. And I’m delighted that they also captivate our five-year-old daughter, as they have much that I want to pass on to her: stories that are beautiful and magical and optimistic, in which the physical world is prominent, that show that how people treat each other and their world is important, with heroines who are real and imperfect and strong. Stories that will grow with her, cartoons that are not very cartoonish.

Today I showed my daughter a picture of the man who makes all these movies we love so much, and she spontaneously said “Thank you, Miyazaki!” I repeated after her, and said a silent prayer that his latest is not his last — he’s a huge part of our shared story world.

In an unprecedented post-festival meeting with the press, the Cannes jury discussed their choices. Re: Palme d’Or recipient “Fahrenheit 9/11″, jury members said “it was a unanimous choice based purely on its strength as a film, not a political statement.”

A.O. Scott summarizes Asia’s influence at Cannes:

What Europe was 30 years ago, Asia is today: a continent with at least a half-dozen artistically and commercially thriving national cinemas producing work in a dizzying variety of styles and genres, from challenging festival fare to populist blockbusters. Their influence is felt around the world, in the high-flying martial-arts wire work that has lately become a Hollywood cliché and, more interestingly, in the delicate urban anomie (a specialty of Mr. Wong’s) that permeates Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.”

In the same article, he reminds us of the impressive Asian representation at Cannes in 2000: “In the Mood for Love,” “Yi Yi,” “Chunhyang,” “Eureka” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;” I was immediately craving both “Eureka” and “Mood” on the big screen.

On a much more serious/infuriating/depressing topic, Frank Rich discusses the Palme d’Or winner, Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″:

Whatever you think of Mr. Moore, there’s no question he’s detonating dynamite here. […] Just when Abu Ghraib and the savage beheading of Nicholas Berg make us think we’ve seen it all, here is yet another major escalation in the nation-jolting images that have become the battleground for the war about the war.

No surprise that a French film festival selected a film so critical of Bush and his war in Iraq? But as we see here, only one of nine judges is French, with a majority being American or English. And Scott asserts that Cannes doesn’t even like documentaries, that this is one of only three nonfiction films allowed in competition in nearly 50 years.

Despite that, as Scott reported a few days earlier:

The audience at the afternoon gala screening responded with a 20-minute standing ovation that the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, said was the longest he had ever witnessed in Cannes.

Rich kindly reminds us, if we needed reminding, that Moore is “a polemicist, not a journalist,” as does Moore himself:

We’ve had this footage [shown in “Fahrenheit 9/11″] in our possession for two months,” he says. “I saw it before any of the Abu Ghraib news broke. I think it’s pretty embarrassing that a guy like me with a high school education and with no training in journalism can do this. What the hell is going on here? It’s pathetic.

And it is.