Cannes' weighty lineup

Loaded with movies from Hollywood and edgy directors, the world's best-known film festival tries to be anything but dull.

CANNES, France - There'll be no boring brown bunnies this time at the Cannes Film Festival, which has tossed in ogres, zombies, Greek warriors, assassins galore and a potty-mouthed Santa Claus to make up for last year's dreary offerings.

A year ago, Vincent Gallo's inert drama The Brown Bunny, featuring the filmmaker driving in silence for minutes at a time, came to symbolize a dull slate of movies at the world's most prestigious film festival.

Organizers of the 57th Cannes fest, which opens today and runs through May 23, made sure to spice up the mix and do its best to stifle yawns. Big summer flicks such as the animated ogre sequel Shrek 2 and Brad Pitt's ancient Greece saga Troy are using Cannes to launch their theatrical releases.

The schedule is heavy on movies from edgy filmmakers, among them Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, which opens the festival tonight; Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (Our Music); Wong Kar-Wai's 2046; and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the director's assault on President Bush's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Hollywood movies that have been released in the United States are at Cannes as a springboard for overseas circulation, including the zombie fest Dawn of the Dead, the Coen brothers' crime comedy The Ladykillers and Billy Bob Thornton's foul-mouthed Bad Santa.

Cannes also is presenting the assassin vengeance tale Kill Bill: Vol. 2 from festival jury head Quentin Tarantino, who won the top honor at Cannes in 1994 for Pulp Fiction.

Festival president Gilles Jacob said organizers renewed their efforts to select "popular auteur films, or, if you prefer, intelligent popular films."

That populist approach can create fresh headaches for Cannes planners, with snooty critics complaining that Hollywood and commercial movies sometimes overrun more artistic choices.

"As always, the difficulty comes in respecting the balance, and that's what we're trying to do," Jacob said. "The idea is to appeal to the tastes of as many media as possible, as many professionals, as many moviegoers, though it's a given that you never know in advance what movie will have the most success with the representatives of a given country or a particular profession."

Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be one of the hottest tickets, with audiences anticipating equal parts satire and outrage from the man whose hilarious and horrific Bowling for Columbine won the documentary Academy Award for 2002. Moore, who premiered Bowling for Columbine at Cannes that year, made a fiery anti-Bush speech in accepting his award at the 2003 Oscars.

Last week, Moore assailed the Walt Disney Co. for preventing subsidiary Miramax from releasing Fahrenheit 9/11. Miramax financed the movie, but Disney boss Michael Eisner said the film was too political for a "nonpartisan company" to distribute. Fahrenheit 9/11 is virtually certain to find an eager distributor.

Bowling for Columbine was the first documentary to screen in the main competition at Cannes. Fahrenheit 9/11 is the second.

Another potentially explosive scenario was defused when festival managers agreed to let French show business workers climb Cannes' famous red-carpeted staircase along with the stars today. The concession from management was made to avoid disruptive protests. Actors, technicians and their colleagues had threatened to shake up the festival, seeking to pressure the government into backing down from a reform that will cut their unemployment benefits.

Along with Pitt, Moore, Tarantino and Kill Bill star Uma Thurman, celebrities expected include Shrek 2 vocal stars Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy; Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron and Emily Watson, who co-star in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers; Tom Hanks of The Ladykillers; and Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, who star in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

Outside the official festival, Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and Jack Black will be on hand to promote their upcoming animated flick Shark Tale. Distributor DreamWorks is presenting footage from the movie for reporters at Cannes.

Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, stars of the Cannes closing-night film De-Lovely, will be joined by musical co-stars Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Cole, who sing tunes in the fanciful tale of composer Cole Porter.

Kline, at the festival before with The Ice Storm, said the grandeur and ceremony of Cannes is unmatched in show business.

"Nobody takes film quite as seriously as the French," Kline said. "You march up the red carpet and there's these guys with halberds and dressed like French Republican guards, and you think, are these guys from central casting? The pomp and circumstance is amazing."

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