Shadows on the Riviera?
What a week.
Sometimes it seems like the world is going crazy. Consider the following events and see if you can find any evidence of a rational universe:
You can’t make this stuff up. Nor would you want to.
Anyway, Ireland seems pleased with its performance in the Eurovision. It came in 8th out of the 25 countries that participated in the final. (Forty-three countries competed overall.) The consensus seems to be that the Grimes twins, known as Jedward, finally brought the country into the 21st century, as opposed to the entries Ireland usually sends, which seem to have come through a wormhole from 1966. Of course, in Eurovision terms, the 21st century is the virtual equivalent of Las Vegas in the 1970s, but still that’s progress. Ireland proved that it could enter a song just as mindless but with a good beat, the same as all those eastern European countries. The annoying thing, of course, is that I still can’t get the damned song out of my head. And that’s saying something since I still don’t know what the lyrics are. When I try to figure it out, it sounds like they may be vaguely misogynistic, but I can’t be sure. The refrain goes something like this: She’s got her lipstick on, here I come, da da dum, she’s got her lipstick on, hit and run, then I’m gone. Jerome Kern, eat your heart out.
The good news about Cannes is that I have had no trouble finding lots of information and blogs and reviews and photos and video of everything going on there. The bad news is that TV5 Monde’s coverage of the film festival got eclipsed a bit when this thing with Dominique Strauss-Kahn hit the fan. (He’s French.) But the good news is that I found I can get snippets of Jonathan Ross’s interviews of Cannes attendees for Cinémoi on YouTube. And snippets are quite enough.
One of the fun side benefits of Cannes this year (and this is something I never expected to be able to write) is watching the Johnny Depp coverage in the hope of getting bits of new information about the Dark Shadows movie, in which Depp will play Barnabas Collins and which now has a release date, May 11, 2012. Before Depp came to Cannes (to hype the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie), he was photographed in Moscow sporting a wolf’s head cane very much like the one Barnabas always carried in the original TV series. Among other snippets of Dark Shadows news we have gleaned in recent weeks (and by the way, the Dark Shadows News Page, run by London-based Stuart Manning, who is also a producer of Dark Shadows audio dramas for Big Finish, does a fabulous job of accumulating and publishing developments regarding the upcoming movie) is that English actor Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) was going to play Roger Collins but then had to drop out. (Latest word is that the role will be played by English actor Jonny Lee Miller.) And production on the movie has begun at England’s Pinewood Studios.
A surprisingly fertile source of information has been 14-year-old American actor Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass, Let Me In), who has been cast as Carolyn Stoddard. She has been sharing lots of info about her experiences in London on Twitter, including recommending Langan’s Brasserie in Mayfair for food and dessert and urging her followers to (see how interconnected things are) vote for Jedward in the Eurovision.
So, the long-awaited Dark Shadows movie will finally be released in just a bit under a year. Could anything possibly make this news any more exciting? Wait a minute. May? Maybe it will, gulp, open at Cannes! If that happens, can I possibly stay away?
-S.L., 19 May 2011
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