The opening credits of the Brad Pitt-starring Killing Them Softly are set to snatches of Barack Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech, focused on the notion of "the American promise," jarringly jump-intercut with scenes of Frank (Scoot McNairy) making his way through a tunnel onto a dismal American city street, windblown trash swirling all around, to emerge under side-by-side campaign billboards for Obama and John McCain More >>

There's Ashley...right there in the (gulp) middle.

Not since Two Girls, One Cup (yes, that's the real link. Be careful) has a work of fecal cinema inspired more gagging, satirical interpretations, and, well, gagging than The Human Centipede.

For anyone who doesn't already know, it's the story of a demented German surgeon and his quest to create the "Siamese Triplet" (the Human Centipede), which consists of three human beings with a shared digestive system. To connect the digestive systems of the three pieces of the "centipede," the doctor must sew the living human pieces together, and he does so ass-to-mouth.

Of the three options, to be the middle piece of the centipede, obviously, is as bad as it gets. Ashley C. Williams played that middle piece in the film, and recently sat down with us to explain the experience of portraying someone in the worst case scenario of a situation that likely already is the the worst case scenario, and give us an update on how the role has impacted her young career.   

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After operating at maybe 75 percent of its potential for almost its first full week, on Sunday the Cannes Film Festival kicked into full auteurist gear, with the premieres of three formally audacious new works from three contemporary international art film stars: Michael Haneke's Amour (which we already discussed); In Another Country, from Korean master of comic romantic disaster Hong Sang-soo; and Like Someone in Love, the baffling, thrilling, Tokyo-set latest from Iranian neo-realism pioneer Abbas Kiarostami.

Thinly framed as a dramatization of screenplay being written by a young woman in an attempt to distract herself from a family crisis too incredible to cope with ("So these things really happen," she says. "What am I doing here?"), In Another Country consists of three short stories, unrelated to one another but extremely similar, featuring the same actors playing different characters but doing more or less the same things. In each, a different French woman played by Isabelle Huppert -- one a filmmaker, one the cheating wife of a businessman, one a depressed recent divorcee -- spends a few days in the same unspectacular seaside tourist trap, where she has similar, quasi-romantic, sometime drunken encounters with two Korean men. In each vignette, the woman is pursued inappropriately, leading to several warnings about "that kind of Korean man." More >>

80-something couple George (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anna (Emmanuelle Riva), former music teachers with one adult daughter (Isabelle Huppert), are comfortably settled into their senescence together in a not-small and yet claustrophobic Paris apartment. One morning at the breakfast table, Anna goes blank -- her eyes blacken, she can't seem to see George or hear him -- and then she snaps out of it, with no apparent knowledge of what just happened. She has a surgery with a 95 percent success rate; she emerges a member of "that 5 percent," paralyzed on her right side, in need of full-time care.

Beginning with a flash-forward to the discovery of the old woman's corpse in a sealed-off bedroom, Amour, directed by Michael Haneke (who won Cannes' top prize in 2009 for The White Ribbon) is a deliberate, almost unbearably tense endurance exercise tracking what happens to George and Anna's relationship, as Anna's condition deteriorates, one horrible day at a time. "There's no reason to go on living," she tells her husband, early into the ordeal. "I know it can only get worse." She is, of course, correct -- and she's foreshadowing the rest of the movie. More >>

As a major festival like Cannes wears on, my notebook accumulates more scrawl than I can translate into full blog posts. So, behold! The first of likely several notebook dumps, with thoughts on John Hillcoat's bootleggers-with-hearts-of-gold vs. sexually-ambiguous-evil-fed and weak-ass local lawmen Western Lawless; Xavier Dolan's tranny-coming-out epic Laurence Anyways; and Cristian Mungiu's follow-up to The Romanian Abortion Movie, Beyond the Hills.

Lawless

"Hi, I'm Shia LaBeouf's Big Fake Hillbilly Accent. Harvey Weinstein said he wouldn't release Lawless, the movie I was invented for, unless I recorded a bunch of narration to be laid over music montages, explaining what Prohibition was, so that my built-in post-Transformers fan base can keep up. Enjoy!"

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Today in unexpected Cannes headline news: a convicted felon turns in one of the best performances at the festival thus far (and it's not Roman Polanski -- rimshot! -- who was the subject of a softball vanity documentary which screened here earlier in the week, and isn't really worth talking about).

After a very well-received screening of Reality -- in which Luciano (Aniello Arena), a fishmonger in contemporary Naples, auditions for the Italian version of Big Brother on a whim, and then becomes increasingly obsessed with the show and all it represents as he waits to hear back about being cast -- director Matteo Garrone (last seen at Cannes with the 2008 mafia epic Gomorrah) confirmed that Arena couldn't attend the festival ... because he's in prison. Garrone apparently tried to cast Arena, who has been part of a prison theater company for much of his two decades behind bars, in Gomorrah, but couldn't get the convict's temporary release approved for that bloody crime film. There is no violence in Reality -- which begins in the key of Capra and then becomes darker and stranger as its protagonist drifts further and further away from, ahem, "reality" -- but it would be hard not to read the film as an indictment of contemporary Italy. More >>

Hot French double-amputee on bare-knuckle boxer sex. Fleshy Austrian cougar cycles between multiple young, fit African gigolos. Loglines of highly-specific fetish porn, or of movies premiering Thursday in the Cannes Film Festival main competition? Perhaps both, but definitely the latter: Oscar winner Marion Cotillard plays the fetching legless woman opposite Bullhead stud Matthias Schoenaerts in Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, while Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl explores the hangover of colonialism through sex tourism in the (ironic title alert!) Paradise (Love). More >>

It's 1965, the rainy end of summer on the rocky, isle-strewn coast of New England. Sam (Jared Gelman), a scrawny, bespectacled outcast with an unusual aptitude for cartography, disappears from the Khaki Scout camp supervised by Scout Master Randy Ward (Edward Norton), absconding with a couple of bed rolls and an air rifle, and leaving a "resignation" letter. Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) -- a just-pubescent bad seed, straddling the line between innocence and sexual precocity in pre-mod peacock eyes and mini dress paired with knee socks and "sunday school shoes" -- disappears from her own dollhouse-like home, her self-absorbed, distracted lawyer parents Laura (Frances MacDormand) and Walt (Bill Murray) initially none the wiser.

After they're paid a visit by the law of the island, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), on his door-to-door rounds in search of Sam, Laura finds a box of "intimate" correspondence between her daughter and Sam (an orphan who, unbeknownst to the kid, has been dumped by his foster family), suggesting the two have run away together. Aided by what remains of Ward's troupe ("It's a chance to do some first-class scouting!"), the grown-ups mobilize to find the fugitive young lovers, and bring them to safety, if not to justice. More >>

Sam Levin

City Councilman Jimmy Van Brammer with Sen. Chuck Schumer, representatives from Kaufman Studios, and other local elected officials.

New York City is oh so very close to being a better city for film and television than Hollywood -- if the federal government would just get out of the damn way!

At least that was the message today on the corner of 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, where Sen. Chuck Schumer, flanked by relevant neighborhood politicians, called on the National Park Service to stop making it difficult for a local film company to build New York City's first-ever outdoor studio.

This project -- which would convert 36th Street between 34th and 35th avenues into a movie studio lot -- apparently could make all the difference in attracting filmmakers and production companies to New York City, instead of Los Angeles, or Toronto, or New Orleans. That means, you guessed it, lots of jobs and economic development, all on one block in Queens.

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Take that, Hollywood!

In the battle for Oscars, New York City is beating Hollywood by a long shot -- at least in one category.

A study released today from the Center for an Urban Future, a New York City-based think tank, shows that half of the films nominated for an Oscar in the documentary-film category were made by New York City-based directors, and four out of the 10 nominated films were produced by New Yorkers.

This is not the first New-York-City-is-actually-better-than-Hollywood news we've heard this year. Last month, our jokester fashion-loving, Gaga-kissing mayor Mike Bloomberg chilled with the cast of Gossip Girl at a press conference declaring New York City the true film capital of the country.

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