Terry O’Neill’s Hollywood

Faye Dunaway, Laurence Olivier, and Jodie Foster are only a few of the Oscar winners to have shined through the photographerl’s lens.

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Terry O’Neill’s Hollywood

The Swell Season’s Glen Hansard Remembers His Magic Oscar Moment

You saw Once, right? If you didn’t, go rent it or stream it or whatever you have to do. No other film I’ve ever seen so accurately captures the joys and agonies of making music without any rational hope of ever earning a dime off it. Now, the film’s stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, who are really musicians—and who really fell in love during the 17-day shoot—are out with a new album. They call themselves The Swell Season, and they’re calling the new collection Strict Joy, after a poem by the Irish poet James Stephens about how “the poet makes grief beautiful.” That’s relevant because they have since broken up—amicably, as reported in The New York Times two Sundays ago. Like all the good breakup albums, Strict Joy, out today on Anti, pulsates with unruly emotions. But as in the film, Irglová’s eerie, beyond-her-years calm tempers Hansard’s Irish fire. (Read Bill Bradley’s review here.) Even if you didn’t see Once, you may remember Hansard and Irglová’s impossibly endearing appearance during the 2008 Oscars, when their duet “Falling Slowly” won for Best Original Song. I spoke to Hansard yesterday over the phone and knew I had to begin there. VF Daily: Since this is Vanity Fair, I wanted to start with the Oscar moment. Can you take our readers through it? Glen Hansard: O.K. It was one of those things where we had been rushing up to this moment for so long—from the time we found out we were nominated until the actual event we were busy, busy, busy. Everything just went into super overdrive. And the closer it got to the actual Oscars day, in a weird way the more calm we became, because we knew that once this was done, no matter whether we won or not, we’d be able to get back to living a normal life.

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Roberto Benigni Will Send You Straight to Hell

Does anybody in this country still remember Roberto Benigni? No? What if we mention his star-making turn in the critically-lauded 1997 Nazi concentration camp tragicomedy Life is Beautiful? Ringing any bells? How about his brilliant performances in several classic Jim Jarmusch art-house movies? Still doesn’t sound familiar? He played Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies between Peter Sellers and Steve Martin. Co-starred in The Voice of the Moon, Federico Fellini’s last film. Soiled your childhood memories with a not-so-good live-action adaptation of Pinocchio. Nothing? Okay, how about this: he was the skinny Italian guy who won an acting Oscar in the late 90s and jumped over seats before announcing to a stunned Hollywood crowd that he wanted to make love to everybody, and then said something nonsensical but adorable about Jupiter and a mountain of snow. Yeah, it’s coming into focus now, isn’t it? That guy. Exactly one decade after he briefly seduced the hearts and minds of a nation, Roberto Benigni is preparing to conquer America yet again, this time with a one-man stage show called TuttoDante, a semi-improvisational tribute to Dante Alighieri’s epic poem Divine Comedy. The show was an international sensation in Europe, touring to sold-out crowds from Rome to Paris to London since 2006. According to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Benigni’s performances have left audiences "in ecstasy, speechless… (and) surprised by such emotion."

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Roberto Benigni Will Send You Straight to Hell

A Glut of B-Movies Giving Lars Von Trier a Run for his Money at Cannes Market

For many film professionals, the real Cannes festival takes place not at the black-tie screenings but in the bowels of the Palais des Festivals, at the Marché du Film. In the basement of the complex is a bazaar of sales agents from around the world, hocking the rights to movies that will probably never come out on DVD, let alone to a theater near you. Even in this somewhat down year, there are about 1,500 scheduled screenings of market films, averaging out to more than 130 per day. And with some estimating a 30 percent drop in buyers this year, that’s quite the B-movie bottleneck. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Ambling among the stands in the Marché, you realize how many filmmakers took that advice if nothing else. Some of these movies feature actors you may have heard of (such as Leelee Sobieski and Hellboy’s Ron Perlman, who both appear in Acts of Violence, though the poster ingrateful misspells the latter’s name). Most of them, however, don’t. In fact, there is such a glut of movies at the Cannes market that, in a casual stroll, I spotted two of them with near identical taglines. Beneath the title of one of the titles, Run Bitch Run, reads the phrase, “Payback’s a bitch.” The other movie, Hanger sees that tagline and raises it, to “Payback is a bitch of a whore.” I know which one I want to see. The unsightly one-sheets after the jump.

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Tripping on Taking Woodstock at Cannes

Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, about the small town that played host to the historic festival in 1969, has gotten a somewhat bad rap since its Cannes screening on Saturday. That’s too bad. It’s lighthearted, smart, and inoffensive, much like the twee stand-up routine of its lead, comedian Demetri Martin. But Lee’s film suffers by comparison to the aura of Woodstock itself. By showing millions flocking to the concert but remaining in its sidelines, Taking Woodstock feels like a tease. As a result, we feel there’s somewhere else we’d rather be. Nevertheless, the movie has several things going for it, including a beefy Liev Schreiber squeezed into a summer dress, Imelda Staunton’s Oscar-worthy performance as a feisty Jewish mother, and the best visualization I’ve ever seen of an acid trip. Lee hints at sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but cuts away before the characters can enjoy any of them, except for one entrancing scene in which Martin shares a stamp with Paul Dano and Kelli Garner in the back of a van. A bright, liquid flow of colors and sounds, it could have been a stand-alone art film. When I ran into Lee at the after-party, I asked him whether he’d ever taken L.S.D. He giggled and sheepishly said no.

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Prediction: Kris Will Win American Idol; Von Trier’s Big Mouth; Little House Laughs

Kris Allen in an Avalanche Welp, the American Idol finale is just about here. And Bob Hollywood is going to lay it all on the line with a fearless prognostication: Kris Allen will win! Not only that. He will beat Adam Lambert handily. It will be not just a landslide but a veritable avalanche. Am I just being perverse? Heck, no. I’d say I have the logic of Mr. Spock on my side. In the last vote, which knocked Danny Gokey off the show, Ryan Seacrest revealed that a million votes separated Allen and Lambert. And who do you suppose will attract the lion’s share of Gokey voters? Got to be Kris. Gokey, despite the scratch in his voice, was a conventional singer and performer—as is Kris Allen, in his own way. Forget, for a moment, that The Lambert has already made the cover of Entertainment Weekly. The Human Eyeliner is just too far out to get the necessary votes on Tuesday night. The country’s in a conventional mood. We want to elect an image of ourselves that’s nice and friendly, and who better to carry that message than the smilin’ and strummin’ Kris Allen? He’s a humble dude for a humble time. Mark my words, readers. Kris will win this thing!!!

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Prediction: Kris Will Win American Idol; Von Trier’s Big Mouth; Little House Laughs

Sunny Weekend in Cannes Brings Girls, Superheroes, and Recycling

After two days of rain, the sun has re-emerged over the Croisette, which has transformed into a catwalk for the gaggles of girls hoping to be discovered. And after being relatively navigable for the beginning of the festival, the palm-studded oceanfront boulevard is now bumper-to-bumper—a waste of horsepower for the various Lamborghinis and Ferraris stuck in traffic, but a perfect way to show them off. But with them also comes the riff-raff. Like a band of nude cyclists. Or Captain Europa here, whose mission it is to protest the European Commission’s decision to allow ros&eacute wine—a local specialty—to be made by mixing white and red wines.

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Sunny Weekend in Cannes Brings Girls, Superheroes, and Recycling

Is Eclipse a Horror Movie?

The Eclipse, the buzzed-about ghost story for adults that inspired a rare bidding war at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, takes place at an isolated outpost of Ireland during what can be for some sensitive souls one of the most terrifying rituals in the civilized world: an annual book festival. It may not be as iconic a horror movie setting as a camp site for promiscuous teenagers or a Victorian Mansion sitting on top of an Indian burial ground, but for the main character, sad sack Michael Farr (Cirian Hinds, who won the festival’s award for best actor), hearing a pompous talk by glib author Nicholas Holden, played with pitch-perfect smugness by Aidan Quinn, sends shivers down his spine. A melancholy exploration of a lonely middle-aged widower whose memory of his late wife seems slowly fading away, playwright Conor McPherson’s existential drama scares in the way that Waiting for Godot does—providing a reminder that many of the horror masters from the sixties and seventies such as William Friedkin, John Carpenter and Roman Polanski learned about terror from the plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. It centers on the ineffectual, frustrated writer Michael Farr, who has started to see shadows and hear creaky sounds around his house. Mr. Hines, who recently starred as the devil in McPherson’s The Seafarer on Broadway, delivers a soulful, trembling performance of a man “terrified of forgetting.”

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Is Eclipse a Horror Movie?