REEL NEWS IN CANNESMovie trailers nowadays reveal far more than I want to see in advance of the films they are plugging, especially those shoddy comedies where all gags are given away in the trailer. A new trend started at Cannes when 20 minutes of footage from the first Lord of the Rings film was shown to whet the appetite of the press, distributors and exhibitors.

Now several studios are getting in on the act. Oliver Stone received masses of publicity when he turned up in Cannes this week to introduce the opening 26 minutes of World Trade Centre, his factually based 9/11 movie starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena as New York Port Authority officers trapped inside the wreckage of the twin towers.

Director Irwin Winkler introduced 40 minutes of footage from Home of the Brave, which features Samuel L Jackson (who happens to be on the Cannes jury this year), Curtis Jackson aka 50 Cent and Jessica Biel as US national guardsmen returning home after service in Iraq. And director Bill Condon was joined by Beyoncé Knowles and Jamie Foxx, the stars of Dreamgirls, to present some footage from that musical, which opens at the end of the year.

Numerous round-table media interviews and press conferences were held at Cannes for all three movies, even though each is still a work-in-progress. Not that I'm being cynical, of course, but I prefer to wait for a screening of the completed film in each case.

Diplomatic position

The Irish pavilion at Cannes is conveniently located just paces from the Festival Palais, and, presumably because of Ireland's neutrality stance, is positioned in between the Iranian and American pavilions. However, the Iranian pavilion remained unfurnished and unstaffed throughout the festival. It transpires that some members of the Iranian film industry called for a boycott of the festival when nothing from Iran figured in the official Cannes selection.

Best of the rest

The local edition of freesheet Metro, a daily, bilingual Cannes edition, conducted a readers' poll to determine the best Cannes entries that failed to take the Palme d'Or. The winner was LA Confidential, pipped in 1997 when The Eel and A Taste of Cherry shared the prize. The runners-up in the poll were Do the Right Thing, Mystic River and Midnight Express.

Paraguayan punishment

Running Richard Kelly's Southland Tales a close second for scathing reviews at Cannes this year is Hamaca Paraguaya (Paraguayan Hammock), which, Screen International observed, "will delight self-flagellating cineastes who believe that pain is good".

Although allowing that the Paraguayan movie "has an elegiac, melancholy beauty", the review went on: "It is like Chekhov in the jungle rewritten by Beckett and filmed by Tarkovsky - only slower." The review in the Hollywood Reporter noted the film "consists of a half-dozen or so static long takes, most shot at 50 paces" and that "only near the end do we see the two players' faces with some clarity, and then only in sideshot."

Haneke plans US rematch

For reasons best known to himself, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke is planning a US remake of his chilling 1997 film, Funny Games. It will be the first English-language film for Haneke, a prize winner at Cannes last year for Hidden (Caché).

The new Funny Games will follow the original plotline, as a middle-class family go on holiday and are terrorised by two young men. It transposes the story to the Hamptons, on Long Island, with Naomi Watts set to play the mother.

Meat the press

Publicists at Cannes are outdoing each other with gimmicks to draw attention to their wares, with the result that press information packs are taking all shapes and forms. To promote Taxidermia, Fortissimo Films placed the data under a photograph of raw red meat and wrapped it up in plastic, supermarket-style. The film is reviewed in my Cannes report on page 6, which helps explain the context.

Family jewels

Festen director Thomas Vinterberg is about to shoot A Man Comes Home, a comedy about a successful opera singer whose return home to Denmark is complicated by various romantic interests.

"It's going to be a rather silly film about sex, love and foolishness," Vinterberg said in Cannes. "I'm getting a lot of inspiration from my childhood in a hippie commune. I was surrounded by a lot of happy people and, let's face it, genitals and private parts. It was the seventies."

mdwyer@irish-times.ie