By Dave McCoy
MSN Movies

May 25, 2006

Anyone who attended a Grateful Dead show during their 30-year run knows what a "miracle" is. As in, "I need a miracle." As in, can you please give my broke, unlucky ass a free ticket? I spent all my money on a veggie burrito and gas to get here.

I'm reminded of Dead shows any time I walk toward the Palais either in the early morning hours or the evening — times when a gala premiere is about to take place. Hundreds of people stand around, holding signs pleading for tickets to the event, while the more aggressive ones grab you and ask you to help out. And these aren't hippies — these are gorgeous (mostly) women in designer gowns and expensive jewelry. I feel for them, but I can't help. Hell, I can't get into any of the galas either. I rented and dragged a tuxedo halfway across the world and it's still sitting in the same damn closet it was 11 damn days ago.

But I digress...

If the folks seeking freebies truly want to see a premiere, here is my suggestion: Stand outside of tonight's "A Scanner Darkly" premiere and simply wait about 5-10 minutes after the film starts. When the steady stream of walk-outs begin, you'll have your ticket. And trust me, there will be walk-outs. At yesterday's press screening, a flood of people left before the film's conclusion. My entire row disappeared. And when the lights finally went up, only half of the audience was left.

I can understand the reaction. Richard Linklater's film (his second this festival, along with "Fast Food Nation") is a tough, often disorienting experience. It's based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name and features Dick's usual paranoid, bad trip of a future. The film is about a man (Keanu Reeves) who has no sense of self, no comprehension of identity and slowly loses his mind through drug abuse. Oh, and it's animated. Linklater shot the film with live actors and then added the layer of animation later. If you saw Linklater's "Waking Life," you have an idea of what this looks like. Psychologically, it's like experiencing the worst acid trip of your life AND hanging out with meth addicts for 100 minutes at the same time. Nothing is ever stable within the frame: Faces melt and transform, walls breathe, furniture throbs and people become bugs. Cops don shape-shifting suits, which make the wearer's face and body change every second (a genius metaphor for an everyman who is in fact no man).

Personally, I found all of this fascinating, if unsettling and slightly nauseating. The story is a bit silly, but the style in which it's explored is powerful. Unfortunately, you can't animate bad acting and that's "Scanner's" real problem. Even under dazzling special effects, Reeves and Winona Ryder are still empty voids and Woody Harrelson is still over-the-top annoying. Only Robert Downey Jr. delivers anything resembling a performance. Still, it was an interesting, well, "trip."

L'Ouest Américain

Cannes is the last place I'd expect to see a couple of films about the American Old West. But nonetheless, cowboys have been seen in the Palais this week.

Anne Feinsilber's "Requiem for Billy the Kid" is part documentary, part myth, part hero worship and completely ultra-French. Feinsilber follows up on a rumor that Sheriff Pat Garrett shot the wrong man and Billy the Kid actually isn't buried where it's said he is. But she really loses interest in the latter part of the story about midway through the movie. Instead, she gets Kris Kristofferson to reprise his role as Billy the Kid (which he played in Sam Peckinpah's masterpiece "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid") and speaks to him as if Billy was still alive. Seriously. And she makes all sorts of comparisons between the two former friends to Verlaine and Rimbaud. I told you it was French. The best stuff in the film is an interview with "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, who discusses the pair's relationship and the effect both had on American culture. Now there's a film I'd like to see.

Better, if slightly pedestrian and less ambitious, is "John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend," a documentary that played in the Cannes Classics series before a screening of Ford's "The Searchers." Sam Pollard's movie is a classically structured bio-doc (appropriate, perhaps, considering the subject) that examines the fertile, sometimes rocky relationship between the two men — they made 14 movies together, including masterpieces like "The Quiet Man," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "Fort Apache," "Stagecoach" and one of the five greatest American films, "The Searchers." It will feel like a film-school survey course for fans of either (though Pollard's found some great old Ford footage and interviews), but if you don't know much about them, this is a good place to start. Plus, you get to hear film historian David Thomson passionately talk about the last shot of "The Searchers." I've seen him do it twice in person and now once on film, and he makes me cry every time.

A demain...

What Cannes selection interests you most? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com.

Dave McCoy is lead editor for MSN Movies.