Bonjour! Buenos dias! Whassup! It's diversity week here at the Trailer Park and we're looking at previews for films from our about different cultures.

Dragonball
I've seen only a a few episodes of the Japanese cartoon on which this live action film is based, but I'm not seeing a whole lot here that reminds me of the anime. Frankly it reminds me more of Mortal Combat Kombat. Like the original, this is a martial arts fantasy with prophecies, super powers, lots of action and a hero with preposterously spiked hair. Chow Yun Fat is in there to add some action movie cred, but will that be enough? From what I've read the anime fans are not thrilled with this one, and it's not doing a lot for me either. I don't think this one if for me.

Amexicano
Here's a charming looking indie about a friendship between and Italian American and an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Bruno (Carmine Famiglietti) is behind on his rent and reluctantly goes into the construction business, hiring Mexican day laborers to help him. When he hires Ignacio (Raúl Castillo) the two forge a bond despite the fact that Ignacio does not speak English. I'm looking forward to this one.

Some people may consider the New York Film Festival a simple "Best Of" sort of event, but the fact that it compiles selections from earlier film fests and merely showcases them in a competition-free program is what I love about it. For those of us New Yorkers who can't always make it to the highlands of Utah and Colorado or the exotic seaside locales of Italy and Southern France, it's nice to know that major festival highlights will likely make their way to Lincoln Center in late September, early October.

This year, the lineup for the 46th NYFF is being noted for its inclusion of films that previously screened at Cannes back in May. Even Steven Soderbergh's four-hour Che (aka The Argentine and Guerilla), which played to mixed reactions in France, even while picking up a best actor prize for star Benicio Del Toro, has been given a spot. Also featured are Cannes leftovers Waltz With Bashir, Wendy and Lucy, Grand Prix-winner Gomorrah and Clint Eastwood's Changeling, which stars Angelina Jolie and has the honor of being NYFF's centerpiece film. Opening the festival is the Palm d'Or winner The Class, while the closing film is Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which premieres a few weeks prior at the Venice Film Festival.

Other exciting big name films include Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, Wong Kar-Wai's Ashes of Time: Redux, Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman and Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours. Surprisingly, Charlie Kaufman's Synechdoche, New York, which screened at Cannes, is New York appropriate and is scheduled to open in October, is missing from the lineup.

The complete list of NYFF selections, courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, can be found after the jump:

Mike Jones over at Variety's The Circuit Blog posted yesterday the first 27 films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)and, not surprisingly, most of them hail from previous fest premieres at Cannes, Berlin and SXSW.

The Gala Presentation will be South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and The Weird, which I saw at Cannes earlier this year and loved. Somewhat reminiscent of Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff. Toronto film fans should really enjoy this one.

What were the surprises at this year's Cannes Film Festival? Does the showcasing of films like Waltz with Bashir and Che at the world's premier film festival mean that traditional film making has been replaced by a new wave of technology and technique? Which factor had more to do with the lower-than-expected number of sales at this year's Cannes Festival -- weak films, or the weak dollar? Is there a subtle subtext to the past few years at Cannes, and what were the films that got away this year? Joining us this week to talk about all these topics and more is Glenn Kenny, the former film critic for Premiere who's now blogging independently at Some Came Running. Cinematical's podcast is now available through iTunes; you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:



As ever, you can download the entire podcast right here -- and those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

Among the handful of titles Sony Pictures Classics snatched up for American distribution at the conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir makes the most sense. While Tyson certainly has potential to alter the public perception of the country's infamous boxer, and Lorna's Silence has appeal for crime fans and art house aficionados alike, both movies could perform well regardless of which distributor picked them up (more or less). Bashir, on the other hand, has SPC written all over it: Relentlessly downbeat and frequently unsettling, Bashir is director Ari Folman's account of his 1982 experience in the Israeli military during the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The animated approach sometimes has a gimmicky feel to it, but that's probably the point; Folman's memories are so foggy that his reconstructions of them seem plausibly unrealistic.

Bashir isn't easy to get into, but you could say that about Thomas Pynchon, too. What we have here is an animated movie for grown-ups, which puts it squarely in SPC's line of expertise. The company has guided many mature animated films to audiences in a manner unparalleled by their colleagues. Last year, talented SPC co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard commandeered the releases of the outlandish anime Paprika and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and the latter film very nearly won an Oscar. Remember The Triplets of Belleville? That was them, too. These people know their stuff. Listen up, guys: I hear Bill Plympton's new movie is quite good.

Earlier today, Laurent Cantent's The Class became the first French film in 20 years to win the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the 2008 Festival de Cannes. Coincidentally, we have James' review of The Class scheduled to run in just a little while; in it, he says of the film: "The Class may very well wind up taking home a nod or two from the jury here in Cannes; rest assured, if that happens, it'll represent more than just sympathy votes for a local favorite."

The grand prize went to Gomorra, which James called "a sweeping, stirring drama that has the shoot-and-loot tension of the best crime cinema but also has the scope and serious intent of great drama." Special Prize went to Catherine Deneuve (A Christmas Tale) and Clint Eastwood (Changeling); the latter of which was a favorite heading into the awards (as was Waltz with Bashir, which, surprisingly, did not take home one of the top awards). Jury Prize went to Il Divo, while Nuri Bilge Ceylan took Best Director for Three Monkeys. Additionally, Benicio del Toro won Best Actor for his performance in Soderbergh's Che, Sandra Corveloni took Best Actress for Linha de passe, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won Best Screenplay for Lorna's Silence.

For reviews of most of these films, head on over to Cinematical's official Festival de Cannes hub. We'll be rounding out this year's coverage over the next few days.

Waltz With Bashir, the first official trailer from cinemascopian.com on Vimeo.

An early Cannes favorite, Cinematical's Kim Voynar describes Waltz with Bashir as a "beautiful, disturbing and deeply compelling film" that "could wind up with an Oscar nod come January." The animation looks stunning (love the gold in those beach scenes), and I'd definitely agree with Spout's Karina Longworth who calls it "Grand Theft Auto: Beirut, Meets A Scanner Darkly" in the title of her post showcasing the trailer above. More from Kim's Cannes review: "Waltz with Bashir documents the struggle of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, to come to terms with the gaps in his memory surrounding the part he played in the first Lebanese war and the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila."

Whaddya think?

The horrors of war and the atrocities of which humans are capable of have, of course, been documented extensively in film since the birth of the medium. From the recent slew of documentaries on the Iraq war to Atom Egoyan's controversial 2002 Cannes debut Ararat (about the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman empire); from Schindler's List to The Killing Fields; from The Battle of Algiers to Apocalypse Now; from Ousmane Sembene's last film, Moolaadé (inspired by the genital mutilation of young girls in Burkina Faso) to The Devil Came on Horseback (a documentary chronicling the genocide in Darfur), recent cinematic history is filled with tales of human suffering, inflicted not by natural disasters, but by human beings upon one another.

Waltz with Bashir documents the struggle of the filmmaker, Ari Folman, to come to terms with the gaps in his memory surrounding the part he played in the first Lebanese war and the 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the West Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Where Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (to which this film will be inevitably, if somewhat inaccurately, compared) used stark black-and-white animation based on Satrapi's graphic novels to tell the history of one girl growing up during the Iranian revolution, Waltz with Bashir uses vivid, hand-drawn animation to bring to life interviews Folman conducted with friends who were involved in the Lebanese war in the early 1980s to bring to life harrowing memories of death, guilt and regret.