By David Germain
The Associated Press
CANNES, France - There'll be no boring brown bunnies this time at the Cannes Film Festival, which has tossed in ogres, zombies, Greek warriors, assassins galore and a potty-mouthed Santa Claus to make up for last year's dreary offerings.
A year ago, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, featuring the filmmaker driving in silence for minutes at a time, came to symbolize a dull slate of movies at the world's most prestigious film festival.
Organizers of the 57th Cannes fest, which opens Wednesday and runs through May 23, made sure to spice up the mix and hopefully stifle the yawns. Big summer flicks such as Shrek 2 and Brad Pitt's ancient Greece saga Troy are using Cannes to launch their theatrical releases.
The schedule is heavy on movies from edgy filmmakers, among them Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, which opens the festival, Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique (Our Music), Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the director's assault on President Bush's handling of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hollywood movies already out in the United States are at Cannes as a springboard for overseas release, including the zombie fest Dawn of the Dead, the Coen brothers' crime comedy The Ladykillers and Billy Bob Thornton's foul-mouthed Bad Santa. Cannes also is presenting Kill Bill - Vol. 2 from festival jury head Quentin Tarantino, who won the top honor at Cannes in 1994 for Pulp Fiction.
Gilles Jacob, festival president, said organizers this year renewed their efforts to select "popular auteur films, or, if you prefer, intelligent popular films."
That populist approach can create fresh headaches for Cannes planners, with snooty critics complaining that Hollywood and commercial movies sometimes overrun more artistic choices.
Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be one of the hottest tickets at Cannes, with audiences anticipating equal parts satire and outrage from the man whose hilarious and horrific Bowling for Columbine won the documentary Academy Award for 2002. Even before its Cannes premiere Monday, Fahrenheit 9/11 was causing a ruckus. Last week, Moore assailed the Walt Disney Co. for preventing subsidiary Miramax from releasing Fahrenheit 9/11. The movie is virtually certain to find an eager distributor, possibly during Cannes.
Along with Pitt, Moore, Tarantino and his Kill Bill star Uma Thurman, celebrities expected at Cannes include Shrek 2 vocal stars Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy; Geoffrey Rush, Charlize Theron and Emily Watson, who co-star in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers; Tom Hanks of The Ladykillers; and Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, who star in The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
Outside the official festival, Will Smith, Angelina Jolie and Jack Black will be on hand to promote their upcoming Shark Tale.
Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, stars of the Cannes closing-night film De-Lovely, will be joined by musical co-stars Sheryl Crow, Alanis Morissette and Natalie Cole, who each sing tunes in the fanciful tale of composer Cole Porter.
