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More panda-monium at Cannes as Jolie steals show
2008-05-15
Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman and Jack "Po the Panda" Black brought Hollywood to Cannes with feel-good movie for kids "Kung Fu Panda", that premiered at the film festival Thursday. Jolie, heavily pregnant with twins, stepped up the celebrated Cannes red carpet flanked by partner Brad Pitt -- and a giant fake panda -- in what she said were lower-than-usual heels with special Nike soles for the gala screening of the Panda movie. The Brangelina appearance at the 12-day filmfest briefly swept Cannes' more high-brow fare off centre-stage, this year showcasing a trend for highly-relevant political movies. The latest offering by the fabled Dreamworks Animation team sees a clumsy flabby overweight panda voiced by Black and obsessed by martial arts catapulted from his job in a noodle restaurant to a role as a kung fu superhero. Was the film a message for the world's overweight, that it was fine to be a fat panda as long as it was a happy one, the cast was asked at a press conference. "No," Jolie told the vast crowd of cameras and press on hand. "Whatever makes you different, whatever is unique about you, embrace it and try to be yourself." Jolie, who also said she and Pitt were thinking about having the birth in France, plays Tigress in the movie. She said it was "a classic tale, with a nice moral message that as a parent you feel your children can watch." Other stars to lend their voices include Jackie Chan and Lucy Liu. "The film is a love-letter to China," said Dreamworks' animation mastermind Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the stars of the film said their thoughts were currently with China's quake victims, as well as those in Myanmar. Somewhat round Black plays the movie's anti-hero Po. "I think of myself as a kind of bear," he said. "I'm soft and squishy and lazy. I am Po. Po is I. There was very little acting involved." For two-time Academy-award winner Hoffman, now 70, it was his first try at being just a voice. Asked by one journalist whether this was a bit of a slide for the one-time star of films such as "The Graduate", Hoffman laughed and said: "There's been a decline in culture. And it's also reached your profession." On the arthouse front in Cannes, of the films competing for the festival's top Palme d'Or prize, the most applauded by critics to date was Turkey's "Three Monkeys" by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a tale set around family tension. The other three competition films already screened have all touched on politically or socially-relevant themes and been well-received -- "Blindness" by Brazil's Fernando Meirelles, "Waltz with Bashir," an animated documentary by Israel's Ari Folman, and "Lion's Den" by Argentinian Pablo Trapero.
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