CANNES, France - The Cannes Film Festival celebrates its 60th anniversary Wednesday with an opening movie that blends an indie sensibility and a glittering cast: Wong Kar-wai's Route 66 road trip tale starring Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and Norah Jones.
The sultry-voiced singer makes her acting debut in "My Blueberry Nights" playing a woman who hits the road to cure her broken heart. For Hong Kong director Wong ("In The Mood for Love"), the movie is his first English-language feature.
The festival also includes Cannes favorites Michael Moore, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers, and it pays homage to the festival's glamorous history. A photo exhibit along the beach shows Cary Grant in black tie; Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty hailed by paparazzi; and Kim Novak in a limousine, with raindrops sparkling on the window like diamonds.
But the festival is not celebrating its anniversary with nostalgia alone. For a feature-length homage to the movies, it commissioned 35 shorts from directors including Wong, Roman Polanski ("The Pianist"), Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu ("Babel"), the Coen brothers ("Fargo") and Wim Wenders ("Wings of Desire.")
Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese ("The Departed") has been enlisted to give a master class on moviemaking. And a host of Hollywood talent will be on hand for the stargazers who wait in the sun with ladders all day to stake their place near the red carpet.
Al Pacino, George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt will promote threequel "Ocean's Thirteen," Leonardo DiCaprio brings his environmental documentary "The 11th Hour," and celebrity super couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will appear -- he for "Ocean's Thirteen," she for "A Mighty Heart," in which she plays the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The main competition includes 22 films from countries including Israel, South Korea and Mexico, as well as movies from four directors who already have been crowned with Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or: Tarantino's gory "Death Proof," the Coen brothers' Rio Grande thriller "No Country for Old Men," Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" and Sarajevo-born Emir Kusturica's "Promise Me This."
Michael Moore, whose "Fahrenheit 9/11" won the top prize at Cannes in 2004, is not competing for awards this year. But "Sicko," his look at the U.S. health care system, already has won more attention than any film in the festival. The U.S. Treasury Department opened an investigation into a trip Moore took to Cuba -- accompanied by a group of ailing Sept. 11 rescue workers -- during the film's shooting.
Cannes was founded in 1939 as an alternative to the Venice Film Festival in Mussolini's Italy -- but almost as soon as it opened, the festival was cancelled because World War II broke out. The festival did not get going in earnest until the 1950s.
Past winners of the festival's top prize include "Rome, Open City," "The Third Man," "Blowup," "M A S H," "Taxi Driver" and "Apocalypse Now."
