FYI. You guys are lucky the webmiss is capable of updating the website after checking all these pictures of our mighty Brad. Gosh that guy is looking good…

Art and commerce? “They’re not meant to get along,” said Brad Pitt, the Cannes Film Festival perennial, whose film career has led to a bit of the former (art) and a bit more of the latter (commerce).

This year’s Cannes competition slate includes the film screened this morning at 8:30, writer-director Andrew Dominik’s small-scale hit-man yarn “Killing Them Softly,” in which Pitt reunites with his “Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” helmer.

Pitt, who also produced, plays a mob clean-up killer trying to do his job amid unreliable colleagues and recessionary spending cuts (the film’s set in 2008, as the banks are collapsing). Like the ’30s bootlegging drama “Lawless,” unveiled earlier this week on the Cannes main competition roster, “Killing Them Softly” is a Weinstein Company release schedule for release later this summer in U.S.

Compared to the weirdly lifeless “Lawless” at least with “Killing Them Softly” there’s something to debate — the film’s slippery black-comic tone, for one, or its blunt metaphoric use of the 2008 presidential election campaign footage. Conversation after conversation between Pitt and Richard Jenkins, or James Gandolfini, takes place with a TV in the background showing Obama on the ’08 trail, touting America’s eternal promise. The transactions and grisly tactics we see in the story makes those words taste ashen.

Read more. Thanks Gabriella.

FYI. And I hate papparazzi videos but this is Brad arriving @ the Cannes Film Festival this morning. I’ve nothing more to say but… Tristan?

Brad Pitt is coming back to New Orleans, and he’s bringing his Steve McQueen-directed adaptation of the Solomon Northup memoir “Twelve Years a Slave” with him. Filming is set to begin in late June.
Brad PittActor Brad Pitt signs autographs at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Local homeowner Pitt will return to New Orleans this summer to star in and co-produce an adaptation of ’12 Years a Slave.’

Based on Northup’s experiences as a free black man who was kidnapped in New York in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana, the project had been rumored for several weeks as considering Louisiana as a shooting site. That was confirmed today (May 4) with its inclusion on the latest state-issued listing of film and TV projects shooting, or preparing to shoot, in-state. (See the full list below, along with contact information for prospective crew members.)

It is scheduled to shoot in New Orleans for 7 weeks, beginning June 27.

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PS. Added some rare pics, hope that makes up for my lil time off