DISPATCH FROM CZECH REPUBLIC 
by Nick Holdsworth
Blessed with a weekend of sunshine – very unusual for usually raining mid-summer Bohemia – the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival got off to a great start this year.
Robert De Niro blew into town to open the festival with Barry Levinson-directed new Hollywood-is-hell comedy "What Just Happened" and accepted a lifetime achievement award on the stage of the Velky Zal – Grand Hall – of fest HQ the Hotel Thermal.
Brave man, De Niro – he delivered his acceptance speech in Czech, tripping over virtually every syllable. He can be forgiven: Czech is a language with a downer on vowels and not the easiest Slavic tongue to master.
De Niro had been preceded by Variety's very own executive editor (features) Steven Gaydos, who picked up an award recognizing his work in promoting European film through the Variety Critics’ Choice section of the festival these past 11 years.
A brisk attitude to authority was required of hacks on Saturday at De Niro’s packed press conference.
There was heavy security – which is a rarity at this laid-back Bohemian fest - and late arriving journos were locked out five minutes before the gig was due to start, including Variety’s own man on the spot, your faithful blogger.
As a Fleet Street-trained British hack, that was a red rag to bull. Within minutes a harassed festival press flak had been nagged into letting not only one but four late arrivals.
Still, De Niro was 14 minutes late himself for what turned out to be a reasonably good press conference for an actor not noted for his loquacity.
Among the gems teased out of him – his backing for Barack Obama and opposition to the proposed Screen Actors Guild strike.
Still, apart from the occasional red carpet star turns, this side of the festival is remote to the great majority of visitors.
A truly democratic fest where hordes of students and other youngsters camp out or sleep rough in the parks (this year not such a damp proposition as normally), festival screenings are virtually always packed and even the relatively pampered members of the press have to be up with the larks to get tickets.
The downside is that in the smaller screening rooms you are often sitting cheek by jowl with the great unwashed – or much to my distress on Saturday morning during a screening of Hal Ashby’s classic “The Last Detail” – with the great snoring shapes of a couple of large Czech chaps sleeping off a night on the tiles.
Still, mustn’t grumble. By mid-fest the sun was still shining and Monday’s night’s Variety Critics' Choice party for once was not rained out.
Seven Meditations Upon Encountering Nicolas Roeg in Karlovy Vary... or Why I Still Like Film Festivals
by Steven Gaydos
1) The Karlovy Vary Film Festival has honored Roeg (pictured with "Puffball" actress Rita Tushingham) with a career retrospective and more importantly an official screening of his new film "Puffball" in the Grand Hall at midnight where 1300 European film fans took a trip into Roeg's bizarre and unique universe. "Puffball's" an unsettling Gothic yarn filled with pagan spells, raw sex, graphic fecundity and other Roeg specialities. Roeg told me the Festival had "kept my baby alive and made sure it could enter the world properly." Next time someone asks me what service film fests perform, I'll have a handy example.
2) So again, many critics and fest directors, film biz mavens and assorted cultural gatekeepers are unamused by these Roegian musings. In 1970, they all attacked his film "Performance." When I lived in a London a few years ago, a British critics' poll called it "The best British film ever made" and when I relayed that info to his producer, Sandy Lieberson, Sandy said with a bitter laugh, "35 years too late."
Over lunch, I told Roeg about how much I enjoyed his film "Track 29" in the Cannes market and how angry the film made the British critics and Roeg told me, with not a whit of bitterness or regret, "I have never made a film that has been well-received." This from the man who made "Man Who Fell to Earth," "The Witches," "Bad Timing," "Don't Look Now" and "Walkabout." I think of films I've seen recently that were "well received" and I start to feel as confused and disconnected to reality as the typical Roeg hero.
3)
Some supposedly important and edgy festival directors passed on "Puffball" and I think about all the minor conventional safe crap they regularly program and I start to get very pissed off. Who are they to bar the door to the new Roeg film? How effing dare they not allow their audiences to see his film and make up their own minds. Craven conventional cowards. Whatever happened to provocation and risk-taking in fest land? Isn't the new work of a master filmmaker automatically worthy of viewing, even if people come after you with pitchforks? Oh how the champions of film freedom become staid and stale, not to mention soulless and disrespectful of artists who've changed the language of film. Fug 'em. He's been at this filmmaking gig for about 60 years, undaunted and undimmed by the timidity of the mainstream thinkers.
4) In conversation, Roeg is as mentally stimulating as his best work. And like his films, a conversation with Roeg leaps about from the cosmic to mundane, with intelligence, grace, manners, profundity and wry humor coursing like an electric current through every line. I'm thinking that someone needs to do a Master Class with this dude and film it and then I hear his wife Harriet has started a film project on this and I am deeply thankful. It's a moment of Roegian synchronicity.
5)
Just watched a piece of "Bad Timing" through the rococo chandeliers of the Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Pupp and likes the shattered fragments of story that constitute the film, I'm seeing shards of images and pain and remembering the tragic coincidence of death that accompanied that dark film's making (Laurie Bird, then-girlfriend to star Art Garfunkel, died of a drug overdose). I try to sleep and the time space continuum buzz in my head does get a synchronistic assist from the disco bass lines thumping from the Lazne III revelry outside the window.
6) What are Roeg's films all about? I may have finally figured it out, after my own 38 years of watching with excitement, exasperation and the most pleasurable confusion imaginable. Roeg's a paparazzi, but he's not stalking movie stars. He's catching eternity on the sly, in compromising situations, pants down, angry and in flagrante and eternity's bodyguards are not amused. When they catch Roeg and throw him out on the sidewalk, he bounces, but his pictures still get developed. Some of us peruse the tabloids just for the pleasure of catching these shots because they prove that eternity is just as fucked up and human as the rest of us. Vice. And Versa.
7) When I was a teenager, Bob Dylan wrote something like "Some people are terrified of the atom bomb and some people are terrified to be seen reading Modern Screen magazine." If Nicolas Roeg made a movie out of that, I'll bet Karlovy Vary would have the balls to show it and I'll bet there would be 1300 young European film fans sitting in the theater at midnight, trying, like Mr. Roeg, to figure out what it all means.
One of the greatest working-vacation fests,
Danny Glover will get the fest's President's Award, Randy Quaid will intro a screening of Hal Ashby's great "The Last Detail," "Mamma Mia!" director Phyllida Lloyd will intro the film at the closing ceremony, and the hundreds of journalists that attend the spa-town will soak in the renown hot springs and vaguely remember that there's some sort of film festival going on nearby.
But some research into the healing effects of these "medicine waters" brings some disturbing items:
These cute monkeys, called Macaques, spend hours in 
Karlovy Vary fest - or KV, as it's affectionately called - has lined up an impressive list of jurors for their 43rd event in July.
Czech writer, dircctor Ivan Passer (who cowrote with Milos Forman "Loves of a Blonde" and "The Firemen's Ball") will head the international jury. Actress Brenda Blethyn, "Waltz With Bashir" filmmaker Air Folman, producer Ted Hope will also serve. Other jurors include composer Jan P. Muchow, actress Johanna ter Steege, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
KV also announced that Petr Zelenka's "The Karamazovs" will compete in the film competition. Based on Evald Schorm's play, the film is a re-telling of Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamozov" set in contempory Poland. Zelenka's film "Year of the Devil" took the Crystal Globe for best film at the 37th KVIFF.
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Michael Jones is the film festival editor at Variety.com. 
