The Cannes Film Festival is much more than a place where the hottest and best in world cinema premieres and gets booed, it’s also a huge marketplace for movies that may very well get booed in the future (in his commentary with Steven Soderbergh on Schizopolis, Steven Soderbergh compares it to a “video store next to an ocean”). So, just on the first day of the festival, we already have much film news to report on. However, I have decided to limit my focus on two key items. You will see why.

Back in the dark ages of February, I reported that Steven Soderbergh might very well be coming out of his Jay-Z-style “retirement” with a movie entitled Logan Lucky (not Hillbilly Heist, as was reported by the initial article breaking this news, thank christ), starring everybody (including grandma)’s favorite, Chan-fried Po-Taters and Michael Shannon (not Po-Taters and Matt Damon, as was reported by that initial article). But we didn’t know for sure for a long time, if a long time was redefined to mean “three months”. Because today, we know for sure. Today, it was announced from Cannes that Riley Keough (who, in addition to being Elvis’s granddaughter, had a supporting role in Magic Mike and the lead in Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience, which I should cover for this site one of these days) would star in the film alongside Tatum and Shannon (incidentally, how fucking awesome is it that Shannon and Soderbergh are finally making a movie together, after their only collaboration was Shannon’s tiny role in the Soderbergh-written Criminal?) (never mind on all that, see my comment for more info), who plays someone who decides to perform a heist of a NASCAR game. This means that Mosaic, Soderbergh’s super-secret HBO project, is no longer alone on the roster of future Soderbergh projects (there’s also still the possibility that The Knick comes back and bums out even more people on a weekly basis). I just hope Soderbergh can get Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard back for this.

Meanwhile, it’s also been reported from Cannes that another, much less intentional, hiatus from filmmaking has been broken. Lynne Ramsay made the acclaimed We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ratcatcher, and Morvern Callar before she didn’t show up on the first day of production for her Jane Got a Gun, which was apparently enough to blacklist her from moviemaking for five years while David O. Russell is one step away from killing one of his actors and gets projects handed to him on a silver platter (there’s also the fact that only one of them pees sitting down). But according to that report, Ramsay is back with a new film, You Were Never Really Here, starring none other than Joaquin “the Joaq of Life” Phoenix. He’ll play a “damaged war veteran”, which is so far up his alley that I’d be surprised if he can work his way back out. The film is written by Ramsay from a novella by Bored to Death creator Jonathan Ames. We don’t know when filming will begin, but it may very well put a dent in the plan for Phoenix to play Jesus opposite Rooney Mara’s Mary Magdalene, which I detailed in my last newspiece. I think I can live with this. Now all he needs to do is play the Andy Garcia role in Logan Lucky, and I’ll be completely at peace. Still, even without that, all of this news more than earns the inevitable posting of that gif (which I actually promised to use in the event of a Soderbergh unretirement back at the Mothership).