Story courtesy of Kevin Armont & Trevor Emmitt

Cannes Screens Lynch, Smith Films

BY JOCELYN NOVECK

CANNES, France (AP) - Director David Lynch is well known for his strange, dark, often violent films. Yet at Cannes, he's come up with a heartwarming movie where nobody dies, nobody is hurt and nobody is even mean.

Kevin Smith is known for small, quirky films that deal with mundane issues like the lives of store clerks. At Cannes, he's presenting a film about nothing less than good, evil and the Catholic Church.

Both films, presented Friday, are among the most talked-about at this year's festival.

For Lynch, it was a newspaper article that led to ``The Straight Story.'' The title is a play on words; it's a true story about Alvin Straight, an Iowa man who gained notoriety in 1994 for a singularly unusual act.

Straight, then 73, heard his brother Lyle had had a stroke. The two hadn't spoken for 10 years, and Alvin wanted to put things right.

With poor eyesight and no driver's license, he hitched a trailer to his lawn mower and drove across Iowa - 240 miles - to his brother's Wisconsin home. The trip took six weeks.

As ``The Straight Story'' begins, we hear music that sounds unmistakably like that of ``Twin Peaks,'' Lynch's famously dark TV series. The music is by the same composer. But the similarity ends there.

The film is a slow-moving (some might say too slow) and beautifully filmed tribute to Straight's stubbornness, and to the kindness he encounters along the way.

There are no huge surprises - it was, after all, based on real events. But the ending is surprisingly affecting. Mostly this is due to the acting of Richard Farnsworth as Alvin, whose expressively craggy face appears in nearly every scene.

Lynch says he got a call after making the film, telling him it had received a G rating.

``I said, please say that again, because it's the only time I'm going to hear it,'' he joked.

Smith's film could not be more different. In ``Dogma,'' showing out of competition, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon play angels who try to return to heaven after they are banished. The film also stars Linda Fiorentino as a reluctant descendant of Jesus Christ, Chris Rock as a trash-talking 13th apostle, Alan Rickman as an angel who is the voice of God, and singer Alanis Morisette as God.

The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS - news), the parent company of Miramax Films, apparently felt it would be inappropriate to release the film under any of the company's movie labels, including Miramax. So Miramax co-chairmen Bob and Harvey Weinstein formed a separate company to purchase and find a distributor for the film.

Smith, who previously directed ``Clerks,'' ``Mallrats'' and ``Chasing Amy,'' says he knew he was going to ruffle some feathers. But he told a news conference he hoped people would ``see the movie for what it is.''

To that end, the film begins with an amusing disclaimer, in which the filmmakers note that God, too, has a sense of humor - witness the platypus.

Then it apologizes to the platypus community.

But the film may be offensive even to those who accept the religious satire. There is plenty of blood and guts, and it is a bit jarring to see charming Matt Damon blowing people away.