Day: May 15, 2019

Almost Cold

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It’s 2:10 am and chilly as hell outside. All the years I’ve been coming to Cannes the weather has always been mild and balmy, usually in the mid to high 60s and sometimes 70-plus. Not once do I recall wearing a jacket and a scarf to an evening screening, but I sure as hell did this a few hours ago on my way to see Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dernelles‘ Bacurau (which I hated by the way).

On top of which Friday and Saturday are expected to to be half-rainy, according to Weatherbug.

Right now it’s 46 degrees here. I thought climate change was supposed to be making things warmer as a rule. I don’t know which is worse, the nippy weather or the sight of 20somethings walking around in shorts and T-shirts and mini-dresses.

Biskind on Coppola Slam

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In that recently-posted Deadline interview between Mike Fleming and Francis Coppola, the 80-year-old director briefly tears into author and former Premiere editor Peter Biskind, claiming unfairness on Biskind’s part in a 1990 piece about The Godfather, Part III, especially regarding Sofia Coppola‘s performance as Michael Corleone’s daughter.

I asked Biskind this morning if there’s anything he wants to dispute or clarify. His statement follows an excerpt from the Deadline interview:

Fleming: “You took some heat casting your daughter Sofia, who has become a fine filmmaker in her own right. Was it right to put so much pressure on her, when she was untested?”

Coppola: “Well, I felt betrayed by a journalist by the name of Peter Biskind. And Tina Brown. I was asked if a journalist could come to the set and report on the movie, but Peter came in with a story all ready to write because he knew that there was a controversy about the fact that I had cast Sofia. He’s the one [who] came out with the article first that sort of greatly criticized her performance and started that whole trend, that I had cast my daughter when Paramount didn’t want me to.

“I felt that the plot of Godfather III was that they were coming for Michael but they got her. And [in the press] they were coming for me but they chose Sofia. I don’t have malice against anyone at this point in my life, but, to this day, it upsets me that Peter Biskind was the one who was given access to the set and he used it to damn my daughter. I believe that in a new [forthcoming] version of the film (to be titled The Death of Michael Corleone), Sofia’s performance will vindicate her.”

Biskind replies: “Francis would be better served resting on his considerable laurels than nursing old grudges. So far as Sofia is concerned, it’s nice to see the Lion King spring to the defense of his cubs, but generally I like her films, and don’t recall maligning her. Besides [Francis and I] were supposed to have kissed and made up 20 years ago when he publicly forgave me for my sins. This reminds me of Godfather II, when Michael forgives Fredo and then has him killed.”

Endorsement

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Evidence of Donald Trump‘s racism has been so abundant over the last three and a half to four years (not to mention the Central Park Five statements that he made 30 years ago) that there doesn’t seem to be anything to say except “what else is new?” But every so often a quote will come along that renews the revulsion. Not among the Trump faithful, of course. Semi-normal people, I mean.

In a day-old Atlantic article titled “An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry,” white nationalist figurehead Richard Spencer says that August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville “would not have occurred without Trump” becoming president.

Spencer, the rally’s organizer and the guy who coined the term “alt-right,” said it “really was because of [Trump’s] campaign and this new potential for a nationalist candidate who was resonating with the public in a very intense way. [The] alt-right found something in Trump. He changed the paradigm and made this kind of public presence of the alt-right possible.”

The Charlottesville rally led to the murder of Heather Heyer, caused by a white racist who plowed through a crowd of liberal counter-protestors with his car. The same day Trump deplored the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” A few days later he re-stated there were “very fine people on both sides.”

Push Comes To Shove

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The first truly exciting film of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival screened this afternoon — Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables. Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly knit Muslim community, it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

Start to finish Les Miserables is rough, riveting, incendiary — written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard. It generally feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a dash of the anxious urban energy of William Freidkin‘s The French Connection.

But it’s about more than just urban action beats. It’s a racially charged tragedy, injected with sharp social detail and several strong (if somewhat sketchy) characters on both sides of the tale. It’s a bit splotchy and slapdash at times, but is quite the ride.

Part policier and part social-canvas suspenser, Les Miserables is basically about conflicted cops (including one bad apple) under pressure vs. a crew of scrappy, rambunctious, vaguely criminal kids in the ‘hood. It takes the side of Montfermeil natives (Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.

Closing motto: “There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

The story is about a mischievous Muslim kid named Issa (Issa Perica) who gets himself into hot water by stealing a lion cub from a small local circus. The circus guys angrily threaten some Montfermeil community leaders (not the suit-wearing kind), and soon after the film’s three plainclothes protagonists — the racist and brutish Chris (Alexis Manenti), a casually brusque but decent-hearted Montfermeil native named Gwada (Djibril Zonga) and Stephane (Damien Bonnard), a new transfer with a curtly liberal, mildly compassionate approach to police work — are on the hunt.

They eventually chase down and capture Issa, but then comes the triggering incident: an agitated Gwada fires a flashbang (a non-lethal stun grenade) into the kid’s face. Luckily Issa recovers, but Chris and Gwada go into panic mode when they quickly realize that the incident has been captured by a drone-mounted video camera. Despite Stephane’s objections, the priority becomes finding and destroying the visual evidence.

Things get increasingly hairy and desperate, ultimately leading to a climax…okay, I’ve said enough.

I won’t reveal the finish but it reminded me of the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation. I for one found it satisfying.

Earlybirds Get The Worm

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The news about Focus Features having bought international rights to Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, which will screen in the Directors’ Fortnight section on Sunday, obviously ups interest levels. Which means that getting into either of the two Lighthouse screenings (8:45 am and 8:30 pm) will require extra determination and stamina.

Elite press badges cut no ice at Directors Fortnight screenings. Everyone is on an equal footing, so you just have to line up outside the J.W. Marriott and hope you’ve arrived early enough. Gaspar Noe‘s Climax was the hottest Directors Fortnight attraction last year, and it took me two tries before I got in.

The Lighthouse solution, I’ve decided, will require a 6 am Sunday wake-up and arriving at the Marriott by 7 or 7:15 am. I recently urged an industry friend, who’s intrigued by The Lighthouse having been shot on 35mm black-and-white celluloid, to join me at that hour. I explained that the 8:45 am offers the only realistic shot because access to the 8:30 pm screening will be a huge time-eater. Awaking at dawn is simply a matter of will.

Skeptical

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In a run-up piece on Rocketman by Variety‘s Mark Malkin, producer Matthew Vaughn recalls how Tom Hardy was attached to play Elton John in an earlier incarnation.

Vaughn scoffed at Hardy’s idea to lip-synch John’s singing. Vaughn: “I feel like an idiot saying it now, but I said, ‘Nobody is going to watch a movie where the lead character is lip synching.’ Cut to Bohemian Rhapsody and me being proven wrong.”

Taron Egerton, who plays John in Rocketman (which is screening here on Friday morning) is a first-rate singer, but his John imitation (to go by the trailer) doesn’t quite get it — close but a degree or two removed from take-it-to-the-bank authenticity.

“I knew how well Taron could sing and musicals are like action movies,” Vaughn tells Malkin. “If you look at Tom Cruise, you know he’s doing it. I’m hoping people are going to lose their minds for Taron when they hear him sing.”

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High Intrigue

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Of the three films I’m planning to catch today, Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles‘ Brazilian, politically-driven Bacarau (which screens tonight at 10 pm) seems to have a special energy, to go by the trailer. Filho’s last film, Aquarius, played in Cannes three years ago. Sonia Braga stars in both.

Boilerplate: “Bacurau, a small town in the Brazilian countryside, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants notice that their community has vanished from most maps.”

Filho to The Jarkata Post: “I am a Brazilian filmmaker. I live at a time when Brazilian society is suffering and stories are springing up.”

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Great Coppola Summary

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I’ve just read an excellent, day-and-a-half-old Michael Fleming interview with Francis Coppola. (It was posted at Cannes dinner hour on Monday, 5.13).

It reminded me what a great and expansive interview subject Coppola can be when the spigots are truly turned on — a fact that I gratefully realized 38 years ago when I cold-called Coppola at the Sherry Netherland one night and got him to talk for nearly two hours. It resulted in a two-part transcript piece that I posted in The Film Journal, which I was managing editor of from late ’80 to the early summer of ’83.

Fleming’s q & a is a straight-on, plain-spoken review and summary of everything Coppola is, was and hopefully will be.

Among the topics: (a) His family, luck and longevity, and his up-and-down fortunes; (b) The ongoing saga of his long-delayed, now-in-preparation Megalopolis with possible castings of Jude Law and Shia Leboeuf; (c) Absorbing summaries of the shootings and backstage battles behind The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II, Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club; (d) Plans for a forthcoming, somewhat shorter re-edit of The Godfather, Part III (with Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone dying inside after the shooting death of his daughter rather than toppling over on his Italian-villa patio at the finale); (e) The touch-and-go beginnings of his hugely successful wine business; (f) A slam at former MGM honcho Gary Barber for being obstinate and obstructive over the re-edit of The Cotton Club (Coppola’s tale mirrors an HE account of this episode that I posted on on 9.7.17), and (g) an announcement that with Barber now out the door The Cotton Club Encore will be screened at the forthcoming 2019 New York Film Festival and receive a limited theatrical window before going to video and streaming.

It reminds, as I noted a year and two-thirds ago, that “one good thing came out of The Cotton Club was Michael Daly‘s “The Making of The Cotton Club,” a New York magazine article that ran 22 pages including art (pgs. 41 thru 63) and hit the stands on 5.7.84.

It was one of the most engrossing accounts of a troubled production I’ve ever read, and it still is. Dazzle and delusion, abrasive relationships, murder, tap dancing, “pussy”, cocaine, flim-flam, double talk, financial chicanery and Melissa Prophet. Excellent reporting, amusing, believable, tightly composed…pure dessert.

Coppola tells Fleming about the participation of a somewhat shady guy during the Cotton Club filming, and how he surprisingly came to be Coppola’s ally in some respects. Coppola calls him “Joey” but Daly’s piece identifies him. Coppola describes him as “pretty bright and, whatever his past was, pretty nice.”

Anyway, that’s it. Totally worth reading. As good as this sort of thing gets.

It rained last night in Cannes. The current weather forecast is for rain, clouds and chilliness for the next week or so — terrific. Today’s events are (a) a press conference for The Dead Don’t Die at 11 am (which I’m not inclined to attend), (b) Alice Silverstein‘s Bull at 2 pm, (c) Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables at 4:45 pm, and (c) Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Bacarau at 10 pm.