From my Cannes Film festival review, posted on 5.14.16: Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey is the second truly exceptional film I’ve seen in Cannes since the festival began last Wednesday night. It’s a kind of Millenial Oliver Twist road flick with Fagin played by both Shia Labeouf and Riley Keogh (Elvis’s granddaughter) and Oliver played by Sasha Lane…but with some good earthy sex thrown in. There’s no question that Honey stakes out its own turf and whips up a tribal lather that feels exuberant and feral and non-deodorized. It doesn’t have anything resembling a plot but it doesn’t let that deficiency get in the way. Honey throbs, sweats, shouts, jumps around and pushes the nervy. (Somebody wrote that it’s Arnold channelling Larry Clark.) It’s a wild-ass celebration of a gamey, hand-to-mouth mobile way of life. And every frame of Robbie Ryan‘s lensing (at 1.37:1, no less!) is urgent and vital.

Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey is the second truly exceptional film I’ve seen in Cannes since the festival began last Wednesday night. It’s a kind of Millenial Oliver Twist road flick with Fagin played by both Shia Labeouf and Riley Keogh (Elvis’s granddaughter) and Oliver played by Sasha Lane…but with some good earthy sex thrown in. There’s no question that Honey stakes out its own turf and whips up a tribal lather that feels exuberant and feral and non-deodorized. It doesn’t have anything resembling a plot but it doesn’t let that deficiency get in the way. Honey throbs, sweats, shouts, jumps around and pushes the nervy. (Somebody wrote that it’s Arnold channelling Larry Clark.) It’s a wild-ass celebration of a gamey, hand-to-mouth mobile way of life. And every frame of Robbie Ryan‘s lensing (at 1.37:1, no less!) is urgent and vital.

The name-brand critics not so high on Spike Jonze‘s Where The Wild Things Are include Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, Village Voice‘s Jim Hoberman, New Yorker‘s David Denby, Charlotte Observer’s Lawrence Toppman, Miami Herald‘s Rene Rodriguez, Chicago Reader‘s J.R. Jones, Slate‘s Dana Stevens, S.F. Chronicle‘s Mick LaSalle, N.Y. Post‘s Lou Lumenick, Toronto Globe and Mail‘s Liam Lacey, L.A. Times‘ Kenny Turan, Salon.com‘s Stephanie Zacharek and Time Out‘s Keith Uhlich. So hold up on that positive emerging consensus I alluded to a day or so ago.

Will the 2017 L.A. Film Festival follow the mindset of the ’16 and ’15 fests, which was basically to screen lower-profile, hand-to-mouth indie titles that no one had heard of or wanted to see? Or will they program at least a few not-yet-released films screened at Sundance, Tribeca or Cannes?

Posted on 5.30.16: “The L.A. Film Festival (6.1 thru 6.9) feels like a no-buzz flatliner. So far I’ve noticed three or four films of passing interest but nothing that really heats the blood. Just a lot of indie titles of marginal interest. No hot premieres, minor Sundance repeaters, none of the Cannes headliners. I shared this view with a film-savvy friend and he said ‘my impression is the same as yours…I felt like last year’s LAFF had almost no buzz, and this year it has even less.’

I’ll be back in Los Angeles on Wednesday, and the first thing I’ll be jumping into will be the L.A. Film Festival (6.1 thru 6.9). So far I’ve noticed three or four films of passing interest but nothing that really heats the blood. Just a lot of indie titles of marginal interest. No hot premieres, minor Sundance repeaters, none of the Cannes headliners…flatline. I shared this view with a film-savvy friend and he said “my impression is the same as yours. I felt like last year’s LAFF had almost no buzz, and this year it has even less.”

The only LAFF film that feels even slightly intriguing is 11:55, a High Noon-inspired drama about neighborhood violence. (It’s screening here in Manhattan tomorrow night.) There’s also Amber Tamblyn‘s Paint It Black — her debut effort as a director. John Krasinki‘s The Hollars, which didn’t fare all that well at Sundance ’16, is an attraction. Ditto Meera Menon‘s Equity, another Sundance premiere. There’s also Political Animals, a doc about LGBT legislators.

I’m assuming that the LAFF programmers deliberately decided to focus on smaller-scale American indie films that nobody has heard of, and didn’t even try to land the hot titles that people would actually like to see. Or maybe they did but the distributors of the hotties said “no dice” because they’re waiting for the start of awards season.

If I was running LAFF I still would’ve tried to book films with at least a semblance of heat.

In order of preference, the finest films I saw at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival are as follows: Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (the questionable ending is a slight thorn, but it obviously didn’t bother me that much), Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman, David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, Andrea Arnold‘s pagan-ish Wild Honey, Jim Jarmusch‘s quietly compelling Paterson, and Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Aquarius, which I barely got into here but admired the more I thought about it, particularly for Sonia Braga‘s award-worthy performance as a scrappy apartment-building owner.

What is that, seven? Personal Shopper was the only home run, and to hell with the idea that a ghost story is automatically a genre sideliner and to hell with the press-screening booers. Graduation and The Salesman were the most substantial in terms of their moral/ethical questionings. All three are eligible for recognition at tonight’s big award ceremony. The only ineligible film is Hell or High Water, which was screened as a non-competitor.

Yeah, I’m pretty much resigned to the general presumption among critics that Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann, which I hated, will win the Palme d’Or.

If Erdmann is passed over for the Palme d’Or, Grand Prix or the Jury Prize (the last two being the festival’s second and third place film awards), this would allow for the possibility of the Best Actor prize going to Peter Simonischek. Please, God…no. His performance as the film’s titular character, a bulky, yellow-toothed creep who attempts to liberate his daughter (Sandra Huller) from a life of cautious uptight-ism with a series of passive-aggressive put-ons, is one of the most repulsive I’ve ever endured.

I attended last night’s Brian Wilson concert at L.A.’s Greek theatre, courtesy of the Love & Mercy team at Roadside. I went with mixed expectations. One, I’d seen Wilson and his backup band give a pleasant but not-exactly-knockout show at a UCLA venue about nine or ten years ago, and who knew if this show would be as good? It might be worse. And two, I’d been told by a friend that a typical Wilson audience these days is wall-to-wall oldsters — baldies, pot bellies, white hair, neck wattles, tent-like Hawaiian shirts — and the thought of being part of such a throng depressed me to no end. I loved the drive up to the Greek (the weather was warm and dry and the various fragrances in the air were to die for) but as I approached the main entrance I was asking myself, “Do I really want to be here?”

Well, my fears were unfounded. The crowd was definitely younger than expected (a healthy blend of people of all ages) and the show was far and away the best Beach Boys/Brian Wilson concert I’ve ever been lucky enough to savor. Paul Merten‘s tight ten-piece band (eleven counting Wilson) just knocked the shit out of 32 Wilson songs, and I’m sorry but it felt truly joyful start to finish. Nobody was cutting the band any slack — they were delivering like champs, gloriously smooth and clean and confident.

About three or four songs into the show I turned to Madelyn Hammond (there with Pete) on my right and said, “Wow, the band is really good!” She agreed 100%. Two seconds later a bewigged Paul Giamatti leaned over and said to me, “What? What did you say to Madelyn?” I looked at him and said, “It’s none of your fucking business!” I’m kidding — Giamatti wasn’t there.

Posted on 11.27.23: “One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting all over again?

“Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.”

Last night “Bob Hightower” posted an anecdote about director Mike Nichols. Residing in the comment thread for an HE article titled “Son of New York Theatre Stories,” it concerns the summer movie-house run of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? and particularly the behavior of a certain New York projectionist.

“When Nichols’s first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened in late June of ’66, he went to a theater in New York one afternoon to watch it with a paying audience.

“The film was out of focus. It kept being out of focus. And of course, no one in the audience complained.

“Nichols frantically ran out and up the stairs to the projection booth. He banged on the door. No one answered. He banged again. Nothing. So he pushed open the door and found the projectionist on the floor banging an usherette. Nichols crept out and left the theater. As Gregg Toland once said, ‘The projectionist is the ultimate censor.'”

HE correction: Toland probably meant to say “the projectionist is the ultimate arbiter.” Showing a film out of focus obviously doesn’t constitute censorship, but vandalism.

Mark Harris informs that the anecdote isn’t from his 2022 Nichols biography, but says “it certainly sounds credible.”

Well, I don’t find the story credible.

HE to Hightower #1: With the urgent knocking why wouldn’t the randy projectionist have gotten up and seen who it was, especially if the door was unlocked? He surely understood that women hate it when strangers burst into a room with intimate activity going on. If the projectionist wanted to keep things going with the usherette he would taken proper privacy precautions. It would have been one thing if the projection booth door was locked, but it obviously wasn’t. You can’t tell me he didn’t hear Nichols knocking.

HE to Hightower #2: Projection booth floors are made of hard plastic tiles or plain cement. Who would attempt to make love to an usherette on one of those awful uncarpeted floors? What kind of usherette would submit to this? Women like their romantic encounters to be nice and soft and candle-lit. I would expect that most projectionists and usherettes would avoid the floor and attempt the deed standing up. Or perhaps with the usherette bent over the reel-spicing table, say.

One thing that’s always bothered me about Virginia Wolff is that George and Martha’s young guests — George Segal‘s Nick and Sandy Dennis‘s Honey — arrive around 2:30 am. The four of them have already been to a previous faculty party which presumably started at 8 or 9 pm, and now it’s five or six hours later and they’re about to start drinking and chit-chatting again? Even at the height of my most rambunctious youth I never showed up anywhere — a friend’s home or a bar or anything — at 2:30 am. During my drinking days I might’ve crashed at 2:30 or 3 am, but I never partied until dawn killed the moon…never. And I was a wild man, relatively speaking.

One of the most infectious bass lines in pop music history was performed by Bill Church on Van Morrison‘s “Wild Night” (’71), a track from his fifth studio album, “Tupelo Honey.” Written by Morrison almost 40 years before he became an anti-masker, “Wild Night” was recorded in the spring of ’71 at San Francisco’s Wally Heider studios (245 Hyde Street, between Turk and Eddy). It was released as a single in ’71 and reached #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

A November 2019 HE plus piece, liberated from the paywall: Almost all mainstream Hollywood sex comedies of the early to mid ’60s are pretty close to unwatchable now. (Can anyone think of a single tolerable film in this vein?) A year or two ago I was close to condemning Lover Come Back as the most painfully unfunny of them all, but they’re all horrendous to sit through.

Any way you slice it, ’60 to ’65 was a truly grotesque era when it came to farcical middle-class comedies.

Frontline commercial filmmakers of the early to mid ’60s had been aroused and influenced by French nouvelle vague and the British kitchen-sink genre, both of which ignited in the late ’50s. This resulted in frank sexual situations in several early ’60s dramas — Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment (which may have been the first Hollywood dramedy of a sexual nature), Alfred Hitchcock‘s Psycho, Lewis Milestone‘s Ocean’s 11, Richard Quine‘s Strangers When We Meet, William Wyler‘s The Children’s Hour, Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, Alexander Singer‘s A Cold Wind in August, Vincent Minnelli‘s Two Weeks in Anther Town, Joshua Logan‘s Fanny.

But at the same time a steady outpouring of constipated sex comedies — largely inspired by the triple-whammy of Ross Hunter‘s Pillow Talk, Wilder’s Some Like It Hot and the Oscar-awarded The Apartment along with increasingly randy Playboy stirrings in the culture at large — began to manifest.

All that sexual interest, energy and intrigue, and almost all of it shackled and smothered. So many U.S. comedies about characters wanting to get randy, and all of them constrained because of the industry’s still-prevailing production code, which didn’t begin to erode until ’66 or thereabouts.

The taboo-dialogue groundbreaker was Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff, which opened on 6.21.66. Believe it or not, it was regarded as a big deal when Elizabeth Taylor‘s Martha said “goddam you!” (a substitute for the original “screw you!” in the stage version) to Richard Burton‘s George. Mainstream sexual frankness followed in short order (particularly in ’67’s The Graduate, The President’s Analyst, Belle du Jour, Reflections in a Golden Eye, Hurry Sundown and Bonnie and Clyde), and the industry was off to the races.

An HE commenter recently wrote that most early to mid ’60s sex farces are “not just bad by present standards but borderline inexplicable. They couldn’t talk about much and they couldn’t do anything, and the elaborate artificiality produces an effect not unlike a Kabuki play.”

Another said that “any film in which you hear smarmy saxophone over a close-up of a zaftig woman’s ass as she sashays out of a room is a piece of shit. And almost every sex farce from 1960-’66 had that exact shot.”