65 years ago Dalton Trumbo wrote the following Spartacus dialogue between Charles Laughton‘s Gracchus and John Gavin‘s Julius Caesar. The subject was Gracchus having arranged with Cilician pirates to provide ships to help Spartacus’s slave army escape from Italy.
Julius Caesar: “So now we deal with pirates. We bargain with criminals.”
Gracchus: “Now, don’t be so stiff-necked about it! Politics is a practical profession. If a criminal has what you want, you do business with him.”
Not so much any more.
The release of the Epstein files has adversely affected POI (people of influence) who had any kind of friendly relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein during the ’90s, aughts and teens. We’re talking about a “social crime” or “stain” upon reputations, and the ones who’ve suffered the most in this regard are Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (recently arrested), Kathryn Ruemmler (Goldman Sachs GC…resigned earlier this month after reports she was a friend of Epstein’s), Brad Karp (Paul Weiss chairman), Larry Summers, Casey Wasserman (LA 2028 chair…tarnished by friendly emails with Ghislaine Maxwell).
I’m not aware that these people are guilty of any kind of hard criminal activity with Epstein, according to the files. Maybe I’m overlooking stuff, but as far as I know they were just chatty with the guy. I’m presuming they saw a financial upside in keeping Epstein in their corner. Nothing more than that.
Somebody needs to find Trumbo in heaven and tell him that the rules have changed. If a criminal has what you want, you avoid him like the plague lest you be condemned for merely being loose and friendly with the guy.
After months of HE irritation and complaining due to an apparent commitment on the part of Greenwich Entertainment to under-promote if not suppress Michel Franco‘s Dreams and only days before the film’s limited 2.27 opening, I’ve finally seen this 98-minute film and have come away…well, certainly not annoyed or negative-minded, as some critics have been.
It’s a smart, bracing, well-honed thing by a top-tier auteur known for cold films (I think Franco is one of the toughest, sharpest directors working today). And yet the last 20 minutes left me a bit puzzled.
Dreams is about a passionate sexual affair between Jennifer (the 40ish Jessica Chastain), a privileged, headstrong, San Francisco-based rich woman who runs her family’s arts foundation, which includes a sponsorship of a prestigious ballet school in Mexico City. During her visits there she’s been discreetly “doing” a gifted ballet dancer named Fernando (the 30something Isaac Hernandez), but has been keeping this hot-and-heavy affair from her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) and, more importantly, from her Daddy Warbucks father (the dreary, dull-faced Marshall Bell), who of course covers all the bills.
The story is activated when Fernando decides to expand the cultural perimeters of this relationship by entering the U.S. illegally and then making his way north to San Francisco and into Jennifer’s Russian Hill condo and soon after her bed.
Jennifer, seemingly delighted with all of the dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick, helps Fernando land an audition with a top-tier SF ballet school, which he aces. And yet Jennifer, we gradually come to learn, is unsettled by Fernando having invaded her home turf. She tries, as noted, to keep their relationship on the down-low, but he smells this and shows resentment, reacts angrily.
Jennifer won’t say this in so many words, but as much as she loves Fernando she wants him back in Mexico City, tucked safely away. She wants the lid kept on.
Franco makes it clear that while Jennifer feigns the brisk and aloof attitude of a cosmopolitan woman of means, she knows where her bread is buttered and therefore does what daddy suggests when he tells her (although not in so many words) to cool it with the beaner. (HE to woke pearl-clutchers: By using the “b” word I’m pretending to think and speak like her flinty father and brother do deep down.)
Dad basically says (a) “you can’t brazenly fuck your Mexican boytoy with all our San Francisco friends looking on”, (b) “fucking this guy is bad for appearances, out of bounds” and (c) “do what you want during your Mexico City trips but not here.”
SPOILER PARAGRAPH: Jennifer winds up doing a really shitty thing to Fernando, and then she feels compelled to admit what she’s done (can’t lie, can’t hold it in) and he gets even angrier and treats her harshly and brutishly (including fucking her in the ass in a rapey way), and then she brings her brother into the situation and Fernando is beaten up and made to howl in pain.
Basic lesson for rich white women: Never fuck the help or your social lessers. But if you do anyway and the lessers starts behaving presumptuously or inappropriately, you need to do the hard thing. You need to be cruel in order to make your point.
I didn’t find Jennifer’s harshness toward Fernando dramatically satisfying. Franco basically goes with a “white people are racist shits who don’t give a damn about south-of-the-border people so fuck them and tbe horses they ride on” message. Except racism always obscures the truth of things, and that’s what this film more or less does.
If you want to be liberal about it, Dreams is an efficient capturing of a certain social malignancy. Chastain and Hernández are excellent in their roles; everything in this film feels steady, straight and believable. HE urges you to catch it.
That fascinating scene with the blind Joan Allen and the sedated Bengal tiger…burned into my memory. She’s emotionally open to Noonan’s Dollarhyde (aka “the Tooth Fairy”) and yes, even sexually. Lo and behold they do it. And yet Noonan/Dollarhyde is too fucked up to go with the feeling. Plus he’s killed a guy he sees as a romantic rival. Plus he later decides to kill Allen. A real babe magnet.
Nothing else that Noonan ever did comes close to Manhunter. I don’t even remember What Happened Was. Or, for that matter, his supporting role in Charlie Kaufman‘s Synecdoche, New York.
Brody shares some of the same observations that I mentioned last year, but his review really digs in…it’s more fully considered…plus the construction is smarter, better. Here’s the whole Brody piece, and here’s my favorite portion:
“It’s no surprise that the children’s frantic quest fosters a deep friendship. The pairing is an old one—the principled book-smart girl and the rough-edged streetwise boy—but Hadi revitalizes it with meticulous observation that links their struggles to those of the country at large. The children playing Lamia and Saeed had no training as actors, yet both are fanatically precise, effortlessly expressive, and pensively deep-hearted. The girl achieves perfect comic timing when she holds a recipe in one hand and her pet rooster in the other as it pecks at the paper.
“When things go sour, both kids spew insults and indignation with a matter-of-fact insolence. At moments of exceptional gravity, they play a staring contest that fills the screen with an ingenuous romanticism. The bonds of the children, Bibi, the postman, and a very few others in their circle endow “The President’s Cake” with a grandly humanistic warmth that’s all the stronger for the mighty pressure under which it’s forged.”
5.16.25: “I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.
“Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion, it’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).
“The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.
“And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.
Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.”
I’ve been assuming all along that Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite (A24, 6.26), which exploded last month during Park City’s final Sundance Film Festival, would play during Cannes ’26. All those European critics champing at the bit…they’d have to show it, right? But Jordan Ruimy informs that A24 is saying “no more festivals.” But there will certainly be Cannes market screenings, I’m figuring. I’ll find my way into one of them.
I knew right away I’d eventually ban this dickhead. He was an irritating ass from the get-go. A psychopath. The air feels slightly cleaner now…more breathable.
Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz (’79) is a dazzler in several respects, but it keeps pushing the coy cynicism button…over and over and over. It walks and talks big-city sophistication within a very narrow lane, but it’s essentially aimed at the rubes.
Roy Scheider gave a career-peak performance as Broadway musical director Joe Gideon, whose story was modelled on Fosse’s own in the early ’70s. And yes, Jazz impressed me the first time (the Manhattan press screening was at Cinema 1). But it irked me the second time. When I caught it a third time on DVD (I love the early dance-audition sequence) I quit before the halfway mark. It over-emphasizes to a fault. Parts are ham-fisted and painfully un-hip, but it was quite the film of its day.
“Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease,” wrote critic Dave Kehr. “This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.”
Time‘s then-critic Frank Richwrote that “as a showman, [Fosse] has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone.”
I interviewed Scheider in late ’81 or ’82 for Us magazine. We met at a coffee shop on Lexington, somewhere in the mid ’70s. He used to go there after his morning run. He was a good egg, an honest cat and a hard worker. Most actors don’t get to flourish with the kind or roles that Scheider was able to land from the early ’70s to the early ’80s.
If a dead celebrity is used for one of those nostalgic AI slop featurettes, he/she enters the frame with a pair of white feathered angel wings attached to his/her back. This one uses amber halos instead. There’s something vaguely creepy or even demonic about those feathers. They’re meant to convey a loving respectful attitude about the deceased, but to me they’re like a glimpse of the reaper. “They’re coming for you, Barbara…”
Even I, a non-sports fan from my mid-teen years onward, know who the great Bill Mazeroski was. The What’s My Line? clip (after the jump) reveals that Bill spoke with a West Virginia barnyard accent. Mazeroski passed yesterday at age 89.
Sen. JonOssoff can’t compete with Gov. GavinNewsom’s rhetorical ease, balls and all-around charisma, but he has a solid honest center. He strikes me as well-grounded.
HE is a sensible centrist, but in the above context my closest allegiance is with the “abundance libs.”
