Last night I suffered through agonizing leg-muscle torture during the Cannes Film Festival’s opening night screening, Pierre Salvadori‘s The Electric Kiss (La Vénus electrique). Over the closing credits we’re treated to a re-listen of Shocking Blue’s “Venus“…this should tell you a lot.

This isn’t an allusion to the quality of Salvadori’s lightweight dramedy (which isn’t “bad”, just forced and insubstantial). It’s a statement of simple fact. I arrived a bit late to the screening due to working on my Rex Reed obit, and was therefore obliged to sit in the half-filled balcony. I was scrunched between two women, and the leg pain began about 45 minutes into the show. I decided to man up and suffer my way through the whole thing, and I made it! 122 minutes!

Set in 1928 Paris, The Electric Kiss is basically an emotionally earnest, low-key farce — an unrequited, “oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive” hetero romance in the usual farcical ways.

What got me, a high-octane hetero in decline, is the fact that Kiss doesn’t offer even the briefest anatomical glimpses or depictions — no sweat-glistened boobs, no fleeting ass shots, no simulations of this or that sex act. It’s kind of striking that while there are no bare breasts to contemplate, Salvadori is careful during one moment to offer a clean silhouette of a female nipple…alluring, old-school, almost Lubitsch-like discretion.

It is universally required that in any hetero dramedy dealing with the pain and ecstasy of romantic longing, the female lead must stir erotic desire among (or more precisely within) dudes like myself. The unfortunate fact is that Anaïs Demoustier, who plays a hustling, opportunistic carnival performer named Suzanne, simply doesn’t cut it in this respect. I’m sorry but that’s the truth of it.

What is The Electric Kiss about? The three Ds — desire, deception, discovery.

In a spring of 1997 edition of The Paris Review (issue #142), David Mamet explains “the trick of dramaturgy” as follows: “The main question in drama…is always ‘what does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. What gives rise to the drama, what is the precipitating event, and how, at the end of the play, do we see that event culminated? Do we see the protagonist’s wishes fulfilled or absolutely frustrated? That’s the structure of drama. You break it down into three acts.”

And that’s fine, but I’ve long believed that the most affecting kind of drama (or comedy even) is one in which the main protagonist wants something and then somewhere during Act Two discovers that he/she actually wants something else. Something that is less a thing of mood or sexuality or a longing for wealth or advancement and more of a tender, deeper, more emotional longing. A personal growth thang, falling in love, doing the right moral thing, etc.

A character who stays with the same desire all the way through a play or a film is not, in my view, an interesting one. We don’t want to see the protagonist’s wishes “fulfilled or absolutely frustrated,” as Mamet says. We want to see those wishes evolve and thereby reveal something unexpected.

Which is why I’ve frequently noted my preference for stories that are built and structured upon the three Ds.

Here‘s an excerpt from Howard Suber‘s brilliant Some Like It Hot commentary track . It partly explains how this basic scheme of all great comedies applies during the finale.

The once-great film critic and flamboyantly blunt-spoken personality Rex Reed has left the earth at age 87.

In his prime (mid ’60s through early ’90s) the openly gay Reed was a swaggering, colorful, unintimidated writer. When he was younger he seemed to really know his stuff and truly care about the value of great cinema. Reed really and truly understood the Hollywood universe, and was a major fan of same. He worshipped legendary filmmakers and their best work, and said so repeatedly with commendable eloquence.

Reed wasn’t really a proverbial “critic of the cloth” who walked around in monk’s robes, and in this sense wasn’t on Roger Ebert‘s level (i.e., at times he seemed to value snooty judgments more than insight for insight’s sake) but during his peak years Reed was an absolute king of the bitchy-critic realm as well as a famous brand and an occasional movie actor, and I for one quite liked reading his stuff, or most of it. I adored his bluntness. Plus I knew him personally and enjoyed his company as far as it went. He was always friendly.

I’ll admit that the older, going-downhill, white-haired Reed got a little sloppy with his reviews from time to time (factual errors, misspellings, etc.), but I loved that he despised woke critics, and they him. I admired his courage in deriding Jordan Peele‘s Get Out (are you hearing this, Bob Strauss?), knowing full well that the identity fanatics would viciously trash him for this.

Here’s my Movieline assessment of Reed’s legendary Warren Beatty hit piece in Esquire, titled “Will The Real Warren Beatty Please Shut Up?“:

I’ve decided to blow off John Travolta‘s Propeller One-Way Night Coach, which will screen in Cannes later this week. Pic was directed, written and narrated by Travolta, and features a kid protagonist named Jeff, and is seemingly bland in a brightly colored way. Pic only runs 61 minutes, which isn’t quite feature-length (a commercial film has to run at least 70 minutes) but too long for a short.

Based on Travolta’s same-titled children’s book and based on his own eye-opening experience in the late ’50s or early ’60s. (Travolta was born in ’54.) I’ll catch it down the road…no offense.

“Revolucian” created this mix 17 years ago…Terminator Salvation opened on 5.29.09…Barbra Streisand delivers the coup de grace.

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I slept last night on a couch inside my one-night Airbnb (20 rue de Mimont, just behind the Cannes gare). I’m moving into a semi-permanent abode around 3 pm today. The hilltop Le Suquet pad (12 days, 3000 euros, rue des Freres) is right next to a high-speed highway (Voie Rapide) with cars going “waahhh!” 24/7. A short downhill walk from the hellishly noisy apartment exterior is a quiet 19th Century area with charming, old-world restaurants (a Vietnamese place looks especially inviting) with outdoor seating areas.

And yes, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania speaks like a sane, reasonable regular guy, and listening to a U.S Senator who tries to avoid default political cliche phraseology is very refreshing.

Fetterman is not a reflexive Trump hater, but — this is where I stand adamantly alone, if need be — his failure to condemn the proposed White House ballroom as a vulgar, Mussolini-like monstrosity isn’t just uncool — it’s blind. The ballroom reeks of philistine sensibilities…a coarse, tasteless, disproportionate projection of Mar a Lago
boorishness…zero class, culturally coarse.

I love a line from Catherine Slessor’s 10.23.25 Guardian essay, to wit: “Trump’s engoldening of the Oval Office, described by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as a ‘golden office for the golden age’, has been unflatteringly compared to a professional wrestler’s dressing room.”

>p>

I met and chatted with Ghislaine Maxwell roughly 20 years ago (via Celine Rattray), and knew nothing about her save for the fact that her dad was Robert Maxwell. I’d totally forgotten about this photo.

Every single Cannes screening of Kantemir Balagov’s Adventures of a Weird New Jersey Guy With Warlock Eyes and a Bee–Stung Nose (not the actual title…I just made this up in order to sound irreverent) is “FULL.” Except one, that is, so we’ll see what happens.

Hotshot producer-buyer friendo weighs in:

Originally posted on 2.18.11:

15 years ago I posted an idea for a kind of ’80s Brian DePalma flick that wouldn’t necessarily require DePalma’s guidance. I called it The Sex Detective.

We all know voyeurism is “wrong,” but that it’s also a guilty pleasure. Alfred Hitchcock knew that when he made Rear Window. But TSD isn’t about peering into windows. It would be a little more like The Conversation.

It’s about a matchmaker-slash-shamus whom people go to in order to investigate someone that they’ve spotted in some public place and are enormously attracted to, but with whom they haven’t yet had a conversation, or a chance to strike one up even.

80% of the time someone you think you might want to know or possibly date based on looks or mutual interests or associations (or because he/she might be rich) turns out to be crazy or dull or even repulsive beyond measure, but we only find this out, of course, through the step-by-step dating process, which can eat up weeks or months and lead to all kinds of trouble.

The Samuel Spade-like protagonist of Sex Detective has made a niche business out of investigating prospective romantic partners by looking into more than just their career and family backgrounds but also, as much as possible, their emotional and sexual histories.

At the end of the search he/she provides a decent-sized dossier on the prospective “mark” (i.e., whether they’re known to be especially good in bed or not, or whether they’ve revealed themselves to be persons of character and are not just fair-weather friends when push comes to shove), and then the client can decide to pursue the matter or not.

Do friends not pass along precisely this kind of information to each other when they know (or have heard) something about a person their friend is interested in? So what’s wrong with paying for this info?

If and when the client is still interested after reading up on the prospective partner, the Sex Detective then offers Phase 2 of his/her service. He/she helps the interested party participate in some kind of “chance” meeting in which they can chat with the mark in some relaxed and unthreatening atmosphere, and perhaps, if things go well, really talk to the mark and (who knows?) possibly make the next move.

Everyone has experienced odd moments in which they’ve felt suddenly attracted to some super-hot stranger at a supermarket or a Starbucks or a Nordstrom, but they’ve never struck up a conversation because you can’t just go up to somebody and say “excuse me but I’m feeling this profound chemical attraction to you and blah blah blah.” That never works, and it’s always hard to think up the right clever line that might break the ice and lead to a possibly engaging conversation.

So most people just let it go and they never see that person again and that’s that.

So the Sex Detective, entrepeneur that he/she is, helps facilitate this. Anyone can be approached and engaged. You just have to do it in the right way.

The Sex Detective service may sound a little pervy to hair-trigger femmebot wokeys, yes, but it does save time. Ultimately the client and the mark are left to their own devices. Either they click or they don’t. But by looking into prospective partners through our detective in advance, a client can at least eliminate the wackos and the losers plus save mess and stress, and the “mark” is never the wiser.

The story, of course, is about a male client who hires the Sex Detective to investigate a woman he says he doesn’t know. The client, of course, is interested in finding out about her personal background for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to explore a relationship. And then the Sex Detective, of course, develops a thing for the female stranger himself and steps in and takes her side when the male client makes his dastardly move.

There are all kinds of ways to animate this side of the story, but the film would mainly be about exploring what people are really like and/or really want, and how they behave in order to hide themselves or attain their goals or whatever.

Tell me that’s not at least a Sundance movie, or perhaps an HBO series.

Monday. 6.11, 6:55 am: Have you heard the news? Oslo at 6:30 am does not believe in warm (or even warmish) May air. It’s effing cold outside, as it was last year when I stayed in Oslo overnight. Scarves, layers, unexpected shivers. But the cappuccino is excellent here, inside Oslo’s Gardermoen Lufthavn. The place is called Parken.

It’s very calming and comforting to be in a country that’s basically white, white, whiter-than-Wonderbread. Just as Richard Pryor felt ecstatic upon visiting developed African countries in the ‘70s, I’m feeling a similar kind of kinship and fraternity. I am among my own here. I like the atmosphere of mellow restraint…those laid-back Norwegian vibes. No shrieking or loud obnoxious laughter. No dumpy, coarsely-dressed women waddling around like they do at JFK and Newark airports. So many classy-looking, soft-spoken women with ultra-fair skin and white-blonde hair.

Last year’s Cannes Film Festival saw at least three attempts to limit or flat-out block press-ticket access to high-profile screenings — Spike Lee’s Highest to Lowest, Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water.

The idea was to attract the usual Cannes hoopla while restricting possibly mixed or negative press reviews. Online attempts by this accredited pass-holder to reserve press seating were blocked from the get-go.

Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam, a 2026 Directors Fortnight selection, is the first major film to pull this horseshit since Cannes press reservations began to happen a couple of days ago. I tried reserving a press ticket mere seconds after the window of eligibility flew open on Friday morning (5.8 at 9 am Paris time), only to be told the screening was full or blocked…sorry, homey!

Back and forth between HE and Cannes–attending friendo:

HE message to hotshot Russian producer:

I’ll admit that any film starring Barry “bee-stung nose” Keoghan would give me pause, but I certainly wouldn’t watch the film in question with a pissy attitude. I would give it a fair shot.

Catching The Sheep Detectives yesterday afternoon wasn’t my idea — it was a West Orange Sutton detour. It was the first time I’d watched a theatrical film with her. To what extent did this formulaic, family-friendly Agatha Christie thing win Sutton over? She seemed vaguely distracted but not bored or irritated; ditto myself.

Set in a small, bucolic, storybook English village surrounded by hundreds of acres of hilly grass fields, pic focuses on two communities — the provincial, plodding humans and the timid but secretly English-speaking sheep/rams, one of whom is a regular Miss Marple when it comes to suspecting who’s who and what’s what.

Hugh Jackman is advertised as the lead, but his English shepherd character is basically a red herring. He’s dead (poisoned) before you know it, and the rest of the film is about Succession‘s Nicholas Braun, playing a flatfoot constable, trying to deductively identify the murderer, Hercule Poirot-style.

The sharp-eyed, English-speaking woolies, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart and the loathsome Bella Ramsey, are…well, more soulful and vulnerably human than the humans.

The four-leggers believe that when you die you transform into a big white cloud….a nice idea that isn’t much different than the human notion about growing a pair of white angel wings after your heart ceases to beat. (Will Donald Trump grow a pair when his time comes? Or will a team of brown, growling gremlins surround his ass and take him straight to the molten caverns of hell?)

I personally related to a small “winter lamb”, shunned by the herd because he/she was born during the cold months and not during the politically correct spring season. Before I got going as a movie journalist in the ’80s I was the very essence of a winter lamb. and even today my basic attitude about the spring herd is “you can all go fug yahselves.” I don’t mean every last ewe and ram — I’m cool with the ones who are extra-perceptive or are otherwise possessed by decency and/or compassion.