Month: May 2014

I chuckled several times during Saturday night’s sold-out public premiere of Gareth Edwards‘ Godzilla (Warner Bros., 5.16) at Le Grand Rex in Paris. And three or four times I laughed out loud, which is saying something considering that my legs were aching due to the cramped balcony seating. For me, chuckling and laughing at a monster film is a thumbs-up reaction. It means I’m having a fairly good time, which Godzilla definitely provided until the finale. Overall it left me feeling cranked up and a bit surprised in a “wait…what?” sense of the term and yet taken care of for the most part. It’s not a great monster film but a very good one, I feel. Or at least until the end. It’s a hell of a lot better that the 1998 Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin version, I can tell you that.

The best blow-your-socks-off sequence, I feel, comes around the middle — a monster- attack-on-Honolulu sequence that includes a big tsunami crashing and racing through the streets and wreaking all kind of non-consequential, eye-popping destruction — ten if not twenty times what this city suffered through when Michael Bay staged his Japanese aerial attack in Pearl Harbor (’00). The swelling wave effects are pretty damned persuasive, I must say. In fact nearly every damned visual effect seems at least above average. On a purely technical level Godzilla is one hell of a ride.

And I loved, loved, loved seeing Las Vegas get levelled all to hell. Like the original 1954 version that started the franchise, Edwards’ Godzilla is supposed to be a metaphor about nature’s wrath pushing back against man’s industrial arrogance and technological excess. It therefore seemed fitting if not delightful that the “worst money-grubbing place in the world” (which I’ve never had any love for, unlike Ben Affleck and a million other guys who actually worship the place) should be one of the cities to pay the price. I laughed and almost cheered when I realized what was happening to this overdeveloped shithole. Eat it, Steve Wynn! Maybe you’ve been crushed to death under the rubble of your own hotel. Just desserts, asshole!

And I liked the fact Edwards tones Godzilla down for most of its running time. Over and over he uses suggestion — visual and aural hints and implications — instead of blatant show-and-tells. He deserves admiration for delaying Godzilla’s first big MCU roar until the two-thirds mark and also holding back on the trademark fire-breathing until the big super-finale, in which San Francisco gets it but good.

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The following image is from a comment thread below a David Poland riff about an economical solution to cell phone usage during the Cannes Film Festival. Hey, David…why not ease up and drop by the La Pizza gathering on Tuesday night? Life is short. We don’t have to sit next to each other or chat too much. Relax and enjoy.

This appears to be more or less a re-heating and re-shuffling of Sam Raimi‘s A Simple Plan. That Scott Rudin-produced Paramount release is now 15 and 1/2 years old, but it seems better and better the more I think back upon it. Scott Smith‘s screenplay was based on his novel of the same name. Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton and Bridget Fonda were never better. Thornton snagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominated, and Smith was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.

This is obviously…okay, seemingly of a very high order. Maybe. If your idea of “a very high order” is a mixture of Runaway Train, the “political exiles on a long ride to the Urals in a cattle car” sequence from Dr. Zhivago (which incidentally contains my beloved “I am the only free man on this train!” scene with Klaus Kinski) and the “realistic” CG panache of Robert Zemeckis‘s Polar Express. I’m also figuring you can’t go wrong with Tilda Swinton in a scenery-chewing mode

I don’t know what crawled up the ass of the Parisian Weather Gods but the air was like mid-November when I stepped out of Charles DeGaulle airport this morning around 8:30 am. Not to mention the gusty breezes…how much would it cost to buy a winter overcoat? Not to mention the misty moisture that wasn’t quite rain but was close enough. Not cool, not welcome. Where the hell is global warming when you really need it? Took the good old Roissy bus into town. My Airb&b sublet in the 17th wouldn’t be ready until 1 pm so my landlady let me drop my bags off at her place. Enjoyed a nice omelette and two cafe noirs at a Montmartre cafe but the wifi (boldly promoted on a sign outside this humble establishment) was on the fritz. It wasn’t exactly cost-efficient to buy a scarf but I was chilly and uncomfortable so I got one. The sublet is in a downmarket area of the 17th (near the La Fourche metro stop) but it’s not too bad. The place itself is terrific — quaint, cozy, homey. The Godzilla screening at the Rex starts in a couple of hours. I guess I’ll just come back here to write the review.

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I’m telling you right now that between the nihilistic muttering and his occasionally challenging if not indecipherable strine accent I’m not going to understand half of what Guy Pearce is saying in David Michod‘s The Rover. I’m telling you this right now. During the Cannes screening I’m going to be cupping my ears, leaning forward in my seat…the whole schpiel.

A Vanity Fair Film Snob video piece about the faithful-custodian theology of Roger Corman, Samuel Arkoff and American International Pictures. “A.I.P.: commonly used abbreviation for American International Pictures, a crank-’em-out production company founded in 1954 that has since come to be revered by Film Snobs as a font of important kitsch.” One could argue that the foundation of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez‘s 21st Century careers have been about tributes to AIP exploitation fare.

It’s now 11:45 am. I have to leave for JFK at 3 pm or thereabouts. The Delta flight to Paris leaves at 6:02 pm, arrives at 6:46 am Saturday morning.

Union Square — Thursday, 5.8, 2:10 pm.

The cold-water knob in the shower where I’m staying is infuriating — just a slight turn to the right and the water is scalding, and a slight twist to the left turns the water cool-ish. Finding a happy in-between is a struggle.

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Today’s distinctive openers are Jon Favreau‘s Chef, Nicholas Stoller‘s Neighbors and Gia Coppola‘s Palo Alto. Favreau’s film is a feel-good concoction, but it’s far and away the most engaging of the three — the liveliest, best-written and most personable. On top of which the food is constantly sensual if not erotic. Yes, the under-subject (leaving aside the road-to-redemption arc of Favreau’s lead character) is social-media humiliation and promotion — an aspect that works as far as it goes (even if it the ease and speed of the film’s up-and-down cyber scenarios seem a little too facile). But it never delivers an uncomfortable moment. In a left-field sort of way Chef reminded me of Fred Zinneman‘s The Sundowners (’60) in that it charmingly ambles along without a lot of difficulty — nothing all that traumatic or devastating happens to anyone, and after a while you start to enjoy this sense of comfort.

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Vertice Cine has issued an all-region Bluray of John Huston‘s Moulin Rouge (’52). Which is necessary viewing, I feel, for the subdued, somewhat hazy, rosey-toned color scheme created by Huston and dp Oswald Morris, who passed a few weeks ago. From the Wiki page: “Huston asked Morris to render the color scheme of the film to look ‘as if Toulouse-Lautrec had directed it’…Moulin Rouge was shot in three-strip Technicolor, [but] Huston asked Technicolor for a subdued palette, rather than the sometimes gaudy colors that ‘glorious Technicolor’ was famous for. Technicolor was reportedly reluctant to do this.” Moulin Rouge received seven Academy Award nominations and won two (art direction, costume design), and yet Morris’ cinematography was bypassed.

The Hitfix Cannes guys (Gregory Ellwood, Guy Lodge, Drew McWeeny…wait, Ellwood is attending this year?) have listed and summarized 12 films that are on almost every high-priority list of every Cannes-attending journo-schmourno: Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (the top of my list), Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep (a close second), Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Homesman, David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, David Michod‘s The Rover, Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army (co-lensed by HE pally Svetlana Cvetko), Olivier Assayas‘ Clouds of Sils Maria (mopey movie-industry women hanging out in a small Swiss town), Jean-Luc Godard‘s Adieu Au Langage (who outside of Godard-ophiles would be even half-interested in this if not for the 3D photography?), Ryan Gosling‘s “experimental” (read: probably somewhat dicey) Lost River, Asia Argento Incompresa (not on my list, pally) and Atom Egoyan‘s The Captive (nope). And yet they’ve left off Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Search, which could turn out to be one of the more distinctive and penetrating dramas of the lot. (Lodge ran a separate piece about it, but including Incompresa or The Captive at the expense of The Search seems…well, perverse.) And they totally overlooked Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York. The festival (which kicks off five days hence, or four days if you count the annual La Pizza gathering as the kickoff event) still seems to me like the most underwhelming, Cote d’Azur-centric, self-regarding, not-necessarily-trailblazing-in-a-commercial-or-awards-context roster in a long, long time.

Ferenice Bejo, Maksim Emelyanov in Michel Hazanavicius’s The Search.

From Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman.

Earlier today entertainment reporter, stand-up comedian and advertising exec Bill McCuddy persuaded me to visit Bergdorf Goodman and buy a nice tube of Supersmile toothpaste ($25), which is supposed to be a good whitener. I also popped for a Supersmile toothbrush ($15). I then walked over to the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store just to mosey around. I saw an attractive scarf and asked a salesman for the price. In a normal store a really cool scarf would cost $75 so I figured the BG price would be $225. The salesman looked at the tag, looked me in the eye and told me the price: $725.