Until this morning I had somehow overlooked the fact that Michael Mann‘s Thief is called Le Solitaire over here. It hit me in a flash that this is a better title. Think about it for ten seconds. It’s not the thievery that defines James Caan‘s Frank as much as the apartness, the “I don’t join”-itude.
Rave-gush reviews of Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros., 5.15) popped early this morning from five trade critics — The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy, Variety‘s Justin Chang, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde and Hitfix‘s Drew McWeeny. The basic consensus is that George Miller‘s imaginative, single-minded ingenuity and relentlessness has resulted in a crafty, gold-standard action thriller. Get it, crank it, lap it up.
Will the wait-and-see schmoes turn Fury Road into the megahit it deserves to be? Maybe but who knows? The audience that swooned over Furious 7 and Avengers: Age of Ultron can be curiously averse to quality. They like what they like, want what they want and don’t wanna know from ivory-tower elites. They’re also just small enough in the cranium to say to themselves, “Hmmm, James Wan…crazy dude, one of us, gets the 2015 thing, likes to use close-ups of girls’ asses…but who the hell is this 70 year-old director named George Miller?”
Observation: Why do bums…sorry, why do gentlemen of character and consequence who are temporarily homeless always seem to sleep right in front of posh uptown establishments where there’s always a lot of heavy light and foot traffic? If I was a bum I’d sleep in a nice dark park under a bench or a tree. Anecdote: There was a slight incident that followed the taking of the Charles de Gaulle Etoile metro shot. A 30ish Middle-Eastern guy with a gray check flannel shirt (you can only see his right arm) wanted to know if I’d captured his face in the photo. Was he alarmed in roughly the same way that Anthony Quinn‘s Auda Abu Tayi became alarmed when Arthur Kennedy took his picture in Lawrence of Arabia? I never asked but I quickly proved he wasn’t in the shot by showing him the evidence on my iPhone screen. Then he and his friend wanted to talk — “Where you from? You American?” — and they kept up the chatter as the Nation train arrived, asking me about Los Angeles and blah-blah with one of them saying he liked my shoes and my jacket. A split second after the friend admiringly caressed my left jacket sleeve I flinched and snapped “the fuck away from me!” I only knew they were getting too close too quickly. The guy recoiled and told me to go fuck off…fine. An innocent misunderstanding? Possibly but nobody caresses my sleeve in a metro station.
Elizabeth Wilson has passed at age 94. You may be drawing a temporary blank, but if you’ve seen The Graduate (’67) you know Wilson quite well. Her performance as the well-coiffed, upper-middle-class mom of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) was limited to four or five scenes at most, but it boiled down to two — the steamy bathroom scene when she asks Hoffman where he’s been going every night until all hours, and the kitchen scene when she lets go with that bloodcurdling howl when her husband (William Daniels) breaks the news that Benjamin and Elaine Robinson are getting married. That was Wilson’s resonant, super-historical moment. David Belcher’s N.Y. Times obit asserts that Wilson’s “best-known film performance, and certainly her most substantial, was…as Roz, the memorably untrustworthy office snitch and the nemesis of the downtrodden workers played by Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, in the 1980 hit 9 to 5.” I don’t even remember Wilson in that part, but her kitchen scream will echo in my consciousness for the rest of my life.
The acting chops alone from Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Paul Dano, Rachel Weisz and Jane Fonda should make Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth, screening in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, worth the sit. Plus Sorrentino (The Great Beauty, Il Divo) is a formidable visual stylist and conceptualist. I don’t think Beauty (a.k.a., La Grande Bellezza), a 21st Century La Dolce Vita, came anywhere close to the level of the stunning Leviathan, but whatever. Let sleeping dogs lie.
While I continue to suspect that Emmanuelle Bercot‘s La Tête haute (Standing Tall), the Cannes Film Festival’s out-of-competition opener, might be a marginal letdown, the word is stronger, I’m told, about Maiwenn‘s Mon Roi (My King), a saga of a destructive love affair costarring Bercot and Vincent Cassel. Maiwenn, 39, became a featured teenaged actress in the early ’80s. She had a daughter in ’93 at age 16 with director Luc Besson, whom she married, lived with in Beverly Hills and later on divorced. (Besson had cast her in minor roles in The Professional and The Fifth Element.) She also had a son with her second ex-husband, Jean-Yves Le Fur. Maybe she knows something about destructive relationships with overbearing men. I know that I saw and respected her 2011 film, Polisse, so perhaps there’s a little something to the buzz.
Yesterday L.A. Weekly critic Amy Nicholson joined Westword‘s Stephanie Zacharek in offering friendly words of praise for the generally reviled Hot Pursuit, which currently has a 6% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a somewhat more forgiving 30% at Metacritic. I’m figuring Zacharek and Nicholson were guided by the same liberal compassion instinct that led Henry Fonda to vote not guilty for that Puerto Rican kid in Twelve Angry Men. Fonda: “Look, this boy’s been kicked around all his life. He’s had a pretty terrible sixteen years. I think maybe we owe him a few words, is all.” Zacharek/Nicholson: “Look, women filmmakers have it tough enough in the industry without the two of us dumping on a comedy directed by a woman and produced by and starring women. We think they at least deserve a pat on the back for getting it made and doing it with spirit…y’know? At the end of the day women in the industry, including critics, need to stand together. Or should, at least, if there’s any way to respectably do that.” Then again this may be a case of perverse taste buds as Zacharek/Nicholson also loved A Million Ways To Die in the West.
Yesterday TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider dazzled…well, enthralled his Periscope followers (and those Twitter followers who were sufficiently intrigued) as he rode the Astro Orbiter at Disneyland. Sneider was visiting the Magic Kingdom as part of a Tomorrowland press junket activity. I, meanwhile, took some GoPro video as I scootered around Paris. It would have been cooler to do it live on Periscope, granted, but that’s for another time. I’m not saying my footage is all that interesting. It might be, I suppose, to those who know Paris or who’ve never been here. But that’s probably a stretch. Sorry for the jarring whip-pans.
“We also spent a huge amount of time on spatial awareness, making sure the viewer could follow the action and understand what was happening. There has to be a strong causal connection from one shot to the next, just the same way that in music there [also] has to be a connection from one note to the next. Otherwise it’s just noise.
“Too often, if you just cram a lot of stuff into the frame, [you’ll] get the illusion of a fast pace. But there’s no coherence. It doesn’t flow. It comes off as headbanging music, and it can be exhausting. [Wells to Miller: Press Play‘s Matthias Stork explained this tendency four years ago in a two-part video essay called “Chaos Editing.”]
“We storyboarded the movie before we had a script: We had 3,500 boards, which helps the cast and crew understand how everything is going to fit together. Movies are getting faster and faster. The Road Warrior had 1,200 cuts. This one has 2,700 cuts. You have to treat it like a symphony. Hopefully audiences will appreciate that.” — Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller to Miami Herald‘s Rene Rodriguez in a 5.8.15 interview piece that includes a near-review.
Three days and a wakeup at 14 rue Constance, south of rue d’Abesses, etc.
I’ve just been invited to a couple of Los Angeles screenings of Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland. I wrote back and asked if there’s a press screening in Paris on Monday, which is my last full day here before the Tuesday morning train for Cannes. If not I’ll have to either (a) catch a market showing in Cannes or (b) pay to see it at the Olympia on Wednesday, 5.20 — opening day in France, two days before the U.S. release. I’m sensing possible concerns with this thing. But maybe not.
The general consensus is that Mad Max: Fury Road (Warner Bros. 5.15) will earn $40 million or so during the first weekend. When I read this my first thought was “that’s all?” George Miller‘s $150 million apocalyptic actioner is generating heat through advance word-of-mouth, knockout trailers and high-impact ads, and I was figuring that even the slow boats would be primed by now. But not yet apparently. The last entry in the franchise (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome) opened 30 years ago, and sometimes the impulse crowd needs a little time to warm up.
Yesterday I hashed things out with Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino, who concurs with the $40 million-or-slightly-better projection. Right now Fury Road is a bit of “a wild card” in the public mind, he said, but “we’ll learn a lot more once they get a load of it. It could break out like crazy if the word of mouth is as good as what I’m hearing from critics. Nobody is not enthusiastic, but right now people are doing a ‘what’s this?’ and thinking it over. With reboots there’s always the challenge of putting your toe back in the water.
“You have to remember that even Chris Nolan‘s Batman Begins (’05) started modestly. The first weekend brought in only $48 million, which was surprisingly low for a Batman movie. And yet it went on to make $206 million and change. People occasionally need time to figure out that a film is awesome.”