Day: May 10, 2015

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.

Homeless guy on the rue de Rivoli earlier this evening.

The right sleeve of the too-friendly Middle-Eastern guy can be seen on the left.

SNCF train ticket to Cannes. Leaving at 7:19 am on Tuesday morning from Gare de Lyon.

Read more

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.

Emmmanuelle Bercot, Vincent Cassel in Maiwenn’s Mon Roi.

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.