Month: May 2015

Yesterday morning in Paris I attended a screening of Kent Jones‘ edifying Hitchcock/Truffaut, which Jones directed and co-wrote with Cinematheque Francaise director Serge Toubiana. Slated to show on 5.19 at the Cannes Film Festivals, the 80-something-minute doc is a sublime turn-on — a deft educational primer about the work and life of Alfred Hitchcock and, not equally but appreciably, Francois Truffaut. Efficient, well-ordered, devotional.

No, it didn’t tell me anything about Hitchcock or his many films or Truffaut’s renowned “Hitchcock/Truffaut” book (a feature-length q & a interspersed with frame captures from Hitch’s films) that I didn’t already know, but that’s okay — almost every detail of the book’s material was absorbed into my system decades ago. 

The bounce, if you will, comes from the talking heads — David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Olivier Assayas, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, James Gray, Arnaud Depleschin, one or two others — each enthused and semi-aglow in their own way. Memories, associations, gratitude.

To me Hitchcock/Truffaut seems good and wise enough to seduce the novice as well as the sophisticated cineaste. It’s a fully absorbing, excellent education. As you might expect, it made me want to read the book all over again.

It contains many snippets of interview audio between the two men. My favorite Hitch quotes: (a) “Logic is dull” and (b) “Plausibility was not allowed to rear its ugly head.”

I sat up in my seat when Jones revealed a brief glance at contact sheet images of Hitch shooting the Phoenix hotel room scene (Janet Leigh, John Gavin) in Psycho — images I’d never seen before. I asked Jones if I could somehow post a few of them but he wasn’t encouraging. Apparently they’re under some kind of copyright lock and key.  Which of course is nonsensical at this stage.

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Imagine attending the Cannes Film Festival for the first time. Going with your pores wide open, determined to see anything of potential value you can possibly fit into your schedule. Leaving for the airport now, planning to land at Nice airport tomorrow afternoon. With nothing better to do you decide to re-review the list of official selections, and you start thinking a little harder about the latest from oddball Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos — The Lobster. Some kind of parable about singlehood, conformity and totalitarianism, pic is about a society in which being single is illegal. Singles are routinely arrested and sent to “The Hotel”, where they have 45 days to pair up with someone. If they fail, they’re transformed into an animal of their choosing and released into “The Woods.” Now, does this sound like something an impetuous, none-too-bright drunk would think up around 2:30 am? What are the odds Lanthimos was going through a romantic dry spell when he wrote the script? And who, to get back to the premise, could possibly fail to find a mate under these circumstances? Obviously singles would find someone on at least a pretend basis, if for no other reason than to avoid being turned into a four-legged beast of some kind. I found a place in my head for Dogtooth and I know Lanthimos is a kind of late-Bunuelian, crazy-salad type of guy but The Lobster just sounds whimsical and undeveloped. Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C, Reilly, Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw and Lea Seydoux. What, honestly, would your reaction be to this thing as your France-bound flight taxis onto the runaway?

I decided against seeing Alan Rickman‘s A Little Chaos, a 17th Century landscaping romance dramedy, at last September’s Toronto Film Festival because it was chosen as the closing night attraction — always an “uh-oh” indicator. Focus Features initially slated a theatrical opening on 3.27.15, but then they bailed on that plan on 1.29.15. Rickman’s film, which costars Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts, is now set for a simultaneous theatrical-and-VOD release on 6.25.15. I’m mentioning this because it’s playing in Paris right now (Le Jardin de Roi), and I was asking myself earlier today “why not see it?” The answer is (a) I’m as enthusiastic about this film as Focus is, (b) I don’t go out of my way to see movies with a 59% Rotten Tomato rating and an even shittier rating on Metacritic, and (c) I have to write and pack tonight. It’s 9 pm now and I have to crash no later than 11 pm to get up at 5 am to catch the 7:19 am train to Cannes.

Kate Winslet and Matthias Scheonarts portray landscape architects working for King Louis XIV.

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.

Mad Max: Fury Road poster on rue de Rivoli — Sunday, 5.10, 10:15 pm.

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?”

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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.

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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.

“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.