Month: May 2015

Exactly 15 days ago (May 6th) the producers behind the much-written-about effort to assemble a final, completed version of Orson Welles‘ never-finished The Other Side of The Wind launched an Indiegogo campaign. Their goal, they said, was to raise $2 million by sometime in June. That figure struck some as a bit rich (an experienced restoration guy shared this view about ten days ago, ditto a noted filmmaker during an early morning breakfast yesterday) but no one knows all the particulars as well as principal organizer Filip Jan Rymsza. As of right now the campaign has gotten donations from nearly 2000 people and raised $212,098, or a little more than $100K per week or $100 per person. If this rate is sustained (and I’m not presuming it’ll continue at this pace but rather lose steam as the days and weeks pass) the fund will have raised a little more than $600K as of June 18th, or less than a third of what it needs.

This suggests that a lot of people who could have contributed haven’t so far. I donated $100 on 5.7, and I guess I’m wondering how many others in my realm have done the same. Starting tomorrow I’m going to write colleagues and ask around. Who would turn down Orson Welles? Would they do the same if Welles was still with us at age 100 and holding out a tin cup on a sidewalk? You might be surprised. A situation like this offers an opportunity to access just how serious cinema devotees are about their convictions.

Read more

The general consensus among Cannes-attending journos I’ve spoken to recently is that the 68th Cannes Film Festival is among the most anemic in recent memory. Son of Saul, Carol and Amy, Son of Saul, Carol and Amy, Son of Saul, Carol and Amy…that’s all you’ll hear when you ask anyone about the highlights. For some reason I haven’t heard anyone mention Pete Docter‘s Inside Out, although that’s certainly been among the “best” films shown here, at the very least on a craft level. Otherwise the festival selections have been a series of planes trying to lift into the clouds but, like Harrison Ford‘s recent experience with a vintage plane at Santa Monica Airport, afflicted with sputtering-engine syndrome and either crash landing or having to put her down on a nearby golf course.

Over the last nine days beginning on Wednesday, 5.13 (tomorrow is my last full day here), I’ve been listening to moaning and occasional tap-dancing from literally dozens of festivalgoers about Matteo Garrone‘s Tale of Tales, Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Lobster, Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man, Nathalie Portman‘s A Tale of Love and Darkness (which I didn’t even see after hearing I didn’t need to bother), Gus Van Sant‘s The Sea of Trees, Nanni Moretti‘s Mia Madre, Maiwenn‘s Mon Roi, Joachim Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs, Brilliante Mondoza‘s Taklub (which I saw but didn’t feel motivated to write anything about), Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth, Hao Hsiao-Hsien‘s The Assassin (which I’m expecting to more or less suffer through tomorrow), Jacques Audiard‘s Dheepan…almost everything shown here has been received as meh-level, problematic, mildly disappointing, respectable but not earthshaking, etc.

Read more

Gaspar Noe‘s 3D Love screened this morning at 11 am in the Salle Bazin. I was right there in the last row with my orange-framed 3D glasses. I liked that they passed out little antiseptic wipe packets with the glasses, which they never do in the States. In order to make sure of a seat I had to stand at the back of the Grand Lumiere during the final minutes of Jacques Audiard‘s respectable but somewhat minor Dheepan and rush up to the Bazin…push, huddle, trudge.

Are you noticing anything different about this review? Mainly that after four sentences I’m tiddly-winking around and not saying anything about how good, bad, reasonably decent or mezzo-mezzo Love is? Not because it’s a bad or dull or unworthy film, but because I can’t seem to summon any strong feelings about it.

Okay, I found the sex scenes mildly appealing. Before this morning I had never seen graphic sex depicted in 3D, and I have to say that while I didn’t feel blown away by the unusualness of the footage I wasn’t entirely unaffected. I was sitting there going “Yeah, okay…this isn’t half bad as far as the 3D aspect is concerned. Visually distinctive, striking, arresting. Nice bods, nicely lighted, no grotesque aspects.” But it didn’t seem like quite enough to justify watching Love for two hours plus.

I was mildly interested (certainly during the first half-hour or so) but I never felt riveted.

Read more

The 12:15 am screening of Gaspar Noe‘s Love broke about five hours ago, or roughly 2:35 am. I’m not about to disregard Guy Lodge’s reaction. Then again Variety’s Peter Debruge admires Noe for the emotional exposure aspects. The PLaylist‘s Jessica Klang calls it “hardcore” but “soft-hearted,” and says “there are no winners in the game of defending Love because there are many, many, many things wrong with it, any one of which would be cause enough to reject the film outright. It is snoozingly overlong and almost comically self indulgent…but a softer Noe (not a hard-on pun, I promise) does not necessarily have to be a bad thing.” Update: My 11 am Salle Bazin screening is about to begin.

Today’s plan to see Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland at Cannes’ Olympia plex was scotched when I realized only dubbed-in-French versions are being shown. Hollywood Elsewhere will not post a review concurrent with tomorrow’s U.S. opening. My only option is that a version originale version of Zeme Zitrka will be playing at Prague’s Cinema City plex, which I could see Saturday night or Sunday. Pic is currently 59% on Rotten Tomatoes and 62% on Metacritic. Those numbers will probably drop by tomorrow afternoon.

Earlier today Brigade’s Adam Kersh invited me to a gathering for Krisha director-writer Trey Edward Shults and his two, family related costars, Krisha Fairchild and Robyn Fairchild, at Nolan’s Irish Pub (6 rue Buttura, Cannes). Nothing snooty, pretentious or aggressively French about this place — LexG could walk right in and comfortably order 13 or 14 beers and feel right at home. Variety‘s Justin Chang posted the following from SXSW on 3.19.15: “An especially fraught Thanksgiving holiday brings a woman’s troubled, booze-soaked history into blistering yet compassionate focus in Krisha, an intimate and unnerving character study that marks a ferociously impressive feature debut for 26-year-old multihyphenate Trey Edward Shults. The winner of the grand jury award for narrative features at SXSW, [pic] reveals an elusive, formally sophisticated storytelling approach that neatly sidesteps the usual addiction/dysfunction cliches, its stylistic experimentation anchored by a subtly wounding performance from Krisha Fairchild in the eponymous lead role.” On 5.18 it was reported that A24 has acquired Krisha plus Schults’ next — a horror flick.

Krisha costars Krisha Fairchild, Robyn Fairchild at Nolan’s — Thursday, 5.21, 9:35 pm.

Krisha director-writer Trey Edward Shults and significant other.

Read more

Less than two months after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival (i.e., last Saturday), A24 will open Asif Kapadia‘s Amy, a highly praised chronicle of the British singer’s 27 years of triumph and struggle, in New York and Los Angeles on 7.3 and then nationwide on 7.10. “Watching Amy, part of me is convinced she just wasn’t made for this world. She lived the way she did, much of the time miserable, but also reaching creative peaks most of us could never imagine. Were alcohol and bulimia necessary components to make that happen? It’s not a very uplifting conclusion to make, but a movie like this may give you second thoughts about enjoying the work of a troubled performer without at least saying thanks.” — Vanity Fair‘s Jordan Hoffman, posted on 5.18.

The bold thing would be to attend tonight’s 12:15 am screening of Gaspar Noe‘s Love, which is apparently porny and cummy in a serious, artistically defensible sort of way. All the festival nuts will be there and at least I’ll have it out of the way when it’s over, but I don’t know how good I feel about stumbling home at 2:30 am and getting maybe four hours of sleep, if that. But I might do it anyway. I haven’t been to a midnight screening in a long time. If I start to feel like it’s not quite worth losing sleep over I’ll just bolt and catch it at a more reasonable hour tomorrow, and nothing will have been lost. Update: Forget it — watching Love tomorrow morning in the Salle Bazin at 11 am. Tonight I saw a 10:30 pm market screening of Denis Gamze Erguven‘s Mustang, which I didn’t find arresting, in part due to the Turkish soundtrack with French subtitles.

I know I have to see Hou Hsiao-Hsien‘s The Assassin during my stay in Cannes, but I just couldn’t make myself catch this evening’s 7 pm showing. I told myself it was because I’d napped for two hours and woken up slowly and took my time writing my Youth review, and because I wanted to finish it properly before running out at 6:30 pm, and that was true to a large extent. But if I didn’t have that excuse I’d have made up another. My loathing for Asian martial arts cinema led me years ago to pledge to never again submit, but I’ve been goaded by some in the HE community into manning up and seeing this thing and so I will reluctantly do so. But it feels so good right now to have ducked out, like playing hookey from school when I was 12 or 13. I’ll catch The Assassin at Friday afternoon’s Salle du Soixantieme screening. Update: The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw attended this evening and is basically calling it masterfully composed but an elusive firefly that’s a bit hard to follow.

Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth is a visually poetic, beautifully captured, symphony-like film, which is what Sorrentino does, of course. This has been his signature style in The Great Beauty and Il Divo (let’s ignore This Must Be The Place for now) and here’s the same tray of gourmet delights — deliciously photographed, serenely scored, composition for composition’s sake, drop-dead delectable, etc. And at the same time Youth is rather languid and swoony and a touch melancholy from time to time, and dryly amusing whenever Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel chew the fart fat while walking in the hills or sitting in a hot tub or sipping tea. But this is mostly a film that celebrates (advertises?) Sorrentino’s gifts as a visual composer.

And I’ll tell you something. After a while I wanted a respite from all the beautiful framing and the luscious, perfectly lighted Swiss scenery. I wanted Caine and Keitel to take a train to Bern or Zurich on some pretext and hit a topless bar or something, if only for a few minutes respite from Sorrentino Land, which — don’t get me wrong — is a fine, rapturous place to be but which can feel, after a time, a bit narcotizing. You could even say that it offers a kind of confinement. It’s not that I don’t value it. I’m not an idiot. I’ve been savoring fine cinematography, editing and production design all my life, and I know what goes.

The story, wholly subordinate to the visual scheme, is about a couple of well-heeled old pals — a retired composer and conductor (Caine) and a hard-working 70something film director (Keitel) — hanging at a Swiss spa (near Davos) and acridly contemplating the indignities of age and the slow ebbing of vitality and diminishment of their lives yaddah yaddah, and to some extent the lives of their children. With some attention paid to Caine’s daughter-assistant (Rachel Weisz) and a young American actor (Paul Dano) famous for playing a super robot but who’s now preparing for a new role, and to Keitel’s longtime creative collaborator (Jane Fonda) who’s expected to star in his latest but drops by the spa to deliver some bad news.

Read more

Variety‘s James Rainey has posted a piece about Cameron Crowe‘s Aloha (Sony, 5.29), otherwise known around these parts as Son of Deep Tiki. Rainey wasn’t given much to work with. He tried to arrange a conversation with Crowe, but the director-writer declined. Rainey asked Sony publicists to let him see Aloha to prepare the piece, and they declined. Rainey quotes that infamous leaked email criticism of Aloha by ex-Sony chief Amy Pascal, in which she said “it never, not even once, ever works.” Rainey tried to get Sony execs to talk about the relationship dramedy on the record, but they agreed only to speak as anonymous sources.

Rainey also notes that Sony has assembled only one trailer for the film — never a good sign. And yet one nameless person emphasizes that the version of Aloha that Pascal was talking about last fall has since been tightened and improved. It “probably” won’t do the business of Crowe’s Say Anything or Jerry Maguire, a source admits, “but is it a really entertaining movie for an audience? Yes, it is.”

Read more