Month: May 2016

My God, this is banal, videogame-derived, flying-combatant paycheck crap! Directed by Justin Kurzel, who last year redefined Macbeth as a Games of Thrones thing, covered in grime and gunk. Costarring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Michael K. Williams, Jeremy Irons and Brendan Gleeson. Assurance: “Set in the same universe as the video games and featuring an original story that expands the series’ mythology”…what a relief!

The words that best describe Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only The End of The World, which I just saw, are “infuriating” and “arrogant.” It’s safe to call it the worst film of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival thus far.

The 97-minute parlor drama is about a successful 34 year-old writer named Louis (Gaspar Ulliel) who announces at the very beginning through voice-over narration that he’s dying and is on his way home to tell his family, whom he’s avoided seeing for 12 years. Except when he gets there he can’t bring himself to break the news, and in fact is unable to say much of anything. He can’t even throw out bon mots or witty conversation. Nothing.

Louis is either wimping out or so full of loathing for this suburban brood (played by Nathalie Baye, Marion Cotillard, Lea Seydoux and Vincent Cassel) that the words just won’t come.

And so we, the audience, are trapped in hell as he stares at his mother (Baye), brother (Cassel), sister (Cotillard) and sister-in-law (Seydoux) and listens to them rant about their anger and frustrations and sense of entrapment. And then he stares a bit more and listens a bit more and sweats and continues to stare, his eyes all glistening from the feeling. And then he throws up out of sickness (or possibly from anxiety) when he’s alone in the bathroom.

In short Louis seems to be trying to divulge his situation but lacks the courage or conviction. He’s so consumed by the enormity of what he needs to say that he can’t say it.

Read more

I was momentarily disappointed with something Personal Shopper director Olivier Assayas said yesterday during yesterday afternoon’s press conference. Shopper seriously entertains the possibility that Stewart’s character, Maureen, is being visited by the ghost of her dead brother, Lewis. All kinds of apparitions (visually based upon old photographs of ghosts taken in the early 20th and late 19th Century) appear, and a texting sequence that occupies a good portion of Act Two was, for me, a huge turn-on.  (A texting ghost!).  And then party-pooper Assayas said that every spooky thing in the film was rooted in common reality. I don’t want ghost stories to be too creepy and ectoplasmic or too rooted in the realm we all know — I like them to float in between. Nobody wants to hear that strange phenomena has had nothing to do with the inexplicable or undefinable. Imagine if Robert Wise had told the press in ’63 that Hill House wasn’t really haunted and that Julie Harris‘s character was just unstable and delusional.

This is a day late and a dollar short but prior to yesterday afternoon’s Cannes screening of Kleber Mendonca Filho‘s Aquarius, the cast (including star Sonia Braga) held up signs stating that currently suspended Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been ousted from office by a coup d’etat. Last Thursday Brazil’s Senate voted to impeach Rousseff, a leftist populist, for breaking budget laws. Rousseff has said in so many words that she’s the victim of a coup, and if you research this a bit it’s apparent she’s speaking the truth.

Noam Chomsky as quoted by Democracy Now: “As even The New York Times pointed out, Dilma Rousseff is maybe the one leading [Brazilian] politician who hasn’t stolen in order to benefit herself. She’s being charged with manipulations in the budget, which are pretty standard in many countries, taking from one pocket and putting it into another. Maybe it’s a misdeed of some kind, but certainly doesn’t justify impeachment. In fact, we have the one leading politician who hasn’t stolen to enrich herself, who’s being impeached by a gang of thieves, who have done so. That does count as a kind of soft coup. I think that’s correct.”

Whatever the story or thematic import, it was nearly a foregone conclusion that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ The Unknown Girl would be a moral tale that would (a) underwhelm, (b) radiate integrity and (c) be almost entirely composed of medium shots of people talking. Plain-spoken, unforced, refined, unpretentious. The Dardennes are nothing if not consistent.

And if you’re smart, you’ll just sit there and take it. You have to slurp the soup and at least respect the ingredients. During this festival, I mean. As I wrote two years ago, the only negative thing Cannes critics are allowed to say about a Dardennes film is that it’s “minor.”

That’s certainly a fair description of The Unknown Girl, which screened in Cannes this morning. Another is CSI: Liege. Set in that allegedly dull** Belgian city, it’s about a young doctor named Jenny (Adèle Haenel) who feels besieged with guilt after ignoring an after-hours attempt by a young African girl to gain entry to her clinic. The girl is found dead the next morning, an apparent murder victim.

The film is about Jenny doing her best to investigate what happened. She is nothing if not gently persistent, and the matter is finally resolved at the end. But before it does the viewer is stuck with the unfolding, the process. Oh, the Liege of it all! That’s a cynical thing to think, much less express. But I was bored.

Read more

“The thing about Hillary is the fact [that] she never went away. Everyone who ever runs for president goes away. Richard Nixon went away. Mitt Romney didn’t appear until, like, four weeks ago! And then you go, ‘Wow! Oh, wow! I forgot! You’re not so bad!’ She’s the one who’s in the carpool with you for 10 fucking years, and every morning you got that cup of coffee and you’re going, ‘I can’t believe I gotta pick her up again.’” — Lewis Black speaking last night on Larry Wilmore‘s The Nightly Show.

It’s 12:30 am and I’m pretty much whipped. Up and rolling since 6 am, and I’ll be hitting Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ The Unknown Girl tomorrow at 8:30 am. Today I saw three films — Pedro Almodovar‘s Julieta (exquisitely composed and well acted but mainly an anguished Joan Crawford mother-daughter hairshirt film), Kleber Mendoca Filhos‘ Aquarius (a rooted, well-honed Brazilian drama about time, aging, survival, dignity and cultural changes with Sonia Braga playing a tough matriarch) and finally David MacKenzie‘s Hell or High Water, which at first glance I was a little afraid of as it seemed B-movieish. It turned out to be not just a tight and forceful bank robbers-vs.-cops drama, but a wry and eloquent one also. It has guns and loot and getaway cars, but the real subject is the tapped-out hinterland economy and how it all seems to be about despair and downhill attitudes out there in shitkicker country. The wise, sometimes funny and sometimes solemn screenplay, written by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), is the saving grace. Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster (who’s looking a lot beefier than he did five or six years ago) costar.

Posted on 5.7: “God forbid the possibility of Criterion delivering a 4K Bluray of McCabe and Mrs. Miller down the road. That candle-and-kerosene-lighted 1971 classic is already dark and smokey, and given their established tendencies the Criterion guys would probably take it even deeper into the cave.” Criterion’s McCabe Bluray, announced yesterday, will pop on October 11th. I’m fearful because I dislike their darkened-down 4K version of Only Angels Have Wings, and I’m no fan of the seemingly darker Bluray of The Player. Enough with the inky.

Hats off to whomever (outside ad agency or in-house Fox Searchlight team) for creating this above-average Birth of a Nation one-sheet. Rousing, classy, half-convincing historical font. (It actually looks more like a 18th Century font but we’ll let that go.) I can see the award-season ads in my head.