“Damn, is it good to watch a movie that expects the audience to pay attention and that doesn’t pander to the least common denominator.” — James Berardinelli, ReelViews. “It may be a mostly pessimistic portrait of its time and place, but it offers hope, if only that movies of its style, scope and smarts can still get made.” — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post. “Gilroy is a master at laying out a twisty plot, and Anderson directs with the kind of verve that enables almost all the twists to hit us with the force of surprise.” — Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times.
And so I began my chat with Beirut screenwriter Tony Gilroy with the following: “It’s so lovely to see a good Tony Gilroy-authored film…done right, done in a clear, adult, complex way…you can actually follow the plot..veins of eloquence and feeling…second-act plot pivots, the payoff and the denouement,” blah blah. And then off to the races.
We covered the basics, which is that Gilroy wrote the Beirut script 27 years ago, when he was working for TedField‘s Interscope. Except nobody bit and so it was put away, and then the film finally launched in ’16 or thereabouts with Brad Anderson directing and Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike costarring, and so Gilroy did a rewrite and then Anderson shot it in Tangiers in less that 30 days, and for next to nothing.
Beirut producer-screenwriter Tony Gilroy.Gilroy #1: “It was meant to be a Sydney Pollack movie. Or a film for Peter Weir or Wolfgang Peterson. The Year of Living Dangerously was a model, and that wasn’t an unusual thing for 1991. Nobody bit because it seemed too controversial, a little too stinky. But what seemed a little controversial in the early ’90s, of course, is now established fact. And it put me in a much higher realm…it moved me up in class…the only movie I had made up to that point was an ice-skating movie…it got me into Dolores Claiborne.”
Gilroy #2: “There are three villains in this thing. I’m not kind to the PLO. It’s corrupt and the leadership is over in West Beirut while thousands of refugees are displaced. I’m saying that the Reagan White House was just a ratfuck of mistaken motivations and of blinking greenlights and just a mess. And I’m also really accurate about Israel’s moment of darkness there, where they were just looking for any excuse to invade.”
Gilroy #3: “I still have to grind. I still have to prove it. I tried to get a couple of original movies off the ground, and it didn’t work. It’s tough, man. I’m trying to do original unbranded IP, man. It’s tough, it’s tough.”
I’m told that Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York will not be announced as a Cannes Film Festival selection tomorrow morning. The reason, I gather, is not because festival honcho Thierry Fremaux didn’t want to show it, and not because Amazon didn’t want to provide a DCP, but because Allen and producer Letty Aronson (i.e., his sister) didn’t want the controversial attention.
Rather than stand up to the naysayers and Rainy Day costar Timothee Chalamet, who announced several weeks ago that he’s donating his salary for working on the film to a #TimesUp organization, Allen and Aronson have apparently opted out.
It may be that A Rainy Day in New York isn’t very good, in which case I would understand Allen’s reluctance to show it in Cannes. But at least a couple of not-all-that-great Allen films have screened in Cannes before (Irrational Man, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger) and so not showing Rainy Day is also, one could infer, about a lack of sterner stuff or certainly an instinct to avoid a turbulent episode.
Ducking and hiding in the midst of a persistent but highly questionable controversy (i.e., the Dylan Farrow allegation that was re-stated in a 12.7.17 L.A. Times op-ed piece, and the Robert Weide defense that was posted on 12.13) is a way of saying “whatever you guys want to believe or not believe is fine with me, but I’m not going to submit to a tabloid circus in Cannes in order to promote my latest film, however good or bad it might be…I just don’t want to get raked over the coals by the Cannes press corps about this whole matter once again so the hell with it…Amazon will probably release it with a minimum of fanfare but I’m moving on to my next film.”
As one insider put it, “Woody himself and his own team might not think that going to Cannes is the best idea at this particular moment.”
A pair of second-hand “insiders” have confided that nothing has been said about A Rainy Day in New York since earlier this year, and that “they’re already talking about working on the next one.” Duck and cover, avoid the heat, choose the path of least resistance, etc.
Netflix’s Ted Sarandos has toldVariety‘s Ramin Setoodeh that the previously submitted Netflix slate — Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma, Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind, Morgan Neville‘s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, Paul Greengrass‘s Norway and Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark — won’t screen at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Terrific! The general importance and impact of this legendary Cote d’Azur gathering has suddenly dropped two or three notches. With the absence of Cuaron, Greengrass and Welles, there is suddenly a gaping void. What could have been a great or very good festival will now be somewhat less so.
“It was not our decision to make,” Sarandos explained. “Thierry announced the change in their qualification rules [that] requires a film to have distribution in France to get in, which is completely contrary to the spirit of any film festival in the world. Film festivals are to help films get discovered so they can get distribution. Under those rules, we could not release our films day-and-date to the world like we’ve released nearly 100 films over the last couples of years. And if we did that, we’d have to hold back that film from French subscribers for three years under French law. Therefore, our films they are not qualified for the Cannes Film Festival competition.”
Also: “I do have faith that Thierry shares my love for cinema and would be a champion of changing that when he realizes how punitive this rule is to filmmakers and film lovers. [So] we hope that they do change the rules. We hope that they modernize. But we will continue to support all films and all filmmakers. We encourage Cannes to rejoin the world cinema community and welcome them back. Thierry had said in his comments when he announced his change that the history of the internet and the history of Cannes are two different things. Of course they are two different things. But we are choosing to be about the future of cinema. If Cannes is choosing to be stuck in the history of cinema, that’s fine.”
My first thought as I watched this obviously well-cut trailer for Dawn Porter‘s Bobby Kennedy For President (Netflix, 4.27) was “how deep-down honest is this film?” It’s very easy to paint a romantic, inspirational portrait of this fallen hero. But we’ve just been through the sordid events of Chappaquiddick, which portrayed Edward Kennedy as a character-challenged weakling. And we all know that President John F. Kennedy had his own character issues as far as incessant hound-dogging was concerned. Are we to assume that the Kennedy family’s tradition of privilege and the faint whiff of arrogance never rubbed off on Bobby? Not a bit?
I agree that RFK was probably the best of the brood, as he’d clearly demonstrated the ability and willingness to grow with the times. But I wonder who he really was, and I mean “really.” He began in the mid ’50s as a conservative-minded hardhead investigator (founding father Joseph P. Kennedy once said that RFK “hates like I do”) and an ally of Communist witch-hunter Roy Cohn, of all people. But by the end of his life RFK had become a kind of poet-dreamer of his own making, a guy who seemed to truly believe in transcendence and compassion and who sang a song that resonated all over.
50 years ago huge portions of this country were in love with the idea of Bobby Kennedy, the successor to the throne with the reedy voice and tousled hair and an affection for Greek poets. Even rural bumblefucks loved and admired him. But today the children of those legions are supporters of an animal — a nostril-breathing, blatantly unhinged rightwing sociopath. Paul Schrader has noted that it wasn’t just movies of the ’60s and ’70s that were better, but that moviegoers were better also. Same thing with the voters. 35% of the voters in this country are nihilistic and dangerous.
The debut of Porter’s four-part miniseries will follow a special 4.25 screening at the Tribeca Film Festival.
All Cannes Film Festival posters are echoes of the ’60s — Claudia Cardinale, Faye Dunaway, Monica Vitti, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, etc. The just-revealed official poster for next month’s festival follows suit — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Pierrot le Fou (’65). No offense but I watched Pierrot le Fou a few years ago at the Film Forum — it’s lazy, catch-as-catch-can, fairly dreadful. My first impression of the new poster was a little bleary as I was just putting on my glasses at 6 am, etc. But before I recognized Belmondo I thought I was looking at Alden Ehrenreich and Scarlet Johansson pretending to be Belmondo and Karina. That would’ve been cool.
Posted from Toronto on 9.14.17: “Glenn Close totally rules in Bjorn Runge‘s The Wife (Sony Classics, 8.3.). The film is strong and precisely written and well–carved, and Close carries it along with costar Jonathan Pryce on a 60-40 basis. She brilliantly re-defines the familiar role of the discreet, classy, long-under-valued wife & partner of an ostensibly great man. Exquisite poise, rich feeling, heart full of soul & regret, eyes of spirit and chrome steel. Close’s emoting demands Oscar cred. It’s a landmark performance with a great, angry, full-throttle climax. Close has a Best Actress nom in the bag.”
Cambridge Analytica aside, I’m not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg‘s suit, shirt and tie. The tie especially. Inspired by those deliberately low-rent shirt-and-tie combos worn by Rodney Dangerfield in the ’80s? It’s all part of a general theory I’ve been developing about Millennials being the worst-dressed generation in the history of Western Civilization. Those hand-me-down Goodwill shirts and baseball caps, those dreary T-shirts and grotesque shorts they wear in the warm months, those ghastly white-soled sneakers.
I’m thinking of an old Howard Hawks story about Lauren Bacall. Hawks was interested in her for a film in the mid ’40s (probably To Have or Have Not) but told her she had to lower her voice, that she’d be more interesting if she sounded sultry and smoky. So Bacall went away and came back and her voice was just what Hawks wanted. Then he told her to stop smiling all the time and to maybe insult a man every now and then. She later told him that she ran into Clark Gable at a party and said to him in that cool, low-down way of hers, “Where’d you get that tie?” Gable said, “Oh, some Beverly Hills haberdash…why do you wanna know?” And Bacall said, “So I can tell my friends not to go there.”
Bulletin from Julien Biri, who annually sub-lets his two-story Cannes apartment to myself and Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday: “Due to the stubbornness of the [French] government, the railway workers have changed their modus operandi for the strike. Unless the government adjusts their position they’ll start an indefinite and permanent strike on Saturday, April 14th. Paris public transport (Metro), Air France and aerial control workers, postal services, and many other sectors of the French economy (supermarket workers, retirement homes, universities) will consider seriously for the general strike. Even the lawyers are on strike.
“I hope the government will back off, but take some good walking shoes for your stay in Paris, just in case. And enjoy the moment — this could be an historic event in France.” May 2018 is, of course, the 50th anniversary of the famous May Day revolt of ’68.
I told Julien I have a TGV train ticket from Paris to Cannes, and that it leaves on Monday, May 7th at 7:19 am and arrives in Cannes roughly five hours later. Key question: “Are you telling me I need to buy an Easy Jet ticket from Orly to Nice?”
Biri response: “No, you will get to Cannes by train. I did not want to panic you. The risk is the train is canceled and you may have to take the next one, and have not a booked seat. Right now 30% of TGV is working. SNCF is a different story. I don’t think it can go below that level of service. What I mean is, I think you will be able to take a train, but maybe not the one you’re booked in. And it might be very crowded and delayed. But you will get to Cannes by train. Don’t book an Easy Jet flight.”
For those who don’t read HE comment threads, some interesting riffs came out of yesterday’s discussion about the hypothetical Best Picture prospects for John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place (i.e., “And The Oscar Goes To…”). It was triggered by a 4.8 “In Contention” article by Variety‘s Kris Tapley that basically said that the New Academy Kidz (i.e., the younger, more diverse members invited to join in 2015 and ’16 by former Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs) might decide to nominate Krasinski’s film, given their apparent view that horror-genre films can and should be regarded as Oscar bait.
This led to HE commenter “Barney Dunn” observing that “the Best Picture slate for 2019 now includes Black Panther and A Quiet Place. On top of which Hereditary was called an early Oscar contender coming out of Sundance. Maybe Ant Man and the Wasp and Incredibles 2 will generate some awards talk. This is where Oscar is now.”
Which prompted my reply: “Exactiy. In part because trade guys like Tapley are helping to fan these notions and nudge them along. I’m trading on this current, obviously, but I’m also saying ‘actually, I disagree‘ with a little sarcasm to boot and, you know, using terms like ‘New Academy Kidz.'”
A few hours later “Mark VH” wrote, “Are we seriously going to do this every time a half-decent genre movie comes out? Why does everything have to win Oscars? Why can’t we just enjoy movies on their own terms without throwing them into competition with each other? We’re a month removed from this year’s Oscars, and does ANYBODY seriously still care who won, who was nominated, etc.? Literally nobody gives a shit.”
My reply: “I care, I’ve taken note, and I’ll never forget. Because the New Academy Kidz have changed the game, revamped the landscape and DEFINITELY lowered the property values. That’s fairly seismic, when you think about it.
“On one hand, if the NAK had been influencing things to this degree back in the mid ‘50s Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers might have been Best Picture-nominated, and that’s obviously indicative of a more intelligent and perceptive Academy mentality than nominating, say, Around The World in 80 Days.
“On the other hand another smart, grade-A monster genre flick that is basically a tactical, situational thriller and which doesn’t, by any stretch or scheme, even attempt to deliver an affecting or metaphorically penetrating impression of the human condition except to say “life is scary because there are predators out there” (not to mention Krasinski’s decision to use the exact same deep-register monster gurgles that were heard in Cowboys and Aliens)…a film of this calibre (i.e., worthy but calm down) has just been thrown into the Best Picture hopper.”
Afterthought: Serious, classy, high-style horror is its own bird. Especially in the case of smarthouse horror like Robert Eggers‘ The Witch and Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook. Being a diehard Luca Guadagnino fan, I’m naturally looking forward to Suspiria, perhaps at the Cannes Film Festival.
