Day: May 21, 2024

A good, solid, blunt conversation…basic values…worth the time…listen.

>

Read more

David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds is a brainy, silky, sophisticated, deliberately paced, high-toned “horror” film for smart, well-educated people. I loved hanging with it…hanging in it.

Vincent Cassel, in great physical shape and adorned with a great silver be-bop pompadour haircut, is Karsh, a widower who’s devastated by the passing of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger). As a way of managing his grief he’s invented GraveTech, a cutting-edge technology that enables survivors to keep visual tabs on their loved ones as they rot in their tombs. I’m serious — that’s really what it’s about. Watching a loved one’s body slowly rot and decay. I was sitting there going “uhm…okay” and then it was “wait…really?”

I didn’t love the complex, slow-moving story but I adored the Cronenberg-ness…the handsome stylings, the discreet nudity, the sex, the flush vibe, the upscale Canadian atmosphere, the shadowy mood, the smart dialogue. Cassel, Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders…everyone brings their A-level game. That was enough for me.

I couldn’t get into the 3 pm Grand Lumiere showing of Sean Baker’s film, Anora, on a last-minute basis. I’ll be catching a Costa–Gavras doc in 45 minutes, and then trying again for the Baker at a 7:30 pm Bazin pool press screening. If I can’t get in for the second time I’ll just wait for the 10:30 pm showing of Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope at the Debussy.

This is the eighth day and I’m sorry but festival energy is dropping all over. I’m looking at three mostly dead days before I fly back on Saturday. I wish they would screen more competition repeats.

Hollywood Elsewhere to Apprentice screenwriter Gabe Sherman and director Ali Abassi [12:10 mark] :

“Uhm, I just wanted to ask, particularly Gabe and Ali, about the amazing, for me, emotional moment when, having known about Roy Cohn a good part, part of my life…and believing and understanding that he was one of the most reprehensible human beings of the 20th Century, arguably…I just thought the movie does an amazing thing by actually making you feel sorry for him…empathy…when Trump basically screws him over, and I was just wondering if you had sort of tried to build to that emotional moment…whether that was a key strategy on your part.”

From this morning’s review of The Apprentice:

Who reunites with an old girlfriend, falls in love again, gets married, parades around and then two years into the renewed relationship decides that it was all an ill-considered impulse thing? Whoops!

We’ve all made the occasional mistake or acted intemperately with romantic partners, but who decides to get married twice (Las Vegas, Savannah) on a half-assed romantic whim…a whim that doesn’t hold up after a year or two? Who does this?

The cliche about love with a certain person being better “the second time around” is apparently untethered to the reality of human experience.

AMC’s decision to post a trigger warning about Goodfellas was reported last weekend. We all know that the people who push for trigger warnings (“uh-oh, you might be upset or traumatized by something in this film, especially if you’re an ultra-sensitive Zoomer #MeToo-er!”) are unstable fanatics and Stalinists at heart — a blight upon our culture.

Quite often the point of shocking or upsetting moments in certain films, especially those of a higher calibre, is to deliberately shock or alarm the viewer. That’s the (sometimes artistic) intention. It was certainly the intention in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic.

I presume that trigger warnings will be (or have been) attached to showings of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, both of which have scenes in which ugly racial comments are spoken.