Month: May 2024

Bouzereau’s “Faye”

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Before last night’s 10:30 pm screening of The Girl With The Needle I slipped into an 8:15 showing of Laurent Bouzereau‘s Faye, an engagingly straightforward life-and-career retrospective about the great Faye Dunaway.

It supplies everything about her career that you’d want to see, everything you’d expect. All the biographical anecdotes, all the required clips, full of respect and appreciation plus healthy servings of Dunaway letting it all hang out (or at least as much as she’s able to do within this format).

It reminded me first and foremost what a great majesterial actress she’s always been. Charisma, timing, energy, just the right amount of push and hesitancy…the whole package.

It barely gets into the strident Faye stories that we’ve all been hearing for decades, but Dunaway’s confession that she was bipolar and occasionally alcoholic helps to explain at least some of her extreme behavior.

The doc offers an amusing retelling of the Roman Polanski-hair-yanking-episode-during-the-shooting-of-Chinatown story, mostly courtesy of producer Hawk Koch.

Dunaway honestly recounts her mad two-year affair with a married Marcello Mastroianni (’68 to ’70). There’s often something reckless and illogical about heated extra-marital romances, and the Dunaway-Mastroianni thing was no exception.

Plus it includes a brief interview with Mommie Dearest director Frank Perry saying that 1981 audiences responding with hoot and howls was fine with him. (Hollywood Elsewhere has always loved this film.)

The doc shows many snaps of young Faye during her youth (she was born in January ’41), and I was surprised to discover that when Dunaway was a teenaged brunette she closely resembled young Barry Gibb of the BeeGees. This resemblance was out the widow, of course, once she turned blonde and glammy in the mid ’60s.

I had to duck out at 9:50 pm so I wound up missing the home stretch and wrap-up, but it’ll be on Max before long.

Magnus von Horn’s “The Girl With The Needle” — Brilliant, Harrowing, Ultimately Horrific — Facing Hurdle with Gerwig’s Jury

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And that’s that this grim, fact-inspired tale about the cold, brutal conditions of women on the bottom of the social order in post-World War I-era Copenhagen has not been directed by a woman.

If it had been, Team Gerwig would be short-listing it for a major festival award. They might still hand acting trophies to Victoria Carmen Sonne or costar Trine Dyrholm. =

It has to win something, I’m telling myself. As relentlessly downish, oppressive social-malaise art films go, this is one of the best I’ve seen in many years. Hats off, full respect.

Until I Catch “Furiosa” Tomorrow Morning…

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Here’s a fully considered, really well-phrased half-and-half review by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman — an affectionate pan mixed with honest, medium-level praise.

It’s obviously too well written for Gleiberman to have tapped it out today.

Do I now feel a tad less enthused about my 8:30 am Thursday screening in the Grand Lumière? Yeah, but I still feel moderately pumped.

Money line: “It’s got a touch of Marvel-itis.”

Drizzle

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If there’s one thing that Cannes is not about, it’s laid-back relaxation. Covering is like attending a demanding senior-level bar exam course. You have to be on your toes each and every minute. That said, it’s an honor to be here as an accredited journalist.

Bottom of the Barrel

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Edgar Wright directing Sydney Sweeney in a new Barbarella flick? Emptiness incarnate. Sweeney’s Barbarella could be one thing with an interesting, probing-mind director, but with Wright at the helm….forget it.

From my 10.29.21 review of Wright’s Last Night in Soho:

“I had suspected I would probably have a bad time with this, but my God, it’s dreadful. Mindless, gaudy throwaway trash. Not to mention dull by way of a mind-numbing repetition of a #MeToo mantra — older men with bulging wallets are toxic beasts.

“Wright got hold of something cool and throttled in the first two-thirds of Baby Driver, but now it’s gone. The bottom line is that he’s a completely untethered geek fetishist — he’s all about design and visual intensity and comic-book-level characters, and at the same time completely disengaged from anything even vaguely resembling an adult sensibility or, perish the thought, an ability to absorb and re-process life as a semi-complex, multi-layered thing.

“In short, Wright is 47 going on 14.

“In the mid ’60s context of Last Night in Soho, Wright isn’t interested in trying to (let’s get creative!) partially channel the spirit of Roman Polanski by way of recalling or reanimating the 1965 atmosphere of Repulsion…God, what a stone cold slasher masterpiece that film is, especially compared to the slovenly Soho. Repulsion and Last Night in Soho are one year apart, and at the same time based in entirely separate galaxies.

“Last Night in Soho essentially says one thing over and over. Ready? Older London men who went to flashy nightclubs in the mid ‘60s were cruel sexist pigs (which many of them doubtless were) and they all wanted to sexually exploit and abuse young women who needed the money. Which made them Hammer horror monsters of the darkest and scuzziest order.

“But that was mid ‘60s London for you! Forget the seminal beginnings of the rock revolution. Forget the Yardbirds. Forget the mid ’60s Soho club scene that had begun to be dominated by London’s rock virtuosos and their many followers. Forget the musical and spiritual explosions conveyed by Aftermath and Rubber Soul. Forget John Lennon and George Harrison being dosed by a dentist in ’65 and experiencing their first-ever acid trip. Forget all that.

“Because in Wright’s view, 1966 London was crammed with creepy, sex-starved, Sexy Beast guys in their 40s and 50s who worshipped the Kray brothers.

“Wright is a truly horrible director of actors. No modifying or keeping it plain and low-key, always presuming that the popcorn inhalers are complete idiots who need everything spelled out in boldface…everything turned up to 11.

“The more I think about it, the more I suspect that Repulsion probably was a major influence upon Last Night in Soho. The difference is that Polanski was and is a visionary, go-his-own-way genius, and Wright is an adolescent shoveller of familiar tropes and garish visual impressions.”

Less Than Accommodating

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Press reservation tickets for Sunday’s (5.19) 6 pm screening of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga were due to be available this morning (5.15) at 7 am.

I signed in at 7 am on the dot only to discover that tickets are completely inaccesible, or “complete.” Unfair! Not cool!

Now I have to find the Warner Bros. team and beg for a ticket. Not the way it’s done, guys. Yes, there’s a Salle Agnes Varda screening on Monday morning at 8:30 am, but that theatre isn’t as big as the Salle Debussy, where a parallel screening should have been scheduled concurrent with Sunday’s Grand Lumiere 6 pm show.

Having Seen Kevin Costner’s “Horizon”, Deadline’s Mike Fleming Calls It “A Sprawling Film About Manifest Destiny”

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If you’re any kind of kneejerk wokester who has more or less believed in the innate malice of white culture since the explosive reaction to the 5.25.20 death of George Floyd, the term “manifest destiny” almost certainly rubs you the wrong way.

Because it basically alludes to a hallowed belief in European-descended immigrant pioneers of the 20th and 19th centuries having brought about essential strengthenings and advancements in the expansionist saga of the U.S. of A.

It also sounds vaguely racist in the view of non-whites (African Americans, Native Americans) who’ve had significant issues and disputes with whites over the last 400 years, to put it mildly.

And yet in a frank, brass-tacks 5.13 interview with multi-hypenate Kevin Costner, director of the soon-to-be-unveiled Horizon: An American Saga — Part One (Warner Bros, 6.28), Deadline’s Mike Fleming, who has apparently seen Horizon, has described the three-hour, covered-wagon saga as “a sprawling film about Manifest Destiny.”

If I was a hair-trigger progressive, I would regard Fleming’s description with a certain degree of alarm. Which is why I, a staunch anti-wokester for the last five or six years, posted a related article two weeks ago, to wit:

THR ‘s James Hibberd indicated as much in a 2.26 interview with Costner.

Horizon will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival early Sunday evening, 5.19.

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