Month: May 2025

It’s too late to bang out a review of Lynne Ramsay‘s Die, My Love, which I saw late Saturday evening, but I can at least pass along that while I respected what it was on about, the Debussy journos didn’t go for it. Too grim, too downish in a one-note sense, no plot pivots of any kind….just a downward swirl into Jennifer Lawrence‘s increasing postpartum derangement….down, down, down.

What is it really about? Just as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds wasn’t so much a restrained horror film about malicious winged demons as an indictment of social complacency, Die, My Love isn’t so much about JLaw’s descent into self-destructive madness as a portrayal of the dull horror of doing almost nothing with your life while caring for a child…an indictment of middle-class, stay-at-home-and-burp-the-baby-while-baking-cookies momism.

There isn’t a single aspect of Richard Linklater Nouvelle Vague — a concise, boxy, black-and-white, you-are-there reenactment of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless, 66 years ago on the streets of Paris….there isn’t a single scene or line or shot that didn’t strike me as wholly, deliciously authentic and note-perfect.

Thank you, Mr. Linklater, for nailing this…thanks for getting it exactly right.

For Nouvelle Vague is pure pleasure. By my sights, at least. Plus it looks, talks, feels, charms and shuffles around like Breathless itself, of course, and is about as joyful and immaculate as it could be in this regard — a genetically fused companion piece.

The handmade, little-film atmosphere shared by Breathless and Nouvelle Vague is the selling point of course…same vibe, same moves….both feel sharp, nervy, tight but impetuous, nimble, unpretentious — and are both focused, of course, on the same influential chapter in cinema history.

Guillaume Marbeck, Zooey Deutch and Aubry Dillon deliver perfect inhabitings of Godard, Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo…they wear their characters well and fully, which is to say with grace, relaxation and confidence to spare.

Will your fundamentally clueless Millennial and Zoomer know-nothings give a shit about any of this? How many under-45s out there have even heard of Breathless, much less seen it?

…will go instantly down the drain, as this is a film that despises the sensibilities of Joe and Jane Popcorn…people will hate it, hate it, hate it. It will lose money hand over fist, and yet IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio are either ignorant of this fact or curiously committed to furthering Sound of Falling‘s myth regardless. It’s this year’s Women Talking….a spoonful of cinematic Castor Oil if I’ve ever tasted one.

One morning in ’74 or thereabouts I strolled into a Hollywood Ralph’s in a semi-ratty neigborhood…Beverly Blvd. just west of Highland, something like that. I’m striding down one of the aisles and….boiinnnggg! — I came upon Doors keyboard guy Ray Manzarek, whom I instantly “made”. I experienced a simultaneous jolt of surprise and pleasurable adrenaline, as I’d long regarded the Doors as mystical-spiritual brethren and here I suddenly was, face to face.

A typical Doors fan would have geeked out and done the old babble-babble, asking Ray about the drug allusions in songs like “The Crystal Ship” and lyrics like “I’d rather fly” and what Jim Morrison was really like on personal terms and so on. But I didn’t want to do the hyper fan thing or even try to engage Manzarek in a conversation. I didn’t want to be just another breathless idiot. So without breaking stride…okay, I slowed down somewhat…I just let go with one of my cosmic grins and said “hey, man!” Manzarek smiled right back and repeated these same words, and that was it.

I didn’t think of myself as any kind of kindred spirit of Manzarek’s but in a Bhagavad Gita way I sorta kinda was (or we were), and so, you know, two souls exchanging some nice, tingly vibrations in a supermarket aisle…the same thing would’ve happened if I’d run into Jimi Hendrix (although he’d been dead for four years)…move on, dream on.

I’m sorry but David Corenswet isn’t quite axe-blade handsome enough — he has agreeable facial features, but is also a teeny-weeny bit funny-looking. Corenswet has a face that sorta kinda looks like a villain in a John Wick film. But at least he’s not gay or trans.

Rachel Brosnahan is three years older than Corenswet, and what’s with her big, thick-soled, lace-up boots?

Pruitt Taylor Vince, 64 going on 79, plays Superman / Clark Kent’s adoptive father, Jonathan Kent.

Or roughly eight hours, start to finish. The Ramsay tops the list, of course, followed by the Linklater and the Peck.

As I only got about four hours of good sleep last night (awakened at 3 am by snoring), I’m heading upstairs to the press lounge. Maybe I’ll find a place to lie down for a bit.

HE tried reserving seats for various hot-ticket (5.21) films this morning between 7 and 7:02 am…sorry! Better luck next year! There’s a word for this situation, and that word is “bullshit”.

Thank God I was able to snag a Bazin ticket to a late screening of Joachim Trier’s film…skin of my teeth.

10:45 am update: I’ve been informed by the festival press office that a “technical issue” is befouling the ticket request mechanism. Tickets are available despite the software saying they’re not, which is quite an “issue” indeed.

…but all through it I was saying to myself, “This is a smart and aggressive political satire of sorts…a crazy relationship-driven thing…a pronounced antagonism film but this small-town ‘western’ set in May 2020 is basically just a narrative version of the same X-treme left vs. X-treme right insanity that we’ve all been living with since the start of the pandemic, if not 2018 or ’19…

“I appreciate the vigor and the pacing and the increasingly lunatic tone, but it’s a miss, I’m afraid…it’s just not happening…I’m not hating it or looking at my watch, but I’m not caught up in it either. I felt detached and distanced…I was in my seat and Eddington was up on the screen….different realms.”

Until, that is, Eddington abandons all sense of restraint and it becomes The Wild Bunch on steroids.

Friendo (half-hour ago): “How was Eddington?”

HE: “It’s a very smart, increasingly intense, ultimately surreal reflection of the stark raving madness of the COVID years. If you remove the over-the-top violence of the last 45 or so, it’s basically a movie about the same polarizing rhetorical shit we’ve all been living with since 2020 (or, in my head at least, since 2018). JUST YOUR BASIC AMERICAN POLARIZED MADNESS. Take away the bullets and the brain matter and it reminded me of the comment threads from Hollywood Elsewhere over the last five or six years.

One reason I didn’t fall for it or kind of resisted the vibe is that Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance as Joe Cross, the rightwing-ish, initally not-too-crazy, anti-mask sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico…Joaquin’s performance is fairly weak…it’s almost like he’s playing Napoleon again…I understood and had no argument with the arc of Cross’s journey and all, but I simply didn’t like hanging with the guy. There’s something flaccid and fumbling and inwardly uncertain about him. He’s not “entertaining”.

Pedro Pascal‘s performance as Ted Garcia, the sensibly-liberal mayor of Eddington, is much more grounded and appealing. Emma Stone is pretty much wasted.

Another reason I didn’t feel all that charmed or aroused is that Eddington doesn’t have any big keeper scenes or any dialogue that I would call signature-level in the manner of Scarface (“You fucked up too, Mel…The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls”) or Heat (“Because she’s got a….great ass!”) or Tony Gilroy‘s Devil’s Advocate (“He’s an absentee landlord!”)…

I’m not calling it a “bad” or ineffective film or anything, but it’s basically unexciting and kind of drab and sloppy and not much fun, really. And the chaos is…well, certainly predictable. It has some bizarre surreal humor at times, but mostly it’s a fastball thrown wide of the batter’s box.

The thing Eddington was selling never plugged in, never spoke to me beyond the obvious. It’s all about X-treme left bonker types vs. gun-toting, righty-right over-reactions. Okay, I felt taken when it became a bloody bullet ballet over the last 45 or so minutes, or do I mean the last 60 or so? I can’t remember.

,/p>A

All hail Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, which I saw this morning at 8:45 am. It’s EASILY the best Cannes ’25 film thus far…EASILY.

The only thing that scares me is that I saw Netflix’s Albert Tello at the screening, and it would be awful if Netflix were to capture this jewel of a children’s adventure film and bury it in their streaming feed. Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term, and it needs to be seen theatrically….please. It’s my idea of an instant classic — all but guaranteed to be nominated for a Best Int’l Feature Oscar.

I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.

Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion, it’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).

The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.

And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.

Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.

Nayef and Qasem are not only perfect in a way that only non-actors can be, but they blend together beautifully.

The brilliant cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru and the nimble editing by Andu Radu are genius touches.

Eric Roth and Marielle Heller helped bring Cake to life from a Sundance Screenwriting Lab. Roth: “It’s a small miracle…dear Hasan has a poet’s soul…in this too public business of absorbing the blows of outrageous fortune, Cake is that sweet taste of honey.”

Chris Columbus and Michelle Satter also pulled strings on the film’s behalf.

A U.S. distribution deal is presumably imminent, but please, God…please don’t let it be picked up and smothered by Netflix.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay from a screenplay by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, the Montana-set Die, My Love is about a new mom developing sinking into postpartum depression and basically going whacko. Costarring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, with Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in supporting roles. Tomorrow night (Saturday, 5.17) at 10:15 pm.