And Alexander Payne‘s jury has blown off The Testament of Ann Lee‘s Amanda Seyfried…no Best Actress Volpi Cup! All the hipster handicappers had her taking it…the “Seyfried, Seyfried, Seyfried” drumbeat could be heard up and down the Lido.
Jim Jarmusch‘s Father Mother Sister Brother is easily his weakest, least nourishing film ever, which is why Cannes Film Festival topper Thierry Fremaux declined to debut it four months ago.
All I can figure is that Payne’s jury decided to give Jarmusch the top Venice award as a “you go, bruh” neck-massage thing…”don’t let Fremaux ratttle you, Jim…take solace in our love and respect.”
I thought The Voice of Hind Rajab, a devastating, anti-Israel docudrama that generated emotional tsunamis whenever it screened, would take the Golden Lion for sure, but assuaging Jarmusch’s ego was a more important thing.
Benny Safdie‘s helming of The Smashing Machine won the Best Director prize fair and square…he did a good job, went for the deep-down stuff.
If an actor doesn’t trust a director, the camera won’t catch much of a performance. The actor has to trust that if he/she jumps off a certain kind of performative cliff, the director will absolutely be there to catch him/her. Both on the set and in post-production.
This kind of faithful bonding surely existed between Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart and John Huston…any famous pairing along this line.
This said, what does this photo tell you about the relationship between Hamnet director Chloe Zhao and star Jessie Buckley?
A traditional relationship between a director and a lead actor tends to be the opposite of what’s being conveyed here…no? The actor tends to be the emotionally uncertain snuggler and the director is the confident care-giver offering a protective embrace…right?
Don’t recite your resume or your hobbies, don’t tell us what you own or how your golf game has improved or how much you love your pets or anything peripheral…none of that…just tell us who you are.
Okay, here goes: I’m a guy who lives to write and writes to live. I believe that while certain bedrock behaviors are more or less constant, sobriety as a way of life matters a great deal, and if you’re sober, moods and perceptions are always tipping this way or that. There is no “real” essential identity. There is only our genetic history plus the constantly adjusting, moving-train way of things…influences, appetites, defense mechanisms, second thoughts.
I was angry as a kid because I’d suffered through a traumatic birth, and angry as a teenager because my functioning alcoholic dad managed to persuade me that I had to avoid turning out like him…that anything would be preferable to that. And yet I miss him as we speak.
Nicholson to HE: That’s very nice, Jeff, but as usual you’re dodging. Who are you? Just say it.
HE to Nicholson: I don’t have a pat answer, and neither do you. Nobody does. I’m an imaginative egocentric refugee from a middle-class New Jersey suburb. I live for those transcendent moments that descend from time to time. (We all do, I think.) I’ve been lucky in some respects, and I’ve been blessed with a strong constitution. Otherwise I’m a reasonably stable, steady-as-she-goes workaholic.
I vastly prefer the poetry of cinema + great writing + music to the occasionally maudlin reality of day-to-day life. My eyes go all watery when certain memories surface, and especially when certain songs and passages from certain film scores are re-savored.
Most of us understand about God’s absolute and infinite indifference about whether we are happy or not, and that there is only “be here now” and the hum of it all, etc. And yet deep down I seem to spend a lot of time trying to re-savor or re-appreciate my deepest and most lasting memories from the 20th Century, and all the while hitting re-fresh.
I understand the rule about not mentioning cats and dogs, but they’re mostly wonderful (98% of the time) to hang with.
Rainer Maria Rilke: “To simply be here is immense.”
