The 2026 Cannes Film Festival (5.12 through 5.23) is only four and a half months away, which means I’ll need to lock down an affordable crash pad by January or February, early March at the latest.
I’ve been looking around, and rental-wise Cannes is once again a miserable proposition. Within last year’s price range (2200 or 2300 euros for ten days) the available places are either the size of broom closets or located too far away from the Palais, or both. One humiliating shit-level rental after another. There’s a notion of possibly bunking at that horrible little studio Jordan and I shared last May…ugghh!
If you want to stay at some half-decent Cannes apartment during the festival, you need to be able to shell out 3500 or 4000 Euros for 10 days. The greed factor makes me sick. Venice rentals are so much more humane.
I still disagree with the spelling of the group’s name. For the last 28 and 1/2 years I’ve been calling them ChumbaWUMba. Obviously the last two syllables being spelled “wamba” doesn’t work in this context.
I’m not in league with the nyah-hyah blamers and fault-finders who love to point their tanned, well-manicured fingers and accuse dicky, flinty, less-than-gracious people of being “dicks” or “ayeholes”.
Were they wrong about Chevy Chase during his late-20th-Century heyday? Apparently not, but they also used to point fingers at Jerry Lewis and he was always fine in my book. I always accepted who and what Lewis was. He was a “prick” but fine…shrug it off. Show business breeds performers with over-sized egos and cavalier attitudes. It goes with the territory.
Now 82, Chase seems a bit diminished. His diction seems a bit off. Maybe I’m wrong.
HE to candy-ass woke brainiacs and male-hating TikTok feminists who are calling Marty Supreme socially dangerous because it clearly admires and in fact glorifies a hungry, selfish, ruthlessly ambitious pogo stick and out-for-number-one ping-pong athlete…
I’m talking to those who are basically calling Josh Safdie out for inspiring toxic, anti-social behavior amongst your impressionable basement-dwelling bros…bitch-slapping Safdie for having made a new version of The Wolf of Wall Street, which people like LexG admired “for the wrong reasons”…
Those who are lamenting that Safdie and Timothee Chalamet have created a new version of What Makes Sammy Run?….
Sadie and Chalamet have valorized, they fear, a lower-Manhattan beanpole who isn’t much different, morally or ethically, from Robert DeNiro‘s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets…
The Marty haters need to get a clue.
Marty Supreme is about a selfish young dude’s journey across the heaving seas…a journey that begins with an epic hustle and ends with tears in a maternity ward,….but it’s mainly about the same primal hunger that drives salmon to swim upstream.
Consider the opening-credit footage of sperm cells furiously swimming toward the egg in order to fertilize. This is what Safdie is telling us in so many words…young men are sperm cells, and they have to furiously swim and scramble their way into a place of warmth, growth and nurture because nobody will do their swimming for them…life is struggle, bruh…move it or fucking lose it.
All exciting or dynamic art strikes the gatekeepers and bluenoses as dangerous…Igor Stavinsky’s LeSacre du Printemps had people howling.
HE is proud of the alleged fact that Wilton, which was largely Republican and booze-free when I was a teenager, is the gayest town in Connecticut. According to GeoUSADiscovery, 2.34% of the homes in Wilton, or “about” 68 homes, are gay-owned. (Does that include lesbians and maybe a trans person or two? For what it’s worth, a trans biomale was working last summer at the Wilton Library.)
Back in the bad old 20th Century porn-flick titles were mainly known for taking mainstream movie titles and changing them into cheap puns. But HE has to hand it to the producers of RearAdmiral…a diamond in the rough.
Gavin Newsom will be obliged and in fact required to destroy the White House’s elephantine, obscenely disproportionate Trumpballroom and recreate the original East Wing as it existed since the original 1902 construction or the 1942 expansion…take your pick. I’m serious. As a symbolic rejection and erasure of arrogant, malignant, Mussolini–likeTrumpism.
Posted on 6.24.25: William Friedkin would turn in his grave if news of Criterion’s defacement of their Sorcerer 4K Bluray could somehow be communicated to his afterlife realm.
Freidkin to Criterion: “How dare you….how fucking dare you saturate my 1977 masterpiece with grotesque teal-green tones…you don’t flood your Carnal Knowledge 4K with teal so why did you do it to Sorcerer?…do you understand that what you’ve done represents a form of evil? Do you even get that, fuckers, or are you oblivious?”
Friedkin-to-Criterion followup: “Do you guys know that Birds scene in the Bodega Bay diner when that hysterical mother says to Tippi Hedren, ‘Who are you?…what are you? I think you’re evil….EVIL!!’ You know that scene? Well, that mother is the Bluray-buying public, and you’re Tippi Hedren!”
Late last night I finally saw Craig Brewer‘s Song Sung Blue, ånd like everyone else I felt generally pleased and often turned on during the musical performance segments. Who wouldn’t be? Catchy NeilDiamond tunes, re-energized by spirited, sufficiently talented middle-class tribute folk…alive, they cried!
I’ve never been the biggest Neil Diamond fan but on a certain level I felt a genuine kinship with the real-life, Milwaukee-based tribute performers Mike and Claire Sardina, who are fetchingly played by Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson.
Mike and Claire’s heyday was in the ’80s and early ’90s, and it was quite a ride. Serious Milwaukee favorites.
Plus I loved Michael Imperioli‘s supporting turn as Mark Shurilla, a Buddy Holly impersonator who joins Mike and Claire’s band. Ditto Ella Anderson, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi, Mustafa Shakir…everyone generates full conviction and good vibes.
There’s a fountain of musical joy that flows from the voices and hearts of Hackman and Hudson, and it’s a serious pleasure during the film’s first half…maybe the first 60% or so. Heart-lifting stuff that really floods the system.
But then they both get walloped with out-of-the-blue waffle irons that struck me, frankly, as too much. These tragedies really happened, yes, but it stills feels like bad plotting.
OBVIOUSLY NOT A SPOILER IF YOU’VE SEEN THE MIKE-AND-CLAIRE DOCUMENTARY, BUT I CAN IMAGINE WHINERS COMPLAINING IF I DON’T WARN: Claire getting hit by an out-of-control car while gardening in her front yard…the fuck? What kind of ridiculously demented asshole-behind-the-wheel would do such a thing? (Another crazy driver slams into the same home 20 to 25 minutes later, and it’s like….again? It’s just too nuts.) And then Mike dying from putting super-glue on a gash in his forehead after suffering a heart attack? It doesn’t feel real. Hell, it feels surreal.
Hudson delivers the spunkiest performance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she winds up getting BestActress–nommed. Plus she seems to have gained a little bit of weight for the part, which is kinda commendable in a Robert DeNiro-in-Raging Bull sort of way. (Okay, maybe Hudson didn’t gain weight for the film, but she sure as hell didn’t lose any. She looks filled out in a 40ish sort of way.)
This is going to sound shallow, but I had problems with Jackman’s Neil Diamond wig, which has a kind of three-pointed shape and looks seriously dorky or bulldogish or whatever. It’s too Prince Valiant bouncy on the sides. The real Mike’s hair was far more becoming.
I’m sorry but last night I gave Henri-Georges Clouzot‘s The Wages of Fear (’53) another viewing, and I came away fully convinced that it’s a slightly lesser achievement than William Friedkin‘s financially calamitous remake, titled Sorcerer (’77). And here’s why:
(1) The first hour of Fear has no urgency or narrative drive. It’s just about the four main characters — Mario (Yves Montand), Jo (Charles Vanel), Luigi (Folco Lulli) and Bimba (Peter van Eyck) — bellyaching about being stuck in the South American town of Las Piedras, which doesn’t look South American at all (pic was shot in the flatlands of southern France), and is certainly not mountainous or jungle-y. The first hour is basically a lighthearted hangout film.
(2) The first hour of the Freidkin version has much more punch and texture, largely due to the riveting backstories of the four main characters — Roy Scheider‘s Jackie Scanlon, Bruno Cremer‘s Victor Manzon, Francisco Rabal‘s Nilo, and Amidou‘s Kassem.
(3) Sorcerer‘s South American shanty town, called Porvenir, also delivers a much more engrossing atmosphere of grit, grime and hand-to-mouth poverty than Fear‘s Piedras, which is all interiors and without much atmosphere (i.e., surrounded by arid flatlands).
(4) In The Wages of Fear, Véra Clouzot‘s Linda, a barefoot cantina worker and Mario’s devoted admirer (lover?), serves no narrative purpose. All she does, really, is smile nonsensically and bat her eyelashes at the camera. (She was the director’s wife, of course — he obviously indulged her and let her do whatever.)
(5) Fear kicks in, of course, once the men begin their journey in the two trucks. This portion of the film is superbly paced, shot, framed, edited. And yet it doesn’t have Sorcerer‘s rickety bridge-crossing scene in the rain and over the raging rapids. Clouzot didn’t have much of a budget — Friedkin spent around $22 million in 1977 dollars, or roughly $125 million in today’s economy.
(6) Both teams have to use nitroglycerine to eliminate a dirt-road blockage (a massive stone in Fear, a fallen tree in Sorcerer), and yet the circumstance that leads to Van Eyck and Lulli’s truck detonating and blowing them to smithereens isn’t shown — an interesting decision on Clouzot’s part, but was it primarily a financial one? It feels like a bit of a cheat. The viewer naturally wants to know what happened.
(7) Montand’s truck-crash death at the end of Fear is caused by his character being in a great, jaunty mood, and is therefore a bit careless. This, I feel, is a bit of a careless ending. It reminded me of a story my dad told me about a guy he met in an AA meeting…a guy whose bumpy life took a joyful turn for the better, which put him into such a happy frame of mind that he started drinking again.
Compare George Clooney’s 2007 Clayton look with the ultra-slender, not-an-ounce-of-fat, rich-movie-star appearance he’s sporting today…he’s probably a good 15 pounds lighter now than he was 18 years ago.
And yet the Clayton thing — slightly puffy-faced, perhaps a bit of a boozer, not-bordering-on-overweight-but-getting-there — undoubtedly enhanced his Clayton character…a “bagman” attorney for a large NYC law firm…a fixer who cleans up messes (a “niche”) and who suffers from a sense of frustration and bitterness, not to mention a touch of low self-esteem.
If Clooney had been as thin back then as he is today, his Clayton performance — his career best — wouldn’t have worked as well.
Is his Jay Kelly performance nearly as good? Yes, nearly. Nominatable, I would say.
