If you’re any kind of semi-knowledgable Beatle disciple, Steven Soderbergh‘s John Lennon: The Last Interview, which I saw this morning inside the Salle Agnes Varda, is almost completely worthless, certainly by Soderbergh standards. There’s no 21st Century perspective of any kind…no fresh idea or strategy or sheen that might have given this thing a certain edge or extra dimension. Any garden-variety editor or director could have thrown this together. Why did Soderbergh take this gig? Just for the money?

JL:TLI is slick gruel…common, low-rent mulch — a montage-y, music-cue’d-to-death rehash of a Double Fantasy“.

The sit-down happened on the afternoon of 12.8.80, or roughly six or seven hours before Lennon was shot to death by Mark David Chapman, a pathetic fatass who believed that Lennon, having withdrawn from music and become a Dakota house-husband between ’75 and ’80, had betrayed his messianic legacy.

Much of the interview has been available from this or that source (a YouTube version, recorded right off the radio, has been there for the listening since 3.22.23) so it’s really not much of a thing.

Soderbergh interviews Sholin, Kaye and Hummel as a framing device….a tiresome mistake.

I smelled crap when Sholin tells a story about David Geffen playing “Starting Over” without identifying the artist, and then asking if Sholin knew who it was. Sholin told Geffen he loved the song but didn’t recognize the voice…BULLSHIT! Everybody in the civilized world had known the sound of Lennon’s voice since the Beatles invasion of early ’64, and a guy who worked in rock radio drew a blank 16 years later?

Soderbergh should have stopped the interview in its tracks right then and there…”what the fuck are you talking about, Dave?…why are you bullshitting me?” Soderbergh should have yanked out a cat-oh-nine tails whip, told Sholin to take his shirt off and submit to ten lashes, which was a sentence of mercy as he deserved at least 20 or 25…sic semper bullshitters!

I was asking myself “why am I listening to these old kiss-asses?…they’re dishonest, not especially thoughtful or articulate even…they sound like typical starfuckers…in fact, why am I even watching this film? I feel burned.”

At one bizarre point Lennon defends disco music (“just another wave pouring into the vast ocean of music”), but he never mentions whether or not he’s been to CBGBs or if he’s listened to Television or Lou Reed or Patti Smith or The Police, whose Outlandos d’Amour and Reggatta de Blanc had been out for a while in ’80…none of this.

And yet the Lennon who spoke that afternoon was a seemingly happier fellow than he’d ever been…a contented family man who loved his wife, was starting anew as a recording artist, and was looking forward to touring and whatnot. But he wasn’t as interesting as he was before he met Ono. The inventive, highly attuned, occasionally angry, creatively on-fire Lennon of ’65, ’66 and ’67…now, there was a guy worthy of a Steven Soderbergh doc!

Yoko Ono was a good partner for Lennon…she protected and mommy’ed him and so on, and he needed that. But I really hate listening to Ono’s voice, and I was reminded of my loathing fr this bitch when I watched Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back and that footage of her sitting silently in the studio for hours and days on end…a black hole of anti-matter sucking up the creative energy of the four lads…who does that?

Nobody liked Ono before and nobody likes her now. Each and every second of my time with JL:TLI I was muttering to myself, “Her ability to inspire repulsion over a half-century lateris truly remarkable…who else has this kind of enduring power?”

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I’m not saying the Cannes Film Festival is principally, secondarily or even thirdly for catching zees. But if — if — you need a jet-lag napping recharge there’s no better option that the Salle Agnes Varda. Those red seats are cushy heaven. Five minutes after sitting down you’ll hear the cackly voice of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West…”sleep…sleep…now you’ll sleeeep.”

Sidenote: The gaudy designs and colors projected upon the Napoleon-era Notre Dame (third photo) are a vulgar desecration — as bad as Criterion’s teal vandalizing of Eyes Wide Shut, etc.

In Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden, a harried, in some ways embattled director of a nursing home in the Parisian suburbs named Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) has been attempting to institute a humane care technique known as Humanitude, in spite of bureaucratic resistance and general nursing-staff recalcitrance.

But then she happens to engage one evening with Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese playwright-director, and boy, do they strike up a long conversation about end-of-life care and facing death! They talk and share for hours on end, not just into the night but into the pre-dawn hours and beyond.

And then they fly to Kyoto together and talk a lot more as well as explore the joyful art of foot massage (no lezzy stuff — just feet), and then they fly back to Paris for more talk and caring and well-massaged peds all around. And then (non-spoiler!) Okamoto’s character finally, inevitably gives up the ghost.

And there’s a Big Lebowski-like scene in which two of Morisaki’s nearest and dearest (a 70ish stage actor, played by Kyōzō Nagatsuka, and a developmentally disabled teenaged kid who yelps like a hyena when emotionally aroused) sprinkle her ashes from a pretty Kyoto mountaintop. Do they suffer the indignity of windblown ashes flying into their faces a la Jeff Bridges‘ Jeff Lebowski? Of course not — this isn’t that kind of film.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t suffer all that much through All of a Sudden. Well, I did to a certain extent (as did several viewers who bailed out of Friday afternoon’s press screening inside the Salle Bazin), but I was so impressed — amazed, really — at Hamaguchi’s audacity.

His bold-as-brass decision, I mean, to make a 196-minute film that is basically a slow-moving, didactic conversational instructional — a 21st Century counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard‘s Marxist instructional films (1967 to 1974) — that completely ignores pretty much all of the dramatic basics — no plot, no character arcs, no story tension, no second-act pivots, no third-act payoffs or dramatic surprises — but at the same time heavily invests in creating spiritual flotation vibes that are kind of catching and make you feel…well, settled and serene.

When my life eventually comes to an end, I would like this transitional passage to occur within a Marie-Lou-styled environment…seriously. I would probably decline offers of foot-and-toe massages but otherwise, cool. Let no one claim that All of a Sudden isn’t a nicely persuasive bit of pro-Humanitude propaganda.

Everyone gets and gives foot massages in this thing, and you can bet I was saying to myself “thank God Hamaguchi insisted on everyone receiving perfect pedicures before the cameras rolled….thank God Almighty for that.”

For what it’s worth sitting through Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling last year was a much more uncomfortable experience.

(1) Fatherland director/cowriter Pawel Pawlikowski, star Sandra Huller during Friday’s 11 am press conference; (2) Parallel Lives costars Virginie Efira (who seemed slightly more slender today than in Asghar Farhadi‘s just-premiered film) and Vincent Cassel; (3) Croisette-facing sculpture by Bruno Catalano.

As expected, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, which I caught late yesterday afternoon, is an austere masterwork. Damn near perfect in every respect, it immediately struck me as a Palme d’Or winner waiting to happen. Spare and precise and honed to the bone, Fatherland runs only 82 minutes…a thrilling discipline!

The performances are equally spare, if not more so. Sandra Huller is being touted (and will continue to be touted) as a Best Actress Oscar contender, but she plays it very close to the vest, as in “very“. The German actress has two scenes in which she lets loose with emotional frustration and unleashed grief over the shocking suicide of her brother Klaus (August Diehl), but that’s it. The rest of her performance is subdued to the max, and yet the reality of her core situation sinks right in. Full exposure.

A 1949 road movie about the great Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Huller) travelling through a divided Germany for a Goethe celebration in the city of Weimar, Fatherland is about as narratively fat-free as a smarthouse feature (or even a popcorn flick) could possibly be.

Translation: Everything that needs to be said or understood is fully conveyed by Fatherland, although some of the HE rubes will probably complain “there’s not enough meat on the bone!” To which I say “there’s enough meat here, trust me…quality, not quantity…nutrition, nutrition.”

It was principally shot, of course, by Pawlikowski’s longtime collaborator Lukasz Zal with the usual needle-sharp monochrome palette — deep blacks, lush grays, ravishing silvertones — within a boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

Fatherland is immaculate and exquisite, and is particularly admirable for the subtlety deployed at every turn. Plot advancements and historical underpinnings are never hammered home — it’s all played deftly and solemnly…fine period detail, a fascinating “you’re really there” aesthetic.

One of my favorite scenes is nominally of little consequence, and yet feels like a perfect brushstroke. Thomas and Erika are stopped — idling — at an East German border crossing. A young soldier, presumably unaware of the elder Mann’s status, taps on a rear passenger window and asks, by way of a slight gesture, if Thomas could spare a cigarette. The author rolls down the window and offers the lad one of his smallish cigars. Not a word, not a wink…a slight hint of disdain.

I’m sorry but I liked Fatherland so much that I’m leaving now to catch it a second time at an 8:30 am Grand Lumiere screening.

HE to critic friend after 6:45 pm screening of Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales: “So whadja think?”

Critic friend to HE: (Making thumbs-down gesture) “Boring. Totally bored. Too long.”

HE: “But it’s a really honest examination of what writers do, I thought…an exercise in naked self-portraiture. An admission that writers do whatever the fuck they can — imagine anything, steal ideas, stalk women, use others, play dishonest emotional games — in order to create a good story or write a good screenplay. Farhadi is admitting ‘this is who I am, what I am.’ And in this sense, it’s really bold.”

Critic friend: “It’s boring. All apartment interiors, two or three cafe scenes, two Paris Metro scenes…all talk. I kept wanting it to end, and time and again it refused to.”

HE: “I realize it’s visually self-limiting because it’s almost all dialogue, but I wasn’t bored at all. I was totally hooked because it’s kind of Rear Window-ish, and because it keeps you guessing as to where the narrative is going.”

Critic: “Great. Good for you.”

HE: “Too much dialogue? What were you looking for, a car chase or something?”

Critic: “I’m just tired of films that are basically just MCUs of people talking and talking. Cinema is changing. I want more than just dialogue.”

HE: “You’re tired of dialogue? God, you sound like a video game guy!”

Critic: “I was bored…sorry. I wanted more.”

I’m almost all alone on this one. Almost everyone I’ve read or spoken to disagrees. The dismissal of this obviously different, indisputedly ambitious, unusually told tale of serpentine plot threads, switching narratives, covert agendas and discreet fake-outs is unmistakable.

When the credits began rolling at the end of Thursday night’s Salle Debussy screening, faint clapping could be heard but the sound of ominous silence easily dominated.

I’m not saying the naysayers are wrong, but they seem to be ignoring the self-portraiture aspect. Farhadi cast Adam Bessa, a 34-year-old French-Tunisian actor who bears a certain resemblance to Farhadi, as Adam, the film’s central protagonist / instigator. It’s not a stretch to regard Bessa as some kind of Farhadi stand-in.

I’ll try to fill in some of the blanks tomorrow, but it’s 12:30 am and I have to attend an 8:30 am screening, not to mention be up and sharp by 6:50 am.

There can be no disagreement that the 49 year-old Virginie Efira is, right now, easily the most fetching, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot-level, middle-aged actress on the planet earth. Zaftig is beautiful.

It’s a bit disconcerting that costar Vincent Cassel, who will turn 60 this year, is presented by Farhadi as a withered, getting-older guy with aching limbs and thinning hair. In David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds (’24) he played a hardbod cool cat with a perfect bop haircut. I know it sounds childish to say “I prefer the latter”, but I do.

John LeCarre‘s candid, artfully worded critique of Martin Ritt‘s 1965 adaptation happens during the last five or six minutes….brilliantly observed.

Last night’s Salle Debussy screening of Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco‘s The Match, a highly intelligent, perfectly edited and fully rousing recollection of the 1986 FIFA World Cup match between Argentina and England, was rapturously received, to put it mildly.

I am not a sports hound, of course, and have never, ever watched a soccer game anywhere (pro or amateur), and I adored the second half of this film. (The first half is fine.) I felt truly charged and elated by the wondrous athleticism of the late Diego Maradona…26 when the game was played, 60 when he passed in 2020.

Cabral and Franco cover all the engaging angles and side-stories, step by step including the whole Falklands War backdrop…all of it. Extra-special praise for the editing team of Lucas Coppolechia, Sebastian Fasanelli, Juan Pablo Scaglione and Mauro Caporossi.

I’ve no explanation for having mis-spelled the word “standing.”

Just for openers, the combination of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy plus Elliot Page…yeesh.

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Zoe Kazan‘s longform Netflix version of John Steinbeck‘s East of Eden will be strikingly different from her grandfather’s 1955 version, which was basically about James Dean‘s anguished Cal Trask.

Zoe’s version adopts the point of view of Jo Van Fleet‘s Cathy Ames/Kate Trask, the bitter, hard-edged madam character who shot Raymond Massey in the shoulder and then, many years later, lent Dean $5K so he could partner with Albert Dekker“s Will Hamilton in the bean business.

I’m simply too attached to Elia Kazan’s 1955 version to give his granddaughter’s angry-feminist version a fair shake.

I respect the fact that Florence Pugh has apparently slimmed down and is no longer chubby-cheeked.