The biggest Cannes film today (Wednesday, 5.9) is Wanuri Kahiu‘s Rafiki, a Kenyan-made lesbian love story that’s been locally banned by Kenya’s conservative-minded government. It will screen at 1:45 pm and again at 10:15 pm at the Salle Debussy. I would normally be catching the earlier screening, but there’s a conflict and a complication with the great Martin Scorsese, who came to town yesterday.
Scorsese, currently in post with his $180 million Netflix gangster flick The Irishman, will sit for a discussion at the Theatre Croisette this afternoon (4:30 pm) following a Director’s Fortnight 2:30 pm screening of Mean Streets. I’d prefer to catch the 82-minute long Rafiki at 1:45 pm and then slip into the Scorsese q & a, but I’m afraid the security goons won’t let me in. I might have to attend Mean Streets in order to catch the Scorsese sitdown (which I regard as essential) without incident, and then catch Rafiki at 10:15 pm. Not the end of the world.
While Hollywood Elsewhere slept in Cannes, persuasive evidence about Russian financial influence upon Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen and the Trump mob family in general came to light via Stormy Daniels‘ attorney Michael Avenatti, and it sounds and tastes fairly delicious. It was all over the news shows last night, but the summary and follow-through by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is my favorite so far.
“A shell company that Michael D. Cohen used to pay hush money to a pornographic film actress received payments totaling more than $1 million from an American company linked to a Russian oligarch and several corporations with business before the Trump administration, according to documents and interviews.
“Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions adding up to at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show.
I’ve just come out of an opening-night Cannes Film Festival screening (not the big whoop-dee-doo one in the Grand Lumiere but a concurrent press screening in the Salle Debussy) of Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows. It’s not a bust but by Farhadi’s lofty standards it’s something of a shortfaller, particularly due to how the third act unfolds.
But it’s still a Farhadi film, and that always means a character-rich, complexly plotted, proceeding-at-its-own-pace family-community drama — smartly written, always well acted — in which deeper and deeper layers of the onion are gradually peeled until the truth comes out.
Set in rural Spain, it’s about the sudden disappearance of a character but it’s not an About Elly-level thing. At all. It’s actually about a kidnapping but that’s all I’m going to divulge. But Everybody Knows follows the Farhadi form by focusing on a large community of family members, friends, co-workers (i.e., a wine farm) and whatnot, and everyone, we soon realize, knows everyone else’s secrets. Well, most of them. And by the end, everything comes out in the wash.
But the story and especially the ending don’t echo all that much in a social-fabric or social-portraiture sense. All you get from it is “people are more selfish and prideful and less compassionate than they let on,” but you knew that going in. It tells a tale about some bad business, and it stays on that level to the end. It doesn’t expand or begin to play a bigger game.
When the closing credits began to roll only five or six people clapped, and half-heartedly at that.
Something is wrong when a portion of an audience laughs at a plot revelation, which happened tonight during the third act or around 100 minutes in. There’s nothing clumsy or attitudinally funny about the “new information”, so to speak, but several journalists inside the Salle Debussy guffawed rather loudly when Penelope Cruz said a particular line.
I almost turned around and sneered because the revelation is something that’s built into the buried-family-secrets plot — you can smell it coming a mile away. Why 10 or 15 journos chortled out loud is beyond me. It’s an awkward moment dramatically, I’ll admit, but it’s not a crazy thing to throw into a drama of this sort. It’s like a third-act “surprise” out of a gothic romance novel, but it fits right into the fabric and scheme of the story.
Having heard over the last couple of days that Everybody Knows underwhelms or is some kind of “meh” thing, I went in expecting a problem movie or even one that goes thud. But it’s not that bad and is actually pretty good all the way through until the last 15 or 20. I would even say first-rate for the most part, but it does get into trouble in the third act.
The finale is okay, but it doesn’t feel complete or fulfilling enough. All the loose ends are tied up for the most part, but it doesn’t quite get there.
The Cannes Film Festival jury — “madame president” Cate Blanchett, Kristen Stewart, Ava DuVernay, Lea Seydoux, director Denis Villenueve, Taiwanese martial-arts actor Chang Chen, Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, Burundian singer Khadja Nin and French social-realism director-writer Robert Guediguian — gathered for a press conference today.
The questions were “diplomatic”, which is a diplomatic term for vaguely dull and unchallenging. The answers followed suit.
If I’d been more strongly motivated, I would have raised my hand and asked, “Sundance ’18 was all but totally ‘woke’ in terms of selections and prizes given….it felt to me like a socialist summer camp in the snow. How woke-minded are you guys gonna be on the Cote d’Azur? Do you believe in ‘woke’ as an ongoing aesthetic and political mandate to bring about much needed change, or do you just, you know, want to watch good films?”
If I’d chickened out at the last minute, I would have asked, “Cannes director Thierry Fremaux recently said he’ll never select films for this festival based on a gender quota basis. But Indiewire, hands down the woke-iest major film site, took issue with this and appears to favor quota systems. If you were in Fremaux’s shoes, would you guys implement quota-system admissions to as to increase the number of female-directed films here?”
Blanchett said at one point that things are changing slowly, but at least they’re changing. “Would I like to see more women in competition?” Blanchett said. “Absolutely,” adding that that she “hoped” more would turn up in the future.
The only other quote that stuck out was also Blanchett’s. “Being attractive doesn’t preclude being intelligent,” she said. Hollywood Elsewhere agrees.
The Kilauea volcanic eruptions are obviously sad and devastating, but at the same time I understand why people on the Big Island of Hawaii, particularly those near Leilani estates on the eastern slope, might want to ogle the destruction. A fascinating, relatively rare phenomenon. On the other hand the lava seems to move about as fast as a turtle, if that, so it’s hard to relate in terms of disaster-movie similarities.
Almost all the volcano movies — Dante’s Peak, Volcano, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, Irwin Allen‘s When Time Ran Out, the 1935 version of The Last Days of Pompeii — have at least slightly exaggerated the speed at which lava flows. And few have dealt with the the threat of sulfur dioxide gas, or so I recall.
At the risk of sounding facile, which volcano movie has delivered the most realistic depiction of how lava actually looks and behaves, based on what we’ve seen over the past two or three days?
The Cannes jury press conference happens today (Tuesday, 5.8) at 2:30 pm, but there’s nothing to see until Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows screens this evening. It screened last week for Parisian press, and the loose talk during last night’s La Pizza gathering was that it might be on the “meh” side. One journo said he’d heard it was similar to Farhadi’s About Elly, another said something about it being Farhadi’s Personal Shopper or — I’m reaching here — possibly in the vein of Almodovar’s Volver. The general feeling is one of slight apprehension rather than excitement.
One of the above said he can’t be specific, but that he understands that a major American film is probably going to get booed. Which is not a difficult achievement here, and is sometimes not that meaningful in the long run. (The journalists who booed Personal Shopper a couple of years ago look like idiots now.)
If the “going to get booed” thing is correct, the likeliest candidates would be David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake, which runs 139 minutes, or Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman. They’ll debut roughly a week from now (Lee’s film on 5.14, the Mitchell the following day). The possible booing recipient could also be Ron Howard‘s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
The BlacKkKlansman rumor is that it’s a “buddy comedy,” but Lee did his best to shoot that notion down on Instagram [see above].
A friend who saw Under The Silver Lake some time ago: “Loved [Mitchell’s] Myth of the American Sleepover, and really like It Follows. I like some of Silver Lake” — presumed to be kind of an impressionistic cultural panorama of present-day hipster Los Angeles a la The Big Lebowski with a dash of Fellini Satyricon — “and I love Riley Keough, but Andrew Garfield is so flaccid and without any charisma or sexuality, and this movie really needs that. There are some great fun sequences and it certainly looks great, but all in all it just feels silly with a donut hole in the lead role.”
A fair amount of make-up sleep yesterday (two-plus hours on the Paris-to-Cannes train, close to three at the Cannes apartment) has resulted in another middle-of-the-night wakeup…yes! There’s nothing like the reassuring feeling of being loved and caressed by Almighty God as you lie stone-cold awake at 2:45 in the morning, contemplating your fate. I look outside at the pitch-black nothingness and feel the chill air sink into my bones. It’s too early even for the crying seagulls, but I can hear Ingmar Bergman‘s wee-hour wolves scampering around outside the building below, panting and whimpering as they lick arterial blood off the cobblestones.
Honest-to-God snap from living room window of the Cannes blackness — Tuesday, 5.8, 3:15 am.
In Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (’75), there’s a scene in which the four brute fascists (Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti) are dressed in drag with particularly ornate women’s hats. Pasolini clearly meant this charade to seem grotesque and perverse. Flash forward 43 years to former Olympic figure skater, sports commentator and LGBT activist Johnny Weir dressed in similar fashion at the 2018 Kentucky Derby. Times change, context is everything.
At 5:45 Cannes time an email arrived from High10 Media’s Jimmy Harney:
“Matt Belloni, Editorial Director at The Hollywood Reporter, will be at Cannes Tuesday 5/8 — Saturday 5/12, and is available and willing for any expert interview needs to talk about the festival.”
That’s ungrammatical, isn’t it? Correction: Belloni will be attending the Cannes Film Festival (“in” might work but “at” alludes to Belloni attending a single event). And he can’t be “willing for any expert interview,” etc. The idea, to clear things up, is that Belloni, a seasoned trade journalist who may know a bit more about the festival than, say, myself or Toronto Star critic Peter Howell or Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman or HE’s own Jordan Ruimy…Monsieur Belloni is hereby willing to comment, expound and generally ruminate about this, possibly the most underwhelming Cannes Film Festival in history.
And so, in Harney’s words, “please feel free to reach out for any opportunities you might need Matt’s expertise for.”
Tonight at La Pizza between 7:30 and 9 pm, Hollywood Elsewhere along with Howell, Gleiberman, Ruimy and several other critics will be available for comments, projections and sage thoughts about the 71st Cannes Film Festival.
We may not be able to shed quite as much light or share as much in the way of perception and perspective as Belloni, but we are nonetheless available and “willing for any expert interview needs,” etc.
Having slept two and half hours on the train, I arrived in Cannes at 12:40 pm. Right away I didn’t care for the vaguely misty, milky-ish light, as if everyone was seeing everything through the eyes of Janusz Kaminski (i.e., HE’s second least favorite cinematographer after Bradford Young). My usual pink-wth-yellow-pastille badge is now dark gray with a rectangular pink-plus-yellow-dot strip, and it’s slightly smaller than before. The official carrying bag is cool — dark-denim colored and lightweight.
I went right back to the Old Town pad and slept again, bagging another two-plus hours. Now I’m unpacking and preparing to head over to La Pizza for the annual Cannes journalist soiree, which will start around 7:15 or so.
Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows, which may have problems, will be the first film out of the gate. The first press-access screening happens tomorrow night at the Salle Debussy at 7:15 pm, about 75 minutes before the 8:30 pm public screening inside the Grand Lumiere. Follow-up press-access screenings will happen daytime Wednesday. If you have a high-grade badge (white, pink with yellow pastille, pink) you’ll definitely get into the first-look press screenings, but the blue and yellow badgers may have to wait. It would so much simpler if the festival would just stick to the old system with a demand that embargos on reviews and tweets (i.e., concurrent with late afternoon or evening public screenings) be respected.
I couldn’t sleep last night for fear of sleeping through the 5 am alarm. I have to hail an Uber at 6 am to be at Gare de Lyon in time for my 7:19 am train to Cannes. The anxiety levels were such that I couldn’t sink into it. After three hours of not quite nodding off, I gave up and rose at 4:30 am. Showered, finished packing, wrote a quick piece about Tully. It’s 5:30 am now. Paris-to-Cannes takes five and a quarter hours. My new concern is that I’ll fall asleep on the train three or four hours into the trip and doze right through the Cannes stop and wake up in Italy somewhere. I can set the iPhone alarm to ring three or four times before the 12:35 pm arrival, but I worry all the same.
10:30 am update: Went under as train was pulling out of Paris; out for 2 and 1/2 hours, woke 20 minutes ago. We’re pulling into Marseilles. 11:20am: Toulon.
Partly a pissed-off family sitcom and partly a tricky psychological drama, Jason Reitman‘s Tully is a decent-enough thing. I wasn’t head-over-heels when it ended, but before the last 15 minutes (which contains a surprise) I was mildly engaged. How did it play in HE land this weekend? The 88% Rotten Tomatoes score was encouraging, but the 74% audience score indicated that Joe and Jane Popcorn had issues.
It wound up with a mildly disappointing $3.18M from 1353 theatres, or a per-screen average of $2350. Will Tully triple that figure before petering out? You tell me.
I liked it more than New Yorker critic Anthony Lane did, but I agree with his final paragraph: “[Tully] all but collapses when Reitman engineers a final twist — the opposite of the twist in The Sixth Sense, say, which enriched everything that had come before. Here the whole saga is hollowed out and thinned.”
In my 1.26.18 Sundance review, I said that “the ending of Tully is interesting but not, I have to say, altogether satisfying. The plot strands don’t entirely mesh.
“Remember the old film-school lesson about how every story starts with an inciting incident, and how this incident should ideally arrive between page 25 and 30? Well, Tully doesn’t have a big inciting incident. Things just move along on a beat-by-beat, nudge-by-nudge basis. I was asking myself ‘is anything going to happen here or what?’ And then something finally does in Act Three.
“Still, Tully is a better film than Reitman’s disastrously received Labor Day and Men, Women & Children, so it’s an image-burnisher to some degree. But it’s on the slight side.
“Diablo Cody’s script is amusingly sharp and sardonic, and Charlize Theron’s portrayal of Marlo, a stressed suburban mom coping with pregnancy and child care, is her boldest since playing an alcoholic writer in Reitman and Cody’s Young Adult (’11) and her most Raging Bull-ish performance since Monster (’03). Her performance is angry, open-hearted, prickly, lived-in — an obvious awards-level thing.”
