On behalf of Sony Classics honchos Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, publicist Jeff Hill invited top-dog Cannes journos to a Thursday luncheon at Silencio (5 rue des Belges) honoring Brigsby Bear. Star-cowriter Kyle Mooney, director Dave McCary, costar Greg Kinnear, cowriter Kevin Costello and costar Kate Lyn Sheil were the headliners. Incidentally: I’ve been told by Loveless music composer Evgueni Galperine to visit Club Silencio in Paris (142 Rue Montmartre) — open since ’11, designed by David Lynch.

I didn’t come to the Cote d’Azur with any expectation of becoming a Brigsby Bear convert, but converted I now am. Last night I saw this gently comic tribute to geeky childhood obsessions at the Espace Miramar, and as much as I tend to resist if not despise this kind of thing Brigsby Bear has an emotional scheme and even a theology that adds up in the end. It didn’t make me overjoyed, but I felt genuine respect.

For this is a little film, made by three childhood pals (director Dave McCary, co-writer and star Kyle Mooney, co-writer Kevin Costello), that really believes in its own alchemy, and particularly in dorkiness, hip-pocket filmmaking, piles of VHS tapes, geek dreams and deliriously cheesy visual effects.

Brigsby Bear develops its own realm and attitude, but influence-wise is basically a mixture of Room, Michael Gondry‘s Be Kind Rewind, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and the twee sensibility of Wes Anderson (and particularly that of Moonrise Kingdom).

Sony Classics is opening Brigsby Bear stateside on 7.28. The costars are Mark Hamill, Claire Danes, Greg Kinnear, Andy Samberg, Matt Walsh, Michaela Watkins and SNL‘s Beck Bennett (i.e., Vladimir Putin).

Do I have to fucking recite the plot? Mooney’s James was kidnapped as an infant by a pair of creative-imaginative weirdo shut-ins (Hamill, Jane Adams). They raised him according to their own insular reality while diverting or brainwashing him with home-crafted episodes of “Brigsby Bear”, a kindly Smokey the Bear-type character invented by Hamill. At the tender age of 30 (older?), James is rescued by a Detective Vogel (Kinnear) and reunited with his real parents (Walsh, Watkins). He tries to adapt himself to the real world, but when he discovers that YouTube-y films can be made by anyone and be about anything, he decides to make a Brigsby Bear feature. Better to recreate what matters to him most in terms of core emotional values than adapt to the pitfalls of 21st Century normality.

Earlier today at a NATO summit in Brussels Orange Orangutan pushed his way past Dusko Markovic, prime minister of Montenegro, in order to be front and center for a group photo. From N.Y. Times account: “With a grimace, Mr. Trump emerges from behind Mr. Markovic and slaps him on the arm. Mr. Markovic seems surprised at first, but then smiles and makes way for Mr. Trump who, once present at the front of the group, straightens up, stands tall, scans the room and pulls the sides of his coat together. The video, shared widely on social media, elicited disdain and mockery aimed at Mr. Trump, who is known for both his criticism of the alliance and his fondness for the spotlight.”

I completely believed in Jodie Foster as an FBI trainee in The Silence of the Lambs, but I’m somehow having trouble accepting Elizabeth Olsen as an FBI agent, even a rookie one. Taylor Sheridan’s debut effort at a director premiered at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, during which the the reviews (RT 85%) were totally respectable. I wanted to catch it here in Cannes, but it was never a top priority. From Time‘s Stephanie Zacharek: “Wind River is what we used to call, and not always pejoratively, a conventional film, a crime procedural that tells a solid story, with well-defined characters, and perhaps opens us up to a world we didn’t previously know much about…well-crafted, cinematically astute.”

This kind of well-phrased, David Mamet-level eloquence rarely happens in real life, certainly not among business colleagues, but it sure is wonderful to listen to in a movie or a play. You’re bathing in the deep mellifluous voice of Liam Neeson, and nodding with quiet satisfaction as you telepathically congratulate the man for finally landing a good, top-tier role that doesn’t involve kicking the shit out of guys. The only problem in playing Mark Felt, as noted before, is that Neeson will be going up against Hal Holbrook. The other thing is that critics are a tiny bit scared of director-writer Peter Landesman, partly because his first stab at directing, Parkland (’13), was a bust. Landesman returned two years later with the reasonably decent Concussion (’15), again as director-writer, but it didn’t make enough against the budget and p & a. But hope springs eternal.

Like many others I was touched and impressed by Kim Masters’ farewell piece about Brad Grey, “30 Years of Humor, Ruthless Ambition and a ‘No B.S.’ Relationship.” Honest and smoothly written. The best parts are the beginning and the ending, both of which allude to the last few months and especially the looming banshee:

“Like many who knew him, I was too shocked to formulate thoughts [when he passed]. He died so suddenly, so young at 59, and had seemed in good shape just recently. My first impulse was to call him and demand, ‘What the hell, Brad?’

“[Grey] had known he was sick for a long time but told almost no one. It seems his higher-ups at Viacom didn’t know. I hear Brad may have confided only in Bob Daly, his friend and discreet adviser, and confidant Lorne Michaels.

“I told Brad once or twice recently that he sounded tired, but he deflected that. On a couple of occasions, I thought that he was slightly slurring his words, and I wondered whether he might have had a drink to cope with the stress of Paramount’s terrible box-office run and the growing threat of being fired. But he was still shrewd and funny, and I didn’t think much of it, which obviously was how he wanted it to be.

“With a change in regime at Viacom and losses mounting, Brad insisted for a time that he would be perfectly fine with being paid to go away. Certainly he wasn’t telling the truth. He waged a ferocious fight to keep his job. He was sick, but maybe he still hoped he could live a while longer. Or maybe he hoped to die as chairman of Paramount Pictures.

As potentially cloying and manipulative as Wonder (Lionsgate, 11.17) may turn out to be, I’m responding to this trailer with feeling, just like I did two months ago at Cinemacon when I saw some footage. You can sense that director Steven Chbosky (The Perks of Being A Wallflower) has handled things with restraint. Maybe.

I reported on 3.30 that a Lionsgate spokesperson told the Cinemacon crowd “that Wonder has gotten the highest test scores of any Lionsgate film ever. And so the original release date, 4.7.17, was changed last February to 11.17, which means that Lionsgate is confident that Wonder has the Oscar nuts.”

Wonder is a delicate family drama in the vein of Peter Bogdanovich‘s Mask. Based on three relatively recent novels by R.J. Palacio, it’s about the journey of a young kid with a facial deformity (Jacob Tremblay) as he acclimates to school, and how his parents (Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson) and extended family help him along.

Palacio’s books were adapted by Steven Conrad. Wonder‘s costars include Mandy Patinkin, Sonia Braga, Millie Davis, Izabela Vidovic, Danielle Rose Russell and Noah Jupe.

A few hours ago Greg Gianforte, a Republican candidate for a Montana congressional seat in an upcoming special election, was charged with assault after apparently slamming Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, taking him to the floor and breaking his glasses and shouting, “Get the hell out of here!” Here’s a recording of the incident; another is below. Simmering hostility and suppressed rage are par for the course for a lot of rightwing guys. Obviously Gianforte has hurt himself more he hurt Jacobs.

The Guardian reporter sounds upset, naturally, just after the skuffle — “You just broke my glasses!…you just body-slammed me and broke my glasses!” But (and please don’t take this the wrong way) Jacobs also sounds, to me, just a tiny bit candy-assy. Not to the extent that it’s a problem, but his voice reminds me of a kid I knew in third grade who was always threatening to tell the teacher that I was throwing spitballs and making faces behind her back. But let’s not dwell upon that. Obviously the bad guy here is Gianforte.

I couldn’t get into tonight’s 10:30 pm screening of Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project. I approached Les Arcades (77 rue Felix Faure) about 45 minutes before showtime, but the line was way too long. Hollywood Elsewhere will wait in reasonable-size lines, but not the kind that are so long they sap your will to live. HE friendo Aaron Salazar, an aspiring director, was at the very front of the line, but he began his vigil at 8 pm. I admire Aaron’s gumption, but no movie is worth a two and a half hour wait. There’s another screening on Saturday but I’ll be gone early Saturday morning. I’ll just have to see Baker’s film sometime this summer or certainly at Telluride/Toronto.

Late this afternoon I attended an Alfonso Cuaron Masterclass in the Salle Bunuel, which was basically the renowned director of Y Tu Mama Tambien, Children of Men and Gravity sitting for an 85-minute interview with French film critic and author Michel Ciment. [A full recording is at the bottom of this page.] They discussed Cuaron’s career — chapter by chapter, film by film — and showed clips. Fine.

And yet Cuaron’s upcoming Spanish-language Roma, which he shot last fall and is basically about a year in the life of a middle-class, Mexico City family in the early ’70s, wasn’t even mentioned. Which disappointed me. I attended this interview not to hear Alfonso talk about Y Tu Mama Tambien or that fucking Harry Potter film or Sandra Bullock or the blood splatter on the lens in Children of Men for the 47th time, but to hear Cuaron speak about Roma at least a little bit…c’mon! Would it have killed him to discuss what it is and what he’s going for, to allude to the story a bit and maybe discuss the tone, themes and whatnot?

I asked Alfonso if there’s any chance of Roma coming out by the end of ’17, and he said “noahh…I didn’t make it.” Maybe it’ll show up at next year’s Cannes Film Festival (an especially good place to launch any quality-propelled, non-English-speaking film), he allowed. Or maybe a year from next fall….who knows? But what a drag that he didn’t even allude to it.

Yesterday N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott posted a tribute piece about the recently departed Roger Moore, titled “Roger Moore Was the Best Bond Because He Was the Gen-X Bond.” The gist was that “the older 007 installments” — the Sean Connery films, he means — “could never match the sublime, ridiculous thrill of seeing The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy on the big screen.

“Those movies were heavenly trash, with plots you didn’t really need to follow and sexual innuendo that struck my young eyes and ears as deliciously risque.”

Moore “exerted himself heroically,” Scott recalls, “grappling with villains atop a moving train, chasing them down ski slopes or into outer space, his unflappable suavity accompanied by an occasional smirk or upward twitch of the eyebrow. He knew exactly how silly these endeavors were, but he was committed to them all the same. He was an ironist and a professional, and as such a pretty good role model for post-’60s preadolescents.”

A nostalgic Gen-X take on the 007 films is fine, but let’s rub the fog off our glasses for a second, okay? Man up and rub that shit off.

There are only two Bond films that ever mattered and ever will matter, and these would be Dr. No (’62) and From Russia With Love (’63). These were the only Bonds that played the game with at least a smidgen of conviction. Yes, they smirked and nudged but they also took the solitary macho-stud assassin thing half-seriously, and they explicitly didn’t embrace the exploitational jizz-whizz approach (i.e., Bond films are about fantasy and made for the Disneyland crowd…why pretend otherwise?”) and were made with relatively lean and mean budgets. These two are the holy grail of the Bond franchise, and still the source of its power and mystique.

The great Sean Connery starred in these two but also in four other Bonds of gradually declining quality — Goldfinger (’64), Thunderball (’65), You Only Live Twice (’67) and Diamonds are Forever (’71). Goldfinger was diverting at times but the other three have become borderline unwatchable. I tried to make it through Diamonds Are Forever a year ago, and I just couldn’t take it. They’re mostly full of shit, these three films. Yes, even Thunderball. They don’t care about anything except flash, self-regard, cheap tricks and wank-offs.

Friend: “What did you think of Sofia Coppola‘s The Beguiled? I thought it was a slow–burning hoot. Coppola completely vacuumed out any of the original’s over-the-top sequences for more arthouse vibes and painterly pastoral framings. Those last 30 minutes are terrifically entertaining.”

Me: “Whoa, calm down on the ‘terrifically entertaining’. It’s pretty good, but not all that different from Don Siegel‘s The Beguiled. Less heated with more emphasis on suggestive humor. And shorter than the Siegel version by 11 minutes, 94 minutes vs. Siegel’s 105. Which I rather liked. Yes, the apple pie scene is amusing if not quite ‘funny’. I think Nicole Kidman barking “get the saw!” was meant to challenge Faye Dunaway shouting “get the axe!” in Mommie Dearest.”

Friend: “How about ‘Edwina! Bring me the anatomy book!'”