Jeffrey Wells

If and when I get around to seeing The Little Mermaid (no way would I forsake my precious Paris time by seeing it here), I’ll probably feel underwhelmed. I’ve hated nearly every Rob Marshall film ever made (I found Nine half-tolerable), and he’s not going to change and neither am I, and this is just a live–action rehash anyway.

I’m a genuine fan of the 1989 animated original (83 minutes!), and so sight unseen I despise Marshall’s version, which tells roughly the same story, for adding 52 minutes of bloat.

Are there some hinterland trollers out there who are saying ixnay because of Halle Bailey’s casting as Ariel (i.e., standard Disney-fied diversity)? Yeah, I guess, presumably. But who believes that the shitty Rotten Tomatoes ratings (top critics at 47% and ticket-buyers at 56% if you count all of them) are driven by this?

The obviously gifted Bailey seems fairly cool and appealing, but I see no genetic evidence of her being the daughter of Javier Bardem’s King Triton, a pale-faced Spaniard by way of the deep blue sea. Why didn’t they make this aspect work? They easily could have. Not a huge deal but a deal.

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It’s Sunday evening (6:15 pm), the sun won’t slip into dusk for another three hours (during the warm months night doesn’t really begin in Paris until 10 pm), and for the first time in nearly two weeks I’m finally feeling relaxed and settled down. Breathing easy.

A couple of hours ago I took my first late-afternoon nap since…I don’t know, May 10th or something. It’s amazing what a decent snooze can do for your disposition. The whole city feels casual and chill. Everyone is sharing the same dreamy mood. Blue sky, gentle sunshine, not too hot.

After nearly two weeks of mostly Cannes-generated stress, deadline pressures, way too little sleep (i.e., the snore bear), waiting in line after line for the next Salle Debussy film and regarding the usual suspects askance, feelings of serenity are finally within. Not for long but at least tonight feels right.

Alas, it all starts again late tomorrow afternoon with my 7:15 pm flight to Newark. God protect me from being seated next to a Jabba.

In Todd Haynes May December, which I saw in Cannes a few days ago, Julianne Moore is Gracie Atherton, a 60ish native of Savannah (actually Tybee Island, a bucolic waterfront community 25 minutes to the east). She services the affluent locals with a dessert-baking business, and is living fairly flush or at least comfortably.

Gracie owns (rents?) an elegant multi-bedroom home, and apparently three nearly grown kids (a lad and — I think — two lassies), and they’re all in college or about to attend same. Not to mention their 36-year-old father, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), whom Gracie married after seducing him at age 13 when they were both working in a pet store.

Like the real-life (and now deceased) Mary Kay Letourneau, Gracie’s misdeed led to a prison term for statutory rape, but that was 23 years ago and life has since settled down. Joe presumably handles the delivery of the cakes, pies and pastries.

As I explained on 5.21, May December is about a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), visiting the Tybee homestead in order to research a forthcoming Gracie portrayal in a film about her once-turbulent life.

I was undergoing some turbulence of my own due to a nagging question: how is Gracie affording all this (pricey abode, college tuition)?

Maybe there was a line about inherited wealth that I missed, but if Gracie comes from a rich family why was she working in a pet store in her 30s?

And how much, really, could she be earning from making fancy birthday cakes and whatnot? Gracie is presumably catering to elites but even if she’s charging double Savannah pastry chefs earn less than $20 per hour, according to Google.

Did she raise money for the house through crowd-funding? Did she get into Bitcoin? Did she write a successful book about her thing with Joe? These questions may have been answered in the film, and okay, it’s quite possible I might have missed some info due to zoning out from boredom.

I only know that (a) wealthy filmmakers tend to write or otherwise create characters whose lives tend to reflect their own comfort levels, and (b) too much financial ease or abundance is alienating from a Joe Popcorn perspective.

Previously noted: Letourneau and Fualaau insisted from the get-go that their relationship was consensual; ditto Gracie and Joe in May December. After serving her prison term Letourneau married Fualaau and, like their screen counterparts, had kids with him.

HE salutes and respects the Cannes jury’s selection of winners. It was a strong festival and I’m glad to have been part of it on a certain level.

I’m pleased that The Pot au Feu’s Tran Anh Hung won the Best Director trophy, although a grander tribute should have come his way.

My brilliant failure to see Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, the Palme d’Or winner, as well as Ali Kaurismaki’s Fallen Leaves, which took the Jury Prize, embarassingly speaks for itself, but then I’ve managed many such flubs for years.

My respectful but less than fully enthused reaction to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which won the Grand Prix, also contributes to a vague sense of lethargy that I’m currently feeling. Ditto my complete lack of enthusiasm for Hirokazu Kore–eda’s Monster.

Let’s just let it go. It’s over. Congrats to all the winners, etc. No gain in raining on anyone’s parade.

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I haven’t seen Disney’s half-biological, half-CG’ed Little Mermaid, but the basic impetus or social agenda has been obvious for months. Armond White explains the deal sans bullshit.

Posted on 5.25 about Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which may, for the usual motives, snag the Palme d’Or during tonight’s award ceremony:

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Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is a strong, admirable, ultra-precise horror film, but it’s strictly made for film devotees and academic know-it-alls…elitists who loathe the taste of popcorn and would rather slit their wrists than experience any kind of visceral enjoyment of anything. Strictly a Cannes joint…DOA at your local multiplex.

…without considering the likely fact that these apparently proud fellows are, on some level, kidding.

If I were King Charles I would have at least forsaken the absurdly flamboyant black-and-gold royal cloak with the 10-foot train, not to mention the crown and scepter.

He’s obviously inviting derision. He’s obviously saying to the world “I am totally living within my own royal membrane and I don’t give a shit what others may think.”

And for the 17th or 18th time, why baldy has ignored the easy-as-pie Prague hair remedy is completely mystifying.

Humphrey Bogart never had this much hair, not even when he was ten or twelve. Back in ‘51 there was no such thing as Prague hair — only wigs.

In other words: “Nothing will give us pause in our determination to trash Coup de Chance when it finally screens in the early fall, possibly in Venice or perhaps at the San Sebastián Film Festival.”

Kady Rush Ashcraft‘s Jezebel riff is nothing –bitter, sour grapes flinging droplets of urine.

As far as I’m able to figure, Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero is a satire of the academic woke insanity virus, which has been spreading among teachers and college professors throughout the progressive community for the last 20-plus years…a virus that has led to mental derangement and domestic terror and has triggered the culture wars .

Or at least, that’s how I read it.

Club Zero is about Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska). a chillingly self-possessed teacher at an elite private school, passing along a wacko food concept called “conscious eating,” which basically states that all foods from any source are kinda bad for you and should therefore be pretty much avoided. Eat less and thereby transcend.

Novak’s teachings require the slapping of foreheads, sure, but aren’t hugely different from insisting that (a) all descendants of European tribes (and white males in particular) are corroded and evil or (b) there are no clearly defined women or men any more (gender is a spectrum), or that (c) guys should get pregnant and deliver more babies and (d) the theology of trans people should be canonical and exalted above all other considerations and that (e) the jokes of Dave Chappelle are repugnant, etc.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis would never watch Club Zero (and certainly wouldn’t have the patience for it if he did) but if he somehow got through it he’d undoubtedly say “I endorse this film…two thumbs up!”

Style-wise Club Zero is quite dry and excessively poised and very soft-spoken in an Orwellian sense (which is the point, of course) and at the same time passionately out-to-lunch as far as recognizable human behavior is concerned. I didn’t really “like” it but any film that condemns wokery gets a pass from this corner.