Is it fair to presume that with Justin Lin directing I’m going to hate Star Trek Beyond (Paramount, 7.22)? I think that’s a reasonable expectation. The Fast and Furious aesthetic applied to whooshing around in space and the adventures of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Chekhov and the gang? Uhm…no, thanks. Even with Idris “paycheck” Elba playing the baddie-waddie.

I flew out of Nice this morning around 11:25 am, and arrived at Prague’s Vaclav Havel airport 85 or 90 minutes later. The Prague pad (U Obecniho dvora 793/2) is great but the wifi was completely non-existent. It took two or three hours of texting the Airbnb rental managers to convince them that the fault wasn’t with me but with a bad password. It took another two or three hours to find some kind of solution –a dinky little mobile wifi device that a tech guy bought around dinner hour.  The signal it’s currently generating is laughable. Around 4 pm I went down to a bar next door to use their wifi, but is it was filled with soccer fans watching a game — couldn’t concentrate. It’s just been a shitty day, and for all the trouble I managed to post exactly one piece (i.e., the Salesman review).

Emad, a 30something Tehran school teacher (Shahab Hosseini), is playing Willy Loman in a stage production of Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman, and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is playing Linda, Willy’s wife. An intriguing endeavor but the play, we soon learn, isn’t central to their story. Forced by structural problems to vacate their apartment building, the couple has moved into another place, a bit raggedy but reasonably spacious, that a friend has referred them to. The wrinkle is that it was recently vacated by a prostitute or, as locals describe her, “a woman with many male companions.” But things are otherwise okay. Emad and Rana are happy (they’re thinking about having a child), Emad enjoys his teaching job, the play is selling tickets, etc.

One day while Emad is out and Rana is about to take a shower, the front-door alarm sounds and Rana, presuming it’s Emad, pushes the buzzer. But it’s someone else — a client of the prostitute. We’re not shown what happens next, but Emad returns to signs of a struggle and blood stains on the floor. Rana has been taken to a hospital, he’s told. She’s okay but has suffered a head wound that requires stitches. She’s been assaulted but not raped.

The attack is bad enough, but from Eman’s perspective there’s another problem. Rana, traumatized and emotionally numb, is reluctant to share details about what precisely happened. At first she says she didn’t see her attacker’s face, but later she indicates that she did catch a glimpse. And then Emad finds someone’s cell phone and a set of keys in the apartment, and also a wad of cash. On top of which a pickup truck, apparently belonging to the attacker, is parked outside, and the keys Eman has found fit the door lock and the ignition.

Bit by bit, Eman becomes more and more anxious about Rana’s reluctance to tell the full tale, and he soon develops a notion that she might be harboring a secret of some kind. He doesn’t suspect her of infidelity but something about the attack doesn’t smell right, and he starts scowling and wondering what the fuck. He and Rana decide not to tell the police because there’s a slight stigma of shame that has rubbed off on Rana (Iran’s patriarchal notions about women make Donald Trump sound like Gloria Steinem), but Eman decides he’s going to find the culprit and give him what for.

And yet it’s all bottled up on both sides. Eman and Rana don’t really talk, but they bicker and give each other looks. And Eman continues to seethe. It all finally leads to a confrontation that doesn’t go well. I’m being deliberately vague.

It’s not the VFX (which are only decent) as much as the fleet, elegant editing that sells this puppy. I would have preferred a roadside conversation between Cary Grant and C3PO before the attack begins. (“Good Lord, that’s odd…that TIE starfighter is buzzing droids where no droids exist!”) Hats off to Vimeo wizard Fabrice Mathieu.

A little more than three years after Steven Spielberg announced an intention to produce a version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Napoleon, HBO has announced it will pool forces with Spielberg to make the historical biopic as a miniseries. Beasts of No Nation and True Detective helmer Cary Fukunaga is in talks to direct the sprawling tale, which I’m guessing will be a four- or six-parter.

Spielberg announced announced his support of the project on or about 3.3.13. Here‘s what I wrote that day:

Kubrick’s Napoleon history is common knowledge. He began work on Napoleon in 1968 just after 2001: A Space Odysssey was finished, and had completed a screenplay draft by July 1969. But MGM, which had agreed to finance, got scared about the film’s earning potential and pulled out.

I’ve read Kubrick’s Napoleon screenplay (the one dated 9.29.69), which I think is the same version contained in “Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made,” which Tashen published in 2011.

A German Kubrick site (which has English translation) concurs about the intensive ’68 to ’69 Napoleon period. Kubrick’s Napoleon history is also summarized in an 11.19.12 Andrew Biswell piece in the Telegraph.

I spoke this afternoon with renowned Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, whose ethical drama Graduation (a.k.a. Bacalaureat) was universally praised after screening yesterday morning. I called it “a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption.”

I would be surprised if Graduation isn’t awarded by the Cannes jury in some major category, but expectations are often thwarted along these lines.

Graduation director Cristian Mungiu — Friday, 5.20, 2:30 pm.

We discussed the film’s view of things, which is basically how capitulating to soft corruption can seem at first like nothing but that it can slightly weaken your fibre and make you susceptible to harder forms down the road. I mentioned a story I passed along yesterday about my father having persuaded a Rutgers professor to give him a passing grade despite having failed a final exam, which was definitely a soft ethical lapse. Mungiu smiled and said “life is complicated.”

We talked about his two kids, ages 6 and 11, and the mostly older films he’s been showing them. Mungiu feels it’s better to expose them to classic silents at an early age before they become accustomed to today’s noisier, faster fare and lose the patience to absorb the artistry of Buster Keaton.

I’m crestfallen about Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog — a lurid, blood-splattered genre satire. It’s not that I don’t get the fuck-all, porno-violent attitude. I just don’t understand how or why a good fellow like Schrader would succumb to this kind of gaudy nihilism with such mystifying gusto. He’s taken a 1997 Eddie Bunker crime novel, which I haven’t read but is reputedly grounded in brutal reality, and made a dark, sloppy comedy of excess that only the animals will like and which only Cannes critics will praise with a semi-straight face.

Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe in Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw has called Dog Eat Dog Schrader’s “best work in years…lairy, nasty, chaotic…Willem Dafoe is great.”

Dafoe’s performance as an imbecilic loose cannon named Mad Dog is in fact awful. Awful. Over-acting, desperate, flailing around. As a longtime Dafoe admirer I was embarassed for the guy. C’mon, man!

I’ll admit that Dog Eat Dog hits the amusement button maybe three or four times (Schrader’s dry performance as a crime lord is one of the few elements that satisfy) but mainly it’s a clumsy, splattery, tonally-chaotic wallow. I know it sounds unkind but the words “diarrhea dump” came to mind as I sat in the balcony this morning.

It doesn’t even feel professional half the time, and then at other times it feels relatively sane and well-measured and reflective of how some people process reality and how they actually behave, and then it goes off the rails again. If it hadn’t been directed by Schrader and hadn’t costarred Dafoe and Nicolas Cage it would be a bottom-of-the-barrel market film that nobody would even blink at.

It’s as if the finance guys said to Schrader, “Okay, we know you were enraged about what happened with Dying of the Light so you can have final cut, no problem, but we want a movie that the ‘international audience’ will enjoy. And by that we man the dumbest guys in New Delhi and Beijing and Seoul. We want chaotic fuck-all cynicism times ten. None of that subdued art-house Schrader stuff. We want depravity-plus…your characters blowing heads off, snorting coke, stabbing fat women in the back. And we also want you to totally torpedo what’s left of your exalted reputation. If you’re willing to do this, we’re prepared to sign the check right now.”

I’m happily surprised about the recently-announced title of Warren Beatty‘s Howard Hughes film — Rules Don’t Apply. I like that it’s vague and anything but on-the-nose, especially given Beatty’s description of the film as a lighthearted dramedy. Rules Don’t Apply is a situational assessment title like Wrong Is Right, Hell Is For Heroes, No Down Payment or Life Stinks. It presumably alludes to a romantic or ethical scenario involving the three main characters (Beatty’s Hughes, Lily Collins‘ Marla Mabrey, Alden Ehrenreich‘s Frank Forbes). The 20th Century Fox release opens on 11.11. If Beatty is smart he’ll take it to Telluride where the odds of a friendly, supportive reception would be high.

It’s easy to get lost in writing, researching and surfing. That’s what I’ve been doing since around 8 pm or thereabouts, to the extent that about 25 minutes ago I looked at my watch and realized I’d missed the 10 pm Salle Bazin screening of Nicholas Winding Refn‘s The Neon Demon. Brilliant. And to think I blew off the 7 pm screening for Laura Poitras‘s respectable but underwhelming Risk. I’m blaming Ryan Werner for this…kidding. It’s my own damn fault.

Favorite Steve Pond review quotes: (a) “Refn’s film brought out the boo birds on Thursday, along with some viewers who couldn’t limit themselves to booing and actually shouted abuse at the screen”; (b) “I’ve seen Cannes films get hostile receptions in the past, but I can’t remember ever hearing a loud ‘fuck it!’ resounding through the Salle Debussy at the end of a film“; (c) “Refn composes every shot for maximum drama, then lingers on them as long as humanly possible. His characters speak so slowly that you could fit entire speeches from Xavier Dolan‘s talky It’s Only the End of the World in the pregnant pauses”; (e) “The whole mess reaches almost sublime levels of utter silliness and questionable taste.”

I’m finding it difficult to write with any feeling about Laura Poitras‘s Risk, a multi-chaptered doc about Wikileaks founder and secret information publisher Julian Assange. Poitras has certainly delivered an interesting, well-assembled, tightly-edited portrait of a guy who bravely made his bed and will probably never be free from governmental harassment and prosecution as long as he lives. But the doc never catches lightning. I knew before seeing Risk this afternoon that it couldn’t hope to duplicate the impact of Citizenfour, Poitras’s Oscar-winning 2014 doc about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and it doesn’t.

The Assange/Wikileaks saga, however admirable and however much I support and sympathize, has gone a bit stale. It peaked during the big revelation years (’06 to ’11 but especially during the publishing of Chelsea Manning documents). And you have to admit that the story seemed to more or less grind to a halt after Assange took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy in August 2012. He’s still there, of course.

I support what Assange did and stands for but after Alex Gibney‘s We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, Assange’s own Mediastan and Benedict Cumberbatch playing Assange in 2013’s The Fifth Estate, what else is there to say?

The doc is too well finessed and particular to be boring. I was noting the three hair-color changes and various haircuts Assange adopted over the years, but I guess it says something about me or the doc or both that I’m even mentioning this. Moments of real political rage pop through now and then, but the most memorable chapter is when Lady Gaga drops by the embassy in the fall of 2012 for a five-hour chat and a cell-phone video interview. Whatever works, right?

Bernie Sanders is behind Hillary Clinton in delegates and certain to lose the Democratic presidential nomination because, very simply, more people have voted for Hillary than Bernie in the various primaries. But also because several Democratic primaries haven’t allowed independents to vote, and because Hillary has much stronger support among African-American and Hispanic voters than Bernie. These are facts. Hillary bros who’ve expressed profound irritation about stubborn, pain-in-the-ass Bernie staying in the race don’t get it, can’t get it. The Bernie thing is not about winning or failing to win the 2016 Democratic convention. It’s about changing the game and fueling a revolution.