Hats off to whomever (outside ad agency or in-house Fox Searchlight team) for creating this above-average Birth of a Nation one-sheet. Rousing, classy, half-convincing historical font. (It actually looks more like a 18th Century font but we’ll let that go.) I can see the award-season ads in my head.

I caught a Critics Week film over at the Miramar a couple of days ago. (I didn’t like the film that much so we’ll let that part go.) I was sitting on the right aisle with four empty seats to my right. The theatre was filling up quickly. A group of five well-off Asian kids (early 20s) came along and piled into the four but with one of their group stranded. The kid next to me asked if I’d mind sitting in the row in front so they could all sit together, but the seat in question was two seats in from the aisle and I like to stretch out so “sorry, nope.” So the fifth kid took it.

Then they all decided to sit in the row behind because it had five open seats, but then some guy and his girlfriend returned from the bathroom or someplace and said “wait, two of these seats are ours…we saved them.” The couple had followed the ancient custom of leaving an article (jacket, bag) to mark the seats so the quintet had no argument. So four of them re-occupied the seats in my row with the fifth guy again left high and dry so he sat right behind them.

The four hypers were chattering, giggling. Two girls got up just before the film started (presumably to hit the head), returning about six or seven minutes later. I managed to keep my eyes on the subtitles as I stood up to let them pass.

Why is Trump suddenly doing much better than anyone else had expected at this stage? God forbid what might happen when he starts going nuclear on Hillary and gradually driving up her negatives. Why, given an abundance of evidence that Trump is a grotesque and hateful manifestation of every small and ugly impulse among the worst people in this country, is he suddenly within spitting distance of out-polling her? Because a lot of people whose incomes are stagnant or shrunken want a big-change candidate, and they see Hillary as bringing more of the same. Which is why Bernie, despite his inability to win the Democratic nomination, would almost certainly do better against Trump. (As polls have shown.) Because Bernie has tapped into the same pool of voter despair, albeit in a constructive and intelligent way.

“[A] captivating, bizarre, tense, fervently preposterous and almost unclassifiable scary movie from Olivier Assayas…a film which delivers the bat-squeak of pure craziness that we long for at Cannes, although at the first screening some very tiresome people continued the festival’s tradition of booing very good films.

“It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date — she stars in a supernatural fashionista-stalker nightmare where the villain could yet be the heroine’s own spiteful id. Is it The Devil Wears Prada meets The Handmaiden (also in Cannes) with a touch of Single White Female?” — The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw.

“How the hell did this movie get made? We pose this question in genuine awe, with absolutely no hint of back-biting consternation. Occasionally it’s a genre movie, then it’s a study of grief, then a satire, then a murder mystery and then a Hitchcockian thriller, and sometimes it manages to be all that and more in the very same moment.

“Assayas taps a wellspring of thought on forms of communication [while drawing] parallels between 19th century drawing room seances and Skype calls. In Personal Shopper, death is just another form of alienation, a physical remove from a person we once knew. Words themselves come under close scrutiny, and Assayas asks if we can ever truly connect with another person if we’re not standing right in front of them and communing fully with the senses. The incessant buzz of a smartphone becomes an attention-grabbing scream from out of the ether.” — Little White Lies’ David Jenkins.

The first-anywhere unveiling of the restored version of Marlon Brando‘s One-Eyed Jacks happened late last night, and it looked truly wonderful in every respect.  Yes, that includes the aspect ratio. I’ve been arguing that the restorers, Universal Home Video and The Film Foundation, should have gone with a somewhat more liberal 1.75 or 1.78 a.r. instead of an announced cropping of 1.85. My tried-and-true “why needlessly slice off that luscious head room?” argument was posted time and again.

Well, guess what? The Jacks a.r. didn’t look like 1.85 to me — it definitely looked more like 1.75. Speaking as an ex-projectionist and an a.r. fanatic second to none I know exactly and precisely what 1.85 vs. 1.75 are shaped like, and I’m telling you there’s an ample amount of headroom in every shot. To my enormous relief Jacks didn’t feel cut off or cramped in the slightest. And that, to me, spells 1.75.

My guess is that the film was indeed shown at 1.75. I was sitting right there in the second row, repeatedly calibrating the a.r. with my eye and my gut, tilting my head 90 degrees to the right and assessing the geometry, and I can’t accept that what I saw last night was cropped at 1.85. My guess is that the film was screened at 1.75 (the French have their own ways) but that the Bluray will pop at 1.85, or with a tiny bit less height. I’ve got an email out to Universal’s Peter Schade and The Film Foundation’s Margaret Bodde (both of whom delivered opening remarks) to suss this out.

I have to leave for the Salle Bunuel for the 10:30 pm One-Eyed Jacks screening but first I have to at least post my tweets about Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, which broke around 40 minutes ago. The mostly Paris-based ghost story starring Kristen Stewart as (I know this sounds strange) a combination personal shopper and clairvoyant. which broke around 90 minutes go. More of a spooker than a “horror film,” but absolutely fresh and world-class in that realm. On par with Robert Wise‘s The Haunting, and I don’t care if every Tom, Dick and Harry agrees with me or not. (My flat-mate didn’t care for it.) This is a knockout, trust me.

I’m presuming there are hundreds of thousands of youngish or middle-aged people out there who are more or less content to live modest lives of regularity and security in minor, out-of-the-way burghs. There are, of course, many more who dream of The Life Kardashian — fame, stardom, super-wealth. So in this era of grotesque values you have to chuckle if not guffaw about Jim Jarmusch having made a film that basically says (a) “fuck all that,” (b) “turn it down and plant spiritual growth seeds” and (c) “dare to be dull in the ironic sense of that term.”

Paterson is about a lanky young bus driver (Adam Driver) and his Iranian wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) who live with a subversive prick dog named Marvin in a small dumpy house in Paterson, New Jersey and generally follow routines of almost astounding modesty — not hanging with friends, not partying, not doing Manhattan clubs on weekends…none of that.

Well, maybe Laura would like a little fun and frolic but Driver’s guy, who of course is also named Paterson, doesn’t even own a smart phone. All he wants is to write poetry in a little composing book. During work breaks, evenings in the cellar. Not to become “famous” but to one day write one-half or even one-third as well as famed Paterson poet William Carlos Williams. The quiet writing life and a general reverence for poetry becomes more and more of a thing as the film develops. Paterson itself is trying to be a kind of small, minimalist poem.

A curious claim about the late Mike Nichols is made in a 5.15.16 L.A. Review of Books piece by Manuel Betancourt (“Mike Nichols’s Disappearing Act”). He writes that “Nichols’s aesthetic (or lack thereof) denied him access to the most enduring of film studies labels, that of auteur. [Because] if there was a signature to be found in his films, it was perhaps that he had none.”

Betancourt mentions that Bruce Weber‘s N.Y. Times obit stated that Nichols “did not create a recognizable visual style or a distinct artistic signature.” He also writes that “Nichols’s direction is often seen as one that merely gets out of the actors’ ways,” and that his films are known “for [a] lack of obvious visual flourishes (no dolly zooms, no distracting jump cuts) that suggest a transparent style that attempts to mimic the mere observation of reality.”

In fact Nichols was known for an unmissable auteurist signature that he relied on for about eight years (’67 to ’75) — the static, ultra-carefully composed, long-take visual scheme that defined The Graduate, Catch 22, The Fortune and particularly Carnal Knowledge.

I explained it in my 11.20.14 Nichols obit. The long-take observation was passed along years ago by longtime Nichols collaborator Richard Sylbert. This signature, Sylbert believed, was what elevated Nichols into the Movie God realm.

“On a thematic level, Top Gun is all about machismo (a major theme in all of Tony Scott’s work), and how men deal with expectations, loss, tragedy, acceptance and success. Those classic scenes in the shower (or during a particular game of beach volleyball) seem homoerotic in hindsight, but what they’re really about is men trying to one up each other, trying to figure out how to best your opponent, and always remembering that there are no points for second place.

“To say that Top Gun is one of the most macho movies ever made would be understatement; you can practically smell the testosterone on the set. I’ve often wondered if PA’s were kept solely for the purpose of spraying down the actors with water in order to simulate excessive sweat, because everyone is glistening in this film.” — from an essay by HE’s own Nick Clement about the 30th anniversary of Top Gun.

I had slight forebodings about Jeff Nichols‘ Loving, which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. Mainly whether a dramatization of the once-controversial interracial marriage between Mildred and Richard Loving would amount to anything more than a rote retelling. And I worried that the combination of Southern drawls (particularly Joel Edgerton‘s) combined with the notoriously bassy sound system in the Grand Lumiere would make for difficult listening.

Joel Edgerton, Ruth Negga in “teaser” poster for Jeff Nichols’ Loving.

Well, the film is slightly better than I expected. A warm, measured, adult-level thing. I wasn’t doing handstands in the lobby but I was telling myself “hmmm, okay, not bad.”

It’s less fact-specific than I would have preferred, and there’s the usual emphasis on emotional rapport and interplay and fine, nicely underplayed performances, my favorite being Ruth Negga‘s as Mildred. And at 123 minutes it feels maybe 20 minutes too long. And if you’re at all familiar with the facts or if you happened to catch Nancy Buirski‘s The Loving Story, a 2012 HBO doc, it’ll be hard to avoid a feeling of being narratively tied down.

But Loving is a compassionate, plain-spoken, better-than-decent film that will amost certainly pick up some award-season acclaim, particularly some Best Actress talk for Ms. Negga’s kindly, sad-eyed wife and mom. I suspect she’s the hottest contender right now for the festival’s Best Actress prize.

Nathan Morlando‘s Mean Dreams isn’t blazingly original, but I found it a handsome, pared-down thing that doesn’t give in to the usual blam-blam when a gun is purchased and push comes to shove. If a cover band really knows how to perform classic Malick rock — Badlands meets Cop Car meets Ain’t Them Bodies Saints meets A Simple Plan meets No Country for Old Men — and they include a riff or two of their own then I really don’t see the problem.

It isn’t how familiar something seems as much as how spare and straight the chops feel. Take, assimilate, make anew.  And the quality of the performances, which in this case struck me as near-perfect in the case of co-leads Josh Wiggins and Sophie Nelisse, and a bad-cop, pervy-dad turn by Bill Paxton that…okay, felt a little moustache-twirly at times and yet acceptable enough in the context of greed, alcohol and obsession. Plus Colm Meaney‘s slightly less corrupt lawman plus Steve Cosens‘ handsome cinematography and a sometimes slammy percussive score by Son Lux…solid as far as it goes.

And then along came Variety‘s Guy Lodge and The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney last night with pooh-pooh reviews, essentially calling it too derivative and/or not twisty enough. I felt a little queasy as I read these reviews around 11 pm last night, as if some kind of virus had gotten into my system from the wrong kind of seafood. Lodge and Rooney and whomever else are entitled to piss on anything they want but I know it when a film feels steady and restrained and is more or less up to something honorable.

So that didn’t seem right but this has occasionally felt like a kind of Twilight Zone-y festival so far with films that I’ve felt somewhat distanced if not repelled by catching a decent amount of acclaim. Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann is example #1 in this regard. There’s actually a belief that it’s the strongest Palme d’Or contender thus far. Words fail. May God spare me the appalling physicality and personality of Peter Simonischek‘s performance for the rest of my time on this planet.

I’m certain that despite being overly long and a lack of a compelling, complete-feeling narrative that Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey more than compensates in other ways. And I agree with the consensus (which I haven’t time to get into with the 8:30 am Loving screening breathing down my neck) about Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson being one of the best thus far, at least in terms of knowing itself, holding back and dealing clean, reverent cards.

It’s 1 am, I haven’t posted zip for 12 hours, and I have to get up five hours hence — terrific. It’s not that I didn’t do a lot — I just couldn’t find the discipline to tap something out in the margins. I attended the American Honey press conference and caught three films (Nathan Morlando‘s Mean Dreams at the subterranean Director’s Fortnight theatre, Asaph Polonsky‘s One Week and a Day at Critics’ Week and Jim Jarmusch‘s much-admired Paterson at the Salle Debussy) over a six hour-period, and then despite trepidations I hit the Amazon party from 10 to 11 pm. Jarmusch’s was the best of the three, but you need to be fully receptive to “restrained”, “minimalist”, “subdued” and “poem-like” to settle into it. (Just saying.) I don’t mind stating I’m a huge fan of Morlando’s film, which, yes, is derivative (it’s basically Badlands meets Cop Car) but is very handsome and well considered for that effort, and I’m furious that both Variety‘s Guy Lodge and The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney blew it off. All I can do now is post photos and then get up at 5 am (Monday) for more filing before hitting the 8:30 am screening of Jeff Nichols‘ Loving.

Three or four of us managed to get American Honey director-writer Andrea Arnold to hang around and answer a few more questions following Sunday afternoon’s press conference.

Carrie Fisher during Saturday’s American Pavillion press conference about Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens‘ Bright Lights starring Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, not just an in-depth capturing of Reynolds and Fisher’s mother-daughter relationship but a blunt, no-holds-barred portrait of the ravages of aging and coping with same.

Mean Dreams‘ Nathan Morlando during Saturday’s Deadline party.

During American Honey press conference (l. to r.) — Shia Labeouf, director-writer Andrea Arnold, Sasha Lane, Riley Keough.

Group photo at Sunday evening’s Amazon party.

Critics inside Salle Debussy awaiting the 7[m showing of Jim Jarmusuch’s Paterson.

One Week and a Day director Asaph Polonsky, also during Deadline party.

Mean Dreams costars Josh Wiggins, Sophie Nélisse following this afternoon’s showing at Director’s Fortnight.