I’m not predicting that Gary Ross‘s Free State of Jones (STX, 6.24) is going to be all that great, but at least this trailer seems to promise more in the way of Confederate racist ass-kicking than Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation. That’s the satisfaction element in these sagas, right? Seeing the defenders of an evil, inhumane system catch hell from those who despise slavery? After seeing The Birth of a Nation last January I lamented that the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner (Parker) takes too long to happen and is over too soon. It would appear that Jones, whatever its merits, doesn’t make that mistake.

Talking animated animals are fine; ditto talking tomatoes and celery sticks. But not processed foods. Why? Because all foodstuffs are dead. Even recently picked, fresh-smelling vegetables at outdoor farmer’s markets are dead. All food markets are, in a sense, large, antiseptic funeral homes for foodstuffs composed of elements that were once fresh and alive before they were picked, chopped, slaughtered, refined, pasteurized, reconstituted and corporatized. If you’re drinking fresh milk right out of a warm cow or swallowing the yolk out of freshly-cracked eggs a la Sylvester Stallone in Rocky — okay, not dead. But you certainly can’t get much deader than hot dogs (partly made from the unusable guts of steers scooped up from the slaughterhouse floor) and sausage, which of course were once pigs. (During an early ’80s visit to a working farm in New York State I ate fresh sausage from a recently butchered pig, and the taste was very robust and even spicy but that didn’t change anything.) Therefore the idea that foodstuffs are cute little quipsters with souls, personalities, hopes, dreams and crushes on would-be girlfriends is pathetic.

Yesterday N.Y. Times/”Upshot” columnists Nate Cohn and Toni Monkovic explained why those new polls showing Bernie Sanders doing much better against Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton should be regarded askance. One mitigating factor, Cohn points out, is that “Sanders supporters are a big reason Clinton is doing worse in her polling against Trump. The second is that Sanders hasn’t faced any major attacks on his record. The Republicans have cheered him on against Clinton, whom they realize they’re inevitably going to face. Clinton never really attacked him, either — no big negative television ad buys, for example — in no small part because she didn’t want to alienate his supporters.”

What Cohn and Monkovic fail to mention, of course, is this: while Sanders, who is essentially an FDR-style New Dealer, would be clobbered by Trump for being a “Communist” (an actual Trump description) who will make their lives miserable with higher taxes, Clinton, whose negatives are nearly as high as Trump’s, is going to be hammered just as brutally for all of her alleged transgressions (including, of course, the email thing, for which the FBI will probably not indict her).

This morning I noticed a 5.22 tweet that claimed knowledge of how Cannes Film Festival jury chairman George Miller felt about Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann. The next time I run into Miller I’m going to give him…okay, not a bro hug but certainly a big smile and an upper-arm pat. It can be argued that I’m not the Erdmann hater that Miller is as I walked out on the 162-minute film at the 100-minute mark, but I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m assured that Erdmann has a knockout ending but the only way I would re-watch it would be (a) with a gun at my head, (b) in a straightjacket, and (c) with one of those Clockwork Orange devices attached to my eyelids. My 5.13 review.

The more I meditate upon Jim Jarmusch‘s Paterson, the richer and deeper it gets. That’s usually the mark of an exceptionally good film, just as the opposite principle — an intense sugar-high movie will often dwindle upon reflection — is also true for the most part. Not always, of course, but often enough.

In traditional movie-plot terms nothing and I mean nothing happens in Paterson. No inciting incident, no conflict, no gathering of elements, no second-act pivot point, no climax. It’s all about impressions and meditation. But it’s good. It sticks, gains, expands.

This led to thoughts about other respected films in which “nothing happens.” Nothing, to amplify, in the way of the main character (a) having some specific goal, (b) interacting with or responding to contrarian characters or forces, and (c) finally taking decisive action to achieve a desired end. There are actually two categories — films in which literally nothing happens of any real consequence, and films in which very little happens. But emotional or spiritual journeys always occur.

The most interesting, view-worthy films of the last 20 or so years in which very little happens but which pay off nonetheless: Nebraska, Lost in Translation, Barcelona, Barton Fink, Shame, Hunger, Naked. There are many others. Please advise.

The standouts in which nothing really happens at all: Everybody Wants Some, Clerks, My Dinner With Andre, Dazed and Confused, Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere…what others?

Monday’s weather in Prague was abundantly warm. I wore a black shirt over a T-shirt and after a half-hour of running around I was wishing I’d left the shirt home. And then it turned cloudy, and when it started thunderstorming around 5:30 pm it was hailing for a bit. Where did I get the obviously wrong idea that it had to be at least cool if not cold for hail to happen? I’m doing the research as we speak.

Those uber-industrious Disney guys are looking to milk the Beauty and the Beast cow once more, this time as a live-action musical with Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as the Beast. Bill Condon is directing from a script by Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallfower). The costars are Ewan McGregor, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Stanley Tucci, Ian McKellen, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Audra McDonald, Emma Thompson. Not many remember that the dreaded Robby Benson voiced the Beast in Disney’s 1991 animated version, which made $425 million worldwide. (I took Jett and Dylan to see it when they were three and two years old.) This new Beast will make…oh, much more! But why is the teaser such a tease? A huge empty mansion, sunlight streaming, candles, paintings, a red rose. The design reminds me just a bit of Guillermo del Toro‘s Crimson Peak. Condon’s Beast opens in March 2017.

When he was Variety‘s lead film critic Justin Chang would deliver his opinions with as much tact and finesse as possible. He would sometimes pan films, of course, but in a way that might prompt a reader to say, “Well, I guess this film has certain merits as well.” “Blunt” and “direct” may have been in Chang’s toolbox, but they were rarely used. But they are now that he’s a big-dog critic at the L.A. Times.

In a sharply phrased piece about Sunday’s Cannes Film Festival awards and particularly about the shortcomings of Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake and, more odiously, Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only The End of the World, which won the festival’s Grand Prix (or second place) award, Chang has let go Sam Peckinpah-style.

“In handing Ken Loach his second Palme d’Or for I, Daniel Blake (he won the first Palme in 2006 for The Wind That Shakes the Barley), Miller’s jury, deliberately or not, wound up favoring an angry, relevant message rather than a great work of cinema. Loach inadvertently seemed to confirm as much when he noted in his acceptance speech that film is ‘exciting, it’s fun, and as you’ve seen tonight, it’s also very important.’

“Still, better for the Palme to have gone to Loach than to Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, the 27-year-old world-cinema enfant terrible who pretty much horrified the press audience by inexplicably winning the runner-up Grand Prix for It’s Only the End of the World.

“In my 11 years of attending Cannes I cannot recall a worse jury decision than this one. A badly shot, shrilly performed and all-around excruciatingly misjudged dysfunctional-family torture session that felt far longer than its 97-minute running time, World was by far the least endurable film in competition (and that includes Sean Penn’s dreadful but dreadfully entertaining The Last Face).

Palme d’Or: Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake. HE comment: WHAT? Wrong call, gents. A good film, but not my idea of a really good one, and a long way from greatness. It’s a sturdy, downish Loach-wheelhouse thing about an older craftsman with a heart condition getting the humiliating run-around by the system. The award, I presume, was partly intended as a political statement on behalf of the despairing and dispossessed, and perhaps partly intended as a career achievement award for Loach, as he said his previous film would be his last, etc. Here’s an argument I had with a critic friend about Blake.

Grand Prix: Xavier Dolan, It’s Only The End Of The World. HE reaction: The jury is serious. They really thought this underwhelming pain-in-the-ass film was the second best of the fest. I’m absolutely stunned and appalled. Dolan is an impudent envelope pusher — now this tendency will be even more aggravated. Stop weeping, Xavier. Man up.

Jury Prize: American Honey, dir: Andrea Arnold. HE comment: Divided reactions among journalists/critics but I was down with this film from the get-go.

Best Director: tie between Olivier Assayas, Personal Shopper and Cristian Mungiu, Graduation/Baccalaureat. HE comment: Yes! Shopper was my #1 pick of the festival (I would have given it the Palme d’Or), Graduation was my #2. I love that the jury stood up to the press-screening booers by honoring Assayas.

Best Screenplay: Asghar Farhadi, The Salesman. HE comment: Full, absolute & total approval.

Best Actor: Shahab Hosseini, The Salesman. HE comment: Excellent choice, fully deserved. Earlier today I predicted without much certainty that Paterson‘s Adam Driver would win for Best Actor but then I added, “If it was my call I’d give the award to The Salesman‘s Shahab Hosseini.”

Best Actress: Jaclyn Jose, Ma Rosa. HE comment: I avoided the Mendoza so no comment. Jose overdid the teary, cracky-voiced emotional surprise. (Read: Sally Field, Halle Berry‘s speeches after winning their Best Actress Oscars.) “Oh, they chose me!…oh, oh, oh!…I can’t believe this is really happening!,” etc.

All hail the dismissal of Toni Erdmann, which I hated. Almost the entire press gang was predicting it would win the Palme d’Or. Egg yolk! Okay, not egg yolk but sublime satisfaction in this corner.

Three days ago the Film Society of Lincoln Center unveiled a curious poster for the 54th New York Film Festival (9.30 – 10.16). A miniature industrial-pastoral thing out of Beetlejuice. Two miniature people dolls in a little rowboat on a simulated river running through some kind of industrial refinery or whatever. The important ingredient is that the poster was designed by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The basic equation is that given the respect Weerasethakul enjoys in effete film-festival circles, his poster at the very least warrants interest and respect. To borrow from an idea in Tom Wolfe‘s The Painted Word, it’s not the art itself but the theory behind it that matters. In this instance the “theory” is not conceptual but factual and political. An endorsement by FSLC guys = dynamic, intriguing, something to talk about

Due respect to the Masters of Cinema guys but Robert Aldrich‘s The Flight of Phoenix (’65) isn’t Bluray material. It’s mainly about a crew of older guys arguing about how best to survive being stranded hundreds of miles from anywhere in the middle of the Sahara desert, and finally deciding to build a new plane out of the wreckage of a crashed one. I’ve seen it two or three times on the tube, and as best I can recall it’s nothing more than a decently framed desert-locale thing, shot in color & 1.85 by longtime Aldrich collaborator Joseph F. Biroc, who also shot It’s A Wonderful Life. I certainly don’t remember any mesmerizing visuals. Pic runs 142 minutes, but it has only one truly gripping scene: “Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger) panics when four cartridges fail to start the engine and Towns (James Stewart) wants to use one of the remaining three cartridges just to clear the engine’s cylinders. Dorfmann objects, but Towns ignores him and fires one cartridge with the ignition off. The next cartridge succeeds.” And that’s it! Nothing else pops. I didn’t even see John Moore’s 2004 remake. Did anyone?

In order of preference, the finest films I saw at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival are as follows: Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (the questionable ending is a slight thorn, but it obviously didn’t bother me that much), Cristian Mungiu‘s Graduation, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman, David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, Andrea Arnold‘s pagan-ish Wild Honey, Jim Jarmusch‘s quietly compelling Paterson, and Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Aquarius, which I barely got into here but admired the more I thought about it, particularly for Sonia Braga‘s award-worthy performance as a scrappy apartment-building owner.

What is that, seven? Personal Shopper was the only home run, and to hell with the idea that a ghost story is automatically a genre sideliner and to hell with the press-screening booers. Graduation and The Salesman were the most substantial in terms of their moral/ethical questionings. All three are eligible for recognition at tonight’s big award ceremony. The only ineligible film is Hell or High Water, which was screened as a non-competitor.

Yeah, I’m pretty much resigned to the general presumption among critics that Maren Ade‘s Toni Erdmann, which I hated, will win the Palme d’Or.

If Erdmann is passed over for the Palme d’Or, Grand Prix or the Jury Prize (the last two being the festival’s second and third place film awards), this would allow for the possibility of the Best Actor prize going to Peter Simonischek. Please, God…no. His performance as the film’s titular character, a bulky, yellow-toothed creep who attempts to liberate his daughter (Sandra Huller) from a life of cautious uptight-ism with a series of passive-aggressive put-ons, is one of the most repulsive I’ve ever endured.