Jeffrey Wells

Ryan Gosling’s idea, I’m presuming, was that post-Barbie he needed to butch himself up, hence the 19th Century gold prospector beard and the styled but un-styled Sutter’s Mill coif. At the same time he didn’t want to over-smother the Barbie association, hence the unbuttoned, chest-baring black shirt and the pink western duster

Saying ixnay to SEXISM, RACISM, FATPHOBIA, HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA, ABLEISM (i.e., giving shit to handicapped people and generally lording it over them) and HATEFULNESS is well and good and noble. But of course wokesters are the spiritual fathers and mothers of AGEISM, or a general all-around dismissal of older white people (and males in particular) who “don’t get” or have otherwise barked at the tenets of woke Maoism. Nobody is more ageist than wokesters — they own it from here to eternity, and it will be carved into their gravestones.

There is no apparent visual evidence that famed director Howard Hawks was ever young. There are many indications, in fact, that he was literally born at age 46 with short silver-gray hair and wearing a series of exquisitely tailored tweed sport jackets.

Hawks gradually aged, of course, into his 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. He passed at age 81 in December 1977.

Which other Hollywood heavyweights were never young or at least persuaded a good portion of the world that they began their lives in their 40s?

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Never, ever wear whitesides to an Oval Office meeting. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries is a good hombre and a skilled operator, but in this instance he should be ashamed of himself. If you’re sporting whitesides you might as well wear knee-length beach shorts or a silky floral print shirt. We’re speaking of plaster cracks in the once-great wall of traditional civilization here. Certain sartorial instincts should be suppressed at all costs.

I mean, will you look at those light blue, horizontally-striped “happy” socks? Seriously…imagine getting dressed for the Oval Office meeting and actually saying to yourself “yeah, these socks definitely work for a White House conference about the debt ceiling…I’ll put them on.”

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.