If you count Monday, 5.16 (flight arrival, moving into the pad, picking up my pass, buying groceries), this is HE’s ninth day of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Three full days to go plus a wakeup…home stretch. At this point I always take a breather and kick back a bit. And now it’s raining with a little lightning and thunder, and some nice cool air filling the kitchen.
Just two films today — Jean Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ Tori and Lokita, a tragic immigration drama set near Liege, Belgium, about a pair of young, unrelated African kids (Pablo Schils as the younger Tori, Mbundu Joely as the teenaged Lokita) who get exploited and kicked around and treated cruelly by drug-dealing wolves. It ends sadly and shockingly. I didn’t melt down but I felt it.
The Dardennes have always had this plain, unaffected directing style — just point, shoot and watch. Believable characters, realistic dialogue, no musical score. Straight-up realism, a dependable brand. I’ve always emerged from their films saying “yup, that was a good, honest film” but I’ve never really been knocked flat. Because their plain-and-straight signature only penetrates so much. In my case at least.
At 10:30 this evening I’m catching Mario Martine‘s Nostalgia, about an older guy returning to his home town of Naples after a 40-year absence. My insect antennae are telling me not to expect too much, but it feels wrong to waste the opportunity.
Apparently I’m not going to be infected with monkeypox any time soon. Or down the road for that matter. Like everyone else I was mildly freaked at first by those horrific photos of boils and blisters, but fear itself is a virus.
“Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted infection, but experts are suggesting that some of the cases that are happening outside of Africa…may be transmitted through sexual contact.” — Jameisha Presecod, BBC Africa reporter.
NBC report: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating four suspected cases of monkeypox in the United States. All of the cases are in men and related to travel. The individuals in the U.S. reported they had traveled in April, with symptoms appearing in early May, according to the CDC.
“The majority of current cases have been reported in men who have had sex with other men.
“Monkeypox has not been historically considered a sexually transmitted disease. However, it’s transmitted through close physical contact, and can be spread during sex. Two raves held in Spain and Belgium among gay and bisexual men have been connected to the current cases.”
Originally posted on 12.31.15: Two recycled stories about male behavior and character. As perceived by women on dates. They may sound disparate but they share a theme, which is that women respect guys who are frank and don't shilly-shally around.
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Last night I attended a midnight screening of Brett Morgen's Moonage Daydream, a splashy, busy-bee, all-over-the-place, paint-splatter documentary about the great David Bowie, who passed a little more than six years ago.
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David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future, which I caught last night, is basically a play — a dialogue-driven, restricted-locale chamber piece. I felt respect and fascination — the scheme is nothing if not disciplined — and there’s never any doubt that you’re watching a thoughtful, rigorously sculpted effort by a grade-A auteur.
But (and I liked this aspect) it’s quite removed from the kind of gross-out horror film aesthetic that your midnight-movie crowd might enjoy. It’s not elevated horror but a kind of perversely erotic body-probe mood piece, and if you’re the kind of viewer who’s into mad energy and geysers of cinematic pizazz and gooey gore for its own sake, the likely reaction is going to be less along the lines of “holy shit!” and more in the vein of “uhm…what?”
Remove the physical-effects stuff — bizarre surgical slicings, erotic body penetration, superfluous internal organ removal — and the seaside, small-hamlet, sound-stage setting (it was shot in Athens), and you’re left with a presentation that could have been staged at Manhattan’s Cherry Lane theatre or…whatever, on Philco Playhouse back in the early to mid ’50s.
Set in a bizarre future in which pain has been eliminated (hence the various surgeries and excavations without anesthetics) and people are growing strange organs in their chest and stomach cavities, Crimes focuses on a performance-artist couple (Viggo Mortensen‘s “Saul Tenser”‘s and Léa Seydoux‘s “Caprice”) whose show involves the removal of said organs before paying audiences.
Did I mention that Caprice is into tattoo-ing Saul’s organs? (She is, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out why or to what end.) And the hanging, tentacled, oyster-like bed devices that Saul sleeps or meditates in, and a scene in which he and Caprice (naked as jaybirds) share some kind of sexual communion? And that you need to chew on the concept of “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome”?
The main thing is that these flesh slicings and subsequent icky probes are a turn-on for all concerned. You’ve read this before, but the film’s most quoted line is “surgery is the new sex.”
A secondary couple (Don McKellar‘s “Wippet” and Kristen Stewart‘s “Timlin”) are investigators at the National Organ Registry. Admirers of Saul and Caprice, they’re both tingling with anticipation about watching their act.
The key plot element is about Saul deciding whether to include in the show an autopsy of a recently murdered young boy — a kid who had become some kind of plastic-eating mutant. I’ll leave out mentioning his killer, but the boy’s father (Yorgos Karamihos), a guy who eats purple chocolate bars with curious chemical components, is the one pimping the autopsy to Saul.
Cronenberg wrote Crimes of the Future almost a quarter-century ago — in 1998 — and in a 5.23 interview with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn insisted “that he hadn’t changed a word of his original draft when production resources finally came together last year,” Kohn writes.
Cronenberg: “The human condition is the subject of my filmmaking and all art. Right now, these are things that are intriguing in terms of where people are and how they’re living.”
The subhead of Kohn’s article states that Cronenberg “elaborate[s] on the [film’s] complex themes,” and yet at no point in the piece do Kohn or Cronenberg even mention, much less discuss, a somewhat related present-day parallel — the fact that over the last few years gender ideology has brought about surgical alterations in young bodies — puberty blockers, breast removals, genital surgery, other transitional procedures.
With all due respect for Park Chan-wook’s smoothly masterful filmmaking chops (no one has ever disputed this) and the unbridled passion that his cultish film critic fans have expressed time and again...
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He basically said that CG comic-book spectacle films are systematically draining the poetry, music and gravitas out of the moviegoing experience.
Once in a blue moon a big franchise film will hit the magic button and deliver something transcendent. One example was last December’s SpiderMan: No Way Home, which I said over and over should be Best Picture-nominated. But mostly they don’t do this. Mostly they just make money.
Gray argues that the big studios “should be willing to lose money for a couple of years on art film divisions, and in the end they will be happier.”
In less extremist terms, Gray is suggesting that the big boys should consider reverting to the ’90s and early aughts system in which specialty divisions made smaller films — films that weren’t expected to bring in huge profits but didn’t necessarily lose money. Which means, of course, that above-the-title talent would have to accept lower fees for making these films. (And there’s the rub.)
HE version: The studios should at least be willing to make smarthouse flicks with a reasonable shot at breaking even or becoming modestly profitable.
Francois Truffaut once said that when one of the films produced by his company, Les Films du Carrosse, reached break even he and his colleagues would pop open a bottle of champagne.
Brett Morgan‘s David Bowie doc seems innately exciting (and how could it not be?); Park Chan-Wook‘s Decision to Leave looks and sounds exactly like a PCW film. Those actors generating those oppressive actorish expressions…God!
So far the 2022 Cannes Film Festival has felt weak. Okay, pretty good but not good enough. A pair of triples (R.M.N., the first half of Triangle of Sadness) but in terms of terms of excellence or ambition or primal goading madness, no homers or grand slams.
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Come hell or high water, Hollywood Elsewhere intends to see the following films today (Monday, 5.23): (a) Park Chan- Wook‘s Decision to Leave (Salle Debussy, 4:30 pm); (b) David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future (Salle Debussy, 9:45 pm), and (c) Brett Morgen‘s Moonage Daydream (David Bowie doc, 12 midnight, Grand Lumiere).
Don’t kid yourself — Park Chan-Wook has always been a high-style genre wallower. I was willing to play along with Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but Stoker is where I drew the line and said “all right, that’s it!…no more!” By the time The Handmaiden came along I was too alienated to respond.
For years I’ve been hoping that PCW would stop playing to the gallery (i.e., sensation-mongers, fans of visual-for-visual’s-sake) and cut the shit and calm down and use his considerable skills to make a real, serious-minded adult film. But year in and year out, he’s refused. He’s now 58 years old — what’s he gonna do, change?
