Now I don’t even have to see Ryan Gosling’s Lost River. The trailer makes it quite clear that this reputed “fantasy thriller” suffers from the good old “trying too hard” impulse that many first-time-filmmakers succumb to. It may be somewhat influenced by Rubber‘s Quentin Dupieux, but it’s probably going to suck eggs. I’m obliged to see it, of course (Tuesday afternoon, 2 pm, Salle Debussy) but I have a pretty good idea what this is going to be. We all do. Iain de Caestacker plays the sensitive-faced son of Christina Hendricks. The “look at my muscles!” guy is Matt Smith. Also featuring Eva Mendes, Saoirse Ronan, Ben Mendelsohn and Barbara Steele.

Earlier this evening I stood uncomfortably rock-still for a good 30 minutes outside the Salle Bunuel for a 7:30 pm screening of Pablo Fendrik‘s El Ardor, which, by the way, is slow and uninteresting. We had to wait a good 15 or 20 minutes longer than we should have because a screening of Steve James‘ Life Itself, the excellent Roger Ebert doc, ran late. And then instead of the crowd exiting when the doc was over, James and Chaz Ebert (i.e., Roger’s widow) apparently decided to have a nice leisurely q & a inside while a couple of hundred people outside melted and suffered. The air began to lose sufficient oxygen, the body heat was oppressive, and the crowd was getting angry and unruly. “That’s Cannes,” a British journalist told me. “That’s how they do things here. Get used to it.”

Last night TheWrap‘s Steve Pond posted a piece titled “Cannes At The Halfway Point: Where’s The Excitement?” Well, I’ll tell you, Steve. Cannes excitement has definitely been sparked by two films thus far — Damian Szifon‘s Wild Tales and David Cronenberg‘s Map to the Stars. Sharon Waxman, Pond’s boss, filed almost the exact same story during last year’s Cannes festival…”nothing’s really happened yet, where’s the pizazz?,” etc.

Yesterday the N.Y. Post‘s Susan Edelman revealed a list of tacky knick-knacks being sold at the new 9/11 Museum Gift Shop. Included are (a) FDNY, NYPD and Port Authority Police T-shirts and caps, (b) earrings molded from leaves and blossoms of downtown trees, (c) cop and firefighter charms by Pandora and other jewelers; and (d) “United We Stand” blankets. Not to mention 9/11 bracelets, bowls, buttons, mugs, mousepads, magnets, key chains, flags, pins, stuffed animals, toy firetrucks, cellphone cases, tote bags, books and DVDs. “Even FDNY vests for dogs come in all sizes,” Edelman reports. Why don’t they sell photos of dead jumpers while they’re at it? What gets me is that visiting adults have to pay $24 to even get into the store. What’s the difference, I’m wondering, between this and similar items (tasteful scale models of prisoner barracks, little Nazi ashtrays, little toy Doberman Pinschers) being sold in a gift shop at the Dachau and Auschwitz museums?

Here are three mp3s from this morning’s Foxcatcher press conference, which was attended by (left to right in pic below) Mark Ruffalo, Channing Tatum, director Bennett Miller, Steve Carell, producer Megan Ellison. Here’s the entire press conference, start to finish. At one point Chaz Ebert asked Miller about having gotten exceptional performances not just from his Foxcatcher cast but particularly from the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whom Miller directed in Capote — here’s his halting emotional response. A little later on Miller explained that you can capture a world or a situation with a telescope or a microscope, and that Foxcatcher uses the latter approach.

(l. to r.) Ruffalo, Miller, Carell, Tatum.

Speaking as a devoted admirer of Bennett Miller‘s Capote and Moneyball, it gives me no pleasure to admit that I feel a tad less enthusiastic about Foxcatcher, which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s no doubt that Foxcatcher is very strong and precise and clean, especially as crime dramas tend to go. And I respect the fact that it contains undercurrents that stay with you, and I certainly respect and admire what Miller has done here with his deft and subtle hand. But the obviously intelligent Foxcatcher is a relentlessly bleak trip that, accomplished as it is, isn’t especially likable or enjoyable. Okay, I “liked” it or…you know, I didn’t “dislike” it because it’s so well-made and refined, etc. But it’s basically a grim study of a dark tale about victims and affluent malevolence and corrupting wealth, and about fate surrounding the characters like tentacles and sucking them down the drain.

No savvy players, no smart detectives, no wise guys, no sex, no heroes, no winners, no zingy dialogue…its a down concerto from start to finish.

Please don’t get me wrong — this is a carefully honed, highly disciplined smart-guy melodrama. I admire the shit out of it, and I will never speak ill of it. But it’s still a downbeat thing about the pursuit of Olympic wrestling glory by a couple of weird obsessives — the late multimillionaire and convicted murderer John DuPont (Steve Carell), and real-life, grim-faced 1984 Olympic wrestling champion Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) — and Mark’s kind-hearted, steady, positive-minded older brother Dave Schultz (Mark Ruffalo), a married ex-wrestler and coach who got caught in the middle when DuPont shot him to death in 1996. The film is about creepy currents and unstated agendas that lead to perplexing tragedy, and it all happens in gloomy rural Pennsylvania — an atmosphere that has always seemed to have a narcotic-like effect upon my system or mood or whatever. I only know that whenever I’m in rural Pennsylvania I want to escape.

The obviously legendary, hugely influential, always blunt-spoken Gordon Willis has died. The man was and always will be a collossus among cinematographers, right up there with Gregg Toland, Conrad Hall, the Sunrise guys (Karl Struss, Charles Rosher) and all the others profiled in Todd McCarthy‘s Visions of Light. I have to catch an 8:30 am Foxcatcher screening in 40 minutes so I’ll just use a quote from Time Out‘s Steven Garrett, to wit: “More than any other director of photography, Willis defined the cinematic look of the 1970s: sophisticated compositions in which bolts of light and black put the decade’s moral ambiguities into stark relief.”

David Cronenberg‘s Map To The Stars (Weinstein Co., 9.26) is not just a brilliant, black-as-night satire of soul-less, impossibly fucked-up Hollywood players, although it’s certainly that in part. And it’s not just a film that will send Justin Beiber and his representatives into saliva-sputtering fits due to the fact that Beiber is clearly the model for a 13 year-old TV superstar named Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) — an ice-cold, soul-dead monster who has the makings of a junior-league Hannibal Lecter. What Map to The Stars does altogether — and this is what makes it an historic film within the Cronenberg canon, and which may result in winning the Palme d’Or or some special distinction prize of some kind — is jump off a kind of grand guignol cliff. I went in expecting a stiff swig of vinegar and a smart-ass spoof, but Map, which was written by Bruce Wagner (Force Majeure), is much darker and more visionary and at the same time much more sincere in an unforced, even-handed way.

This is how you do a lethal comic satire, by having the cast perform and behave like they’re not kidding or winking in the slightest, like they really mean it…seriously. Map really cuts to the rancid bone of Hollywood fuckwad culture in a mad-brushstroke way. I think…no, I know it’s Cronenberg’s best since A History of Violence or Spider, and before that Crash, Dead Ringers and The Dead Zone. Julianne Moore owns it pretty much as a nearly over-the-hill actress who’s desperate to stay in the game, but everyone else is on the same page here — John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson (yes, he’s on the stick), Sarah Gadon and the afore-mentioned Bird. They all get what’s going on, and it’s all quite perfect and complete.

There are two…well, technically three versions of The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (Weinstein Co., 9.26) — a Him/Her version (which constitutes two films) and a Them/mashup version. I didn’t see The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him and Her at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, but it took 191 minutes to tell the same breakup story from the differing perspectives of James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain‘s characters. Word around the campfire is that Him/Her is a more interesting film than the 123-minute Them, which tells the same tale but in a neutral-ish way. In any event I saw Them yesterday in Cannes, and I can tell you three…no, four things:

(1) Them is an intimately rendered, believably performed adult relationship piece that “does it right,” for the most part. It’s about character and trust and need and longing and trauma, and it deserves all the nice things that have been said about it. As such it casts…how to say it?…a certain favor upon director-writer Ned Benson, at least in terms of how it feels as it moves along during the first hour;

(2) I lost patience at the one-hour mark because I suddenly realized nothing was really happening — the story is about a breakup (due to an initially unexplained tragedy) and a possible rapproachment, but it boils down to being about a series of sometimes intriguing, sometimes meandering conversations between family members and friends with little hints of character thrown in from time to time…but nothing really happens in a semi-decisive, plot-propelling sense…nothing that makes you say “oh, that was interesting, what just occured”;

(3) The conversations between Chastain and Viola Davis‘s sardonic, world-weary NYU professor character started to bother me after a while. I started to ask myself, “Why am I supposed to give a shit about what Davis thinks about anything? What is she, Moses down from the mountain? Why doesn’t she just zip it?”;

(4) In the middle of an intimate moment that may signal a new beginning for their relationship, McAvoy tells Chastain that he had it off with another woman (a restaurant co-worker played by Nina Arianda) but not in a way that meant anything. Good God, man…never tell someone you love about any intimate contact (recent or otherwise) with another woman EVER. Respond to questions but never, ever offer that. Any guy who’s dumb enough to do what McAvoy does in this scene doesn’t have my allegiance or rooting interest. When this happened I said to myself, “All right, that’s it…this guy is an emotional idiot…he doesn’t deserve to get back together with Jessica Chastain.”

Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Homesman screened early Sunday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, and it deserves no more than a modest salute. Just because it’s a feminist western with an oddly unusual story that regards the plight of Old West women in a compassionate light…that doesn’t mean it gets a pass. It basically says that life on the prairie could be so brutal and unforgiving that some women went plumb out of their heads; it also says some were so gripped with despair that they offed themselves. That’s a new kind of sadness to bring into a western, and that’s what The Homesman is selling. But that doesn’t mean I have to jump up and click my politically-correct heels and go “whoo-hoo, a great western because it looks at the female side of things!”

Based on a 1988 novel by Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist, Where The Boys Are), it’s a well-made, handsomely-shot drama (set in Nebraska territory) with a few plot turns that are just too what-the-fucky to add up or calculate in a way that feels right. It’s an odd, minor-key effort at best.