Chris Petit‘s Radio On (’79) may be the most lethargic and downish “cruising the motorway while listening to cool music” film ever made. Nothing “happens,” it goes nowhere, and the energy levels are almost nonexistent. And yet it captures something, although I know not what. It gets into your head and somehow sticks to your ribs.

Martin Schaefer‘s black-and-white cinematography captures what it felt like to be all listless and bummed out in England 42 or 43 years ago. Bummed verging on catatonic, I mean. It captures what it felt like be a sullen, morose, borderline nihilistic, soft-spoken hipster with a cutting edge flat-top haircut (fuck you!), tooling around and listening to all the late ’70s cool groups — Police, Devo, Kraftwerk, Spandau Ballet, Dire Straits, Cheap Trick, The Rumour, The Clash — on the car radio as you were going nowhere in the rain, thinking nothing and barely awake…just plotzing in the driver’s seat, nodding out, dreaming about possibly scoring some heroin.

A friend and I were discussing the strength of Academy-voter enthusiasm for Nicole Kidman‘s performance in Being The Ricardos.

I honestly like and respect her Lucille Ball as far as it goes, but I’m not getting the Best Actress fervor. Put it this way: I admired her in Being The Ricardos, but I like Lucille Ball‘s performances in Five Came Back or Too Many Girls a bit more.

We all know what the Nicole narrative was before everyone saw Being The Ricardos. “She’s wrong for the part, doesn’t look like Lucy, they should have hired Debra Messing,” etc. Then it opened and everyone said “oh, Nicole’s better than we expected…not bad!” And then somehow that got turned into Best Actress Oscar heat.

Kidman’s Lucy is satisfactory but is it Oscar-level good? She’s fine but it’s almost laughable to even compare her Lucy performance to Penelope Cruz in Parallel Mothers.

While Jordan Ruimy also approves of Kidman’s Lucy performance, he claims it isn’t as good as she was in To Die For, Birth, The Hours, The Others, Moulin Rouge, Destroyer, Birthday Girl, Bombshell, The Paperboy, Rabbit Hole, Portrait of a Lady and Dogville.

This led me to wonder what David Thomson, author of “Nicole Kidman” (’08) and arguably her greatest fan, thinks of her work in Being The Ricardos. So I reached out and Thomson replied as follows:

“I agree with Jordan. I think Being the Ricardos is an absurd project that ends up dejected. Whereas the younger Kidman could take silly ventures and make them seem necessary. I don’t think Kidman is turned on by Lucille, whereas we felt she was eating To Die For (among others) alive.”

Alternate Thomson take: “Miraculously Kidman could channel her sexuality into the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf [in The Hours], but she can muster none of that interest in Lucille Ball. I suspect she [had] dreamt of being Woolf but finds Ball a pain in the neck. Just guessing.”

Has Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation ever looked bad? Not to my knowledge. I’ve seen it four or five times, and it’s always looked fine. That said, it might be nice to catch one of the shows at the Nuart. Except I’ve never “liked” the Nuart. It’s shaped like a bowling alley with a too-small screen where the bowling pins would be.

…is only a motion away.

I thought after the spread of Omicron that the dates of Cannes ’22 might be up in the air. But apparently they’re intending to hold it between Tuesday, 5.16 and Saturday, 5.28. I haven’t been there since 2019 but I’m looking to attend this one. So I’m sending off my credential request and sniffing around for lodging, preferably someplace small and cramped and appropriate for hand-to-mouth journalists on a budget. No balcony views, single beds, tiny kitchens, etc.

It was decided early on that Kristen Stewart‘s Princess Diana in Spencer would be campaigned for Best Actress, and I mean before anyone had seen Pablo Larrain‘s film. Once I saw it in Telluride I knew for a fact that it stunk, and was basically a dream-trip, loony-tune Diary of a Mad Princess. Knowing all the while that Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is easily her best movie ever.

Did Stewart’s “people” even consider promoting her Personal Shopper performance for Best Actress? Of course not. Because your empty-Coke-bottle Academy members never vote for a lead character in a scary movie.

So I feel rather badly for Stewart — she knocked it out of the park almost six years ago and nobody gave enough of a shit. She does a decent job as crazy Diana in the mediocre, mostly-painful-to-sit-through Spencer and people are going “oh, she’s so wonderful!” Because she’s playing the tragic princess.

For me, Personal Shopper deliver the biggest high of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It left me breathless and even a trembling a bit.

“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.

From “The January 6th Criminal Case Against Donald Trump,” posted by The New Yorker‘s David Rhode on 1.5.22…

Not to mention the Beatles’ “Come and Get It” and their 1964 hit, “Lies”. Please name other songs played by artists or bands who never played them.