HE tried reserving seats for various hot-ticket (5.21) films this morning between 7 and 7:02 am…sorry! Better luck next year! There’s a word for this situation, and that word is “bullshit”.
Thank God I was able to snag a Bazin ticket to a late screening of Joachim Trier’s film…skin of my teeth.
10:45 am update: I’ve been informed by the festival press office that a “technical issue” is befouling the ticket request mechanism. Tickets are available despite the software saying they’re not, which is quite an “issue” indeed.
Late last night I was toasting some pita bread in “le pad” (8 Blvd. Montfleury), and the heat caused the pita to crack apart, so it had to be retrieved. I used a kitchen knife to scoop it out….zotz! The entire place went black, no power, nothing.
No breaker box in the place itself, but there are several boxes in the hallway. Off, on…nothing. I texted with exclamation points and called the landlord….flatline, silencio. No wifi, no computers. Smart phone or nothing.
Update: it’s now 8:35 am and the landlord hasn’t called or even acknowledged the problem via text.
Earlier this afternoon I suffered through most of MaschaSchilinski’sSoundofFalling, and I want credit, dammit, for toughing it out for just short of two hours. (It runs 149minutes.)
A hellish, multi-chapter, visually dreary, narrative hop-around from the perspective of a few suffering women and young girls at different times during the 20th Century, SoundofFalling brings the grim and the soul-drain in the usual suffocating ways.
You could say that the soft, muddy, under-lighted cinematography is meant to inject the same shitty, misery-pit, lemme-outta-here feeling the women and girls are experiencing at every turn. Sure, I’ll buy that.
Is Schilinski an auteur — a feisty, willful, go-for-it filmmaker with a persistence of artistic vision and a stylistic stamp all her own (albeit a stamp that brings you down, down, down)? Yes, she is that.
Does her film have something to say? You’d better believe it. It’s saying that 20th Century farm women in northern Germany were miserable as fuck, and that the men were either smelly pigs or abusers or both, and that most of them smoked and a few had massive pot bellies.
SoundofFalling doesn’t make you think about dying before your time, but it does prompt thoughts of escape early on.
On top of which I was sitting in the Grand Lumière balcony, scrunched between two women and with no leg room at all, and my thighs and calves were stuck in a kind of purgatory, suspended between numbness and screaming pain.
But I didn’t leave for the longest time. I wanted to but I couldn’t be the first balcony-sitter to bail. I said this to myself — “no quitting until a couple of viewers go first”.
So I hung in there with the patience of Job, waiting for some intrepid soul to man up and bolt the fuck outta there, but nobody did for the first…oh, 100 minutes or so.
And then a woman got up and walked. And then another. Thank you, sisters, and thank you, my sweet Lord…glory be to God!
I stood up with my bag and retreated to the main walkway, and then decided to watch from a standing position. And then another person threw in the towel. And then another. And then a trio of Zoomers left at the same time. Hey, we’re reallylivin’here!!!
I’ve never felt such wonderful kinship with strangers as I did at that moment.
Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totallyraved about Schilinski’s punisher.
I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.
Average Joes and Janes, trust me, are going to hate, hate, hate this exactingly assembled, artistically pulverizing tourdeforce.
The cabin windows are open, the sun is bright and the cloud-free sky is a gleaming light blue as our SAS flight approaches Copenhagen. It’s 8:26am in Copenhagen, 2:26am in NYC and 11:26pm in Los Angeles. I’ve gotten maybe 90 minutes of sleep, if that. HE’s connecting flight to Nice leaves from CPH terminal 3 at 11 am. Nice touchdown at 1:25 pm.
The long-retired Brigitte Bardot, who turned 90 on 9.28.24, is obviously no #MeToo advocate. Earlier today she told BFM that she believes renowned French actor Gerard Depardieu, 76, who will soon face an array of sexual assault charges (13 women have accused him) under the French legal system, should be left alone.
This can only be filed under the general category of eccentric opinions. Bardot and Fanny Ardant aside, no one on the planet earth seriously believes that swaggering, hard-drinking, old-school rich guys known for occasional ornery behavior (like Depardieu) should just be forgiven and cut loose when it comes to allegations of louche or unlawful sexual behavior…nobody.
Several Fairfield County homies (myself among them) during the Nixon administration, posing on the side porch of a large, ramshackle, six-bedroom home in Southport, CT. There was a small barn out back where we’d pass the pipe around. The guy in the striped T-shirt made a 16mm short in which I starred, called Beyond Embarassment. I’ve never forgotten what a friend wrote on the dining room wall: “We are all merely sea men.”
Glenn Kenny’s toxic acidity is a really ugly thing to endure (especially in my case), but it’s to his credit that he was able to put his snide anti-conservative prejudice to one side while reviewingDavid Mamet’s Henry Johnson.
Posted on 6.9.15: “Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre.
“She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is.) But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy. “
My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Maugham‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “
She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit she didn’t even open her eyes). Now, at last, her peace is absolute.
Amelie Bonnin ‘s PartirUnJour (lowered expectations) at 9 am, the Chris McQuarrie thing at 12:30 pm, MaschaSchilinski’s SoundofFalling at 3:30 pm, ixnay on the Robert DeNiro thing, MI: FinalReckoning at 6:45 pm, Sergei Loznitsa’sTwoProsecutors at 10:15 pm. Four films. Come hell or high water, I must commit at 1 am eastern, tonight.
