Cannes Film Festival-wise, we’re looking at a COVID-19 flashing amber situation. Pack two or three boxes of pre-moistened sanitizing hand towelettes. Who isn’t imagining scores of journos adorned in N95 face masks, waiting to get into the Salle Debussy? I’ve been expecting to see a drop in NYC-Milan RT fares — so far coach prices are hovering around $600. Is that really the best they can do?

“For once, [here was] a genre movie built around an anti-progressive premise. The Hunt, which was due for release on 9.27.19, at least sounded contrarian. But Trump doesn’t have the most finely tuned irony gauge, [and] seemed unable to understand that the globalists in the film are plainly the bad guys and that the trailer was satirizing rather than saluting the hunters it portrays.

“We weren’t meant to see events from their point of view, but were to put ourselves in deplorable shoes. For once, a major Hollywood film studio was about to release a movie sympathetic to Trump voters.” — from “Pro-Trump Movie Cancelled, Thanks to Trump,” posted by National Review critic Kyle Smith on 8.11.19.

The 15-person staff of Cahiers du Cinéma (including editor-in-chief Stéphane Delorme) has resigned after the publication’s sale to a group of film producers (including A Prophet producer Pascal Caucheteu) and tech-finance philistines.

The issue was over editorial purity. The staffers claimed that the new owners would “create a conflict of interest for a critical publication…whatever articles are published, there would be a suspicion of interference.”

The staffers were also dismayed about the new owners wanting to turn the nearly 70-year-old publication “into a more relaxed and fashionable read.”

Launched in 1951 and renowned as the spiritual birthplace of the French nouvelle vague, Cahiers du Cinema has lasted longer than any other devotional film-dweeb publication. Its closest American counterpart, Film Comment, is approaching its 50th anniversary, having begun publishing in ’72.

Nobody wants to see Cahiers du Cinema slip beneath the waves, but aside from the venerable The New Yorker, which has been publishing for 95 years, all legendary magazines give up the ghost sooner or later. Times and attitudes change, etc.

The first version of Vanity Fair ran from 1913 to 1936 — 33 years. Collier’s lasted 69 years, from 1888 to 1957. The Henry Luce version of Life published between 1936 and ’72. Look ran from ’37 to ’71.

Hasn’t Cahiers du Cinema (which launched an online version in ’07) been losing money for a fairly long time? You’d think there’d be some way for it to at least break even.

And how pure was it before this latest rupture? Ten years ago a Guardian piece by Phillip French ran a quote by Emilie Bickerton, author of “A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema,” that the publication was “limping on…as another banal mouthpiece of the spectacle.”

I found Leigh Whannell‘s The Invisible Man passable but underwhelming at times. In yesterday’s review I mentioned that it’s vaguely similar to Paul Verhoeven‘s 20-year-old The Hollow Man in that both are about rather ugly and perverse predators.

Kevin Bacon‘s Sebastian Caine and Oliver Jackson-Cohen‘s Adrian Griffin are super-brilliant scientist assholes with increasingly hostile attitudes about their ex-significant others (played respectively by Elisabeth Shue and Elisabeth Moss). The difference is that Jackson-Cohen’s character is a vicious control freak before he enters the ghost realm whereas being invisible seems to exacerbate Bacon’s basic tendencies, causing him to go from arrogant to fiendish.

Whannell’s film is a #MeToo stalker thing, told from the POV of Moss’s besieged character, whereas Verhoeven’s film is more of a neutrally observed, high-tech enterprise with a diseased attitude.

I was drawing upon moderately positive recollections of the Verhoeven but I hadn’t seen it in 20 years. So I rewatched it today on Amazon Prime, and I’m sorry but it’s a kickier ride. A bit colder and creepier than The Invisible Man, true, but with more bang for the buck. For my money it’s more visually inventive and carefully parsed. Andrew Marlowe’s screenplay is smarter and more carefully orchestrated than what Whannell put to page.

Then again the Hollow Man‘s budget was $95 million ($148,947,712 in 2020 dollars) while The Invisible Man cost only $7 million to make, so give Whannell credit for delivering with fewer resources.

“Around halfway through Saint Maud (A24, 4.3), writer-director Rose Glass constructs a cinematic wince moment for the ages, involving nails, bare feet and a young woman with a Christ complex far too big for her own snappable body. ‘Never waste your pain,’ she says, and this short, sharp needle-jab of a horror parable from bleakest Britain takes the same advice.

“Glass is sparing with her shocks, but knows how to make them count, like sudden voltage surges in the fritzed, volatile machinery of her narrative, each one leaving the protagonist a little more anxiously damaged than before.

“A meek, devoutly Christian palliative nurse, with an open wound of a past and what she believes is a higher calling for the future, Maud is like Carrie White and her mother Margaret rolled into one unholy holy terror; as played with brilliant, blood-freezing intensity by Morfydd Clark, she’s a genre anti-heroine to cherish, protect and recoil from, sometimes all at once.” — from Guy Lodge‘s 9.8.19 Variety review.

Question: The titular character is played by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark. To American ears the first name sounds…well, classy and storied, but also a bit somber. Like the name, perhaps, of the sister of Mordred, the villainous Arthurian figure.

A Trump-Sanders smoking gun.
South Carolina Trump activists in a much-promoted Facebook video: "We're asking South Carolina Republicans to show their support for President Trump by crossing over and voting in the Democratic primary for Senator Bernie Sanders." pic.twitter.com/FNqEUNXDWq

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 26, 2020

Sent from Berlinale-attending journalist to U.S.-based journalist friend: “From what I’ve been hearing around the Berlinale, and I hate to be the first person to bring this up, but with the current outbreak of the coronavirus in Italy I think there’s a possibility that the Cannes Film Festival [could be] cancelled if this thing further spreads. Remember that there’s usually a large contingent of Chinese industry people that go to Cannes. Will the entire country be quarantined?”

From “Six Nations to Stormzy: which events could be cancelled by coronavirus?,” a Guardian piece by Lucy Campbell, Sachin Nakrani, Andrew Pulver, Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Oliver Wainwright, and posted today (2.26).

News flash: There is no Indiana Jones franchise. It was a thing in the ’80s — three films over an eight-year period. The last half-decent Indy film opened 31 years ago. 12 years ago I embarassed myself by giving a thumbs-up in Cannes to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I don’t know what I was thinking, but a day hasn’t passed in which I haven’t regretted that review. I’m presuming James Mangold will do a decent job with Indy 5, but the brand value is no more.

Question: Have you ever had a dream in which you’re a mouse scampering around and maybe eating bits of cheese, and suddenly a Siamese cat with the head of Scott Feinberg walks into the kitchen and spots you, but instead of chasing you down and eating you the cat corners you and asks, “Can you explain to me what harmony is? A lot of people in their 20s and 30s don’t know what it is and I thought I’d ask you that.”

“Crosby vs. Feinberg,” posted on 7.20.19.

Joaquin Phoenix did something good a day after his big Oscar win, and this video (which is nicely shot) is affecting. It made me feel good that a place like Farm Sanctuary (5200 Escondido Canyon Rd, Acton, CA 93510) is operating. All bovines end up being killed sooner or later, but these people at least have a heart.

I actually saw two films last night, The Invisible Man and then a Kino Bluray of Peter Yates‘ Robbery (’67). The latter struck me as as a far better film than the Blumhouse newbie. Not to be mentioned in the same breath.

A lot of tense urban actioners have been called “taut”, “bracing” and “engrossing” over the years, but Robbery is one of the daddies of this sort of thing. At least in the British realm.

As much of a seminal influence upon crime films as Jules Dassin‘s Rififi, it feels real and un-performed and stripped of all pretentious bullshit. I was completely riveted from the get-go. As in “hold on, wait…this is good.”

Until last night (2.25) I had never seen Yates’ 53 year-old British heist film, which is largely based on the actual Great Train Robbery of 1963.

I’ve been aware of it for decades, and I’ve no explanation for having been derelict all this time.

But I’m also glad I waited as the Kino Bluray looks magnificent, at least in my humble view. Distinct colors (at times a little loud), whistle clean, no grain to speak of

Robbery opens with a wild-ass, high-speed car chase through the streets of London, and of course this was the first major sequence of its type — a year before Yates’ San Francisco car chase in Bullitt and five years before William Friedkin‘s under-the-subway-track car chase in The French Connection.

It stars Stanley Baker, who produced along with Joseph E. Levine, and costars Joanna Pettet (as Baker’s wife) and James Booth as a canny British detective. The supporting players include Frank Finlay, Barry Foster (the necktie murderer in Frenzy), William Marlowe, Clinton Greyn, George Sewell and Glynn Edwards (the Albert” character in Get Carter whom Michael Caine stabs to death).

Until last night I had never gotten the Joanna Pettet thing. But her late-night marital dispute scene with Baker is one of the film’s strongest, at least in terms of intimate currents and whatnot.

A friend of Sharon Tate‘s from the mid ’60s, Pettet is portrayed by Rumer Willis in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. She’s now 77 and living (I’ve heard) somewhere in the vicinity of Palm Springs