From Robbie Collin’s Cannes review:

HE will try to catch it at 8:30 am tomorrow.

I’m sorry but I’ve never been a fan of Hirokazu Kore-eda, the humanist, kind-hearted, Ozu-like Japanese director whom everyone (i.e., the Cannes mob) admires. I “respect” his signature focus (sad, anxious, troubled families going through difficult times), but his films (Shoplifters, Broker, Like Father, Like Son) have always bored my pants off.

Which means, of course, that I don’t like Kore-era’s humanism…right? I know I’ve always found his stories frustrating because they seem to just go on and on.

I certainly felt this way during today’s Salle Debussy screening of his latest film, Monster, which deals with school bullying, repressed rage and various family misunderstandings.

It struck me as repetitive and meandering and lacking in narrative discipline. I began to feel antsy after the first hour, and then this feeling seemed to double-down. My soul was screaming during the final half-hour of this 125-minute film, which felt more like three hours. I was silently whimpering.

I’m not condemning Monster or calling it a bad film. I’m just saying the world of Kore-era is not for me, and never will be. This doesn’t make me a bad person, or so I’m telling myself. I know that at the 95-minute mark I leaned over and muttered to a friend, “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

I got up early to attend this morning’s 8:10 am Directors Fortnight screening of Cedric Kahn‘s The Goldman Case (aka Le process Goldman), and yet the show didn’t begin until 8:45 am. No matter — all my irritations melted away almost immediately once it finally began. For this is a taut, lean and honed to the bone French courtroom drama — boxy-framed and based on an actual 1976 trial of admitted felon, social activist and revolutionary militant Pierre Goldman, who was charged with killing two female pharmacists during a robbery.

Goldman (Arieh Worthalter) admits to being an armed thief while vehemently insisting that he killed no one. And yet he refused to approve a typical defense, at least as far as calling character witnesses was concerned. “I’m innocent because I’m innocent,” Goldman declares while venting disgust with the usual courtroom strategies. In a pre-trial letter to his attorney Georges Kiejman (Arthur Harari), we hear a letter from Goldman in which he fires Kiejman for his allegedly soul-less mindset while calling him an “armchair Jew”. Then again Goldman recants soon after.

So the trial testimony boils down to reviewing Goldman’s life and political history while Kiejman tries to chip away at eyewitnesses whose testimony has pointed to Goldman’s possible guilt.

All I can say is that The Goldman Case eschews typical courtroom strategies and dramatics as ardently as Goldman 47 years ago. Based upon interviews with Goldman’s attorneys and news accounts and certainly shorn of almost everything that might appeal to fans of typical American courtroom dramas (i.e., everything from Witness For The Prosecution to The Verdict to A Few Good Men and Primal Fear), this is one ultra-tight, super-specific and and brilliantly focused courtroom nail-pounder. It pulls you right in and keeps you hooked, in no small part due to Worthalter’s intense but subtly moderated lead performance.

I have a Monster screening breathing down my neck so that’s all I can say for now. The Goldman Case is way too severe and hardcore for typical American audiences, who won’t know or give a fuck who Goldman was in the first place. But I was riveted, and I would expect that many others will feel the same when and if The Goldman Case begins streaming on U.S. shores. (I would be surprised if a U.S. distributor decides that it’s worth showing theatrically, but then again someone might.)

The SJW whimsy type, I mean. If a movie stars or costars an actor with a somewhat blemished reputation, the ideal jury member — passionate, political-minded — is given to openly wondering whether or not she’ll see it, or, if she does, whether or not she’ll approve. (Not.)

Go, Brie Larson…go tell it on the mountain!

— from Anne Thompson’s 5.16 IndieWire piece about Depp’s comeback.

If a speculative two-day-old tweet by TheRealFella is to be given any consideration, it may be that the widely condemned Ansel Elgort, the West Side Story costar whose career was all but murdered by woke Twitter fanatics 35 months ago, is no longer regarded by the crazies as a Roman Polanski-level predator and sexual assaulter but more of “briefly a bad boyfriend” type in the realm of Aziz Ansari.

Maybe. Who knows? Either way AE deserves to be released from the industry doghouse.

I had the story more or less dead to rights in mid-June of ‘20, but the mob was consumed and they wanted Elgort’s disembowelment. All Elgort had done in the case of the mythical “Gabby” was behave like a thoughtless prick, which young men have unfortunately been guilty of for thousands of years. Ansel “ghosted” the poor girl, and we all know that stuff hurts. But that’s a long way from sexual assault.

If I were younger and prowling around, I most certainly wouldn’t be a “wokefisher.” If anything I would be a “throw-back-icky-wokesters-into-the-water” type.

I love this 5.14 Forbes article because it reveals that wokeism is a real, desirable thing in the dating-and-mating market. The article basically counsels targeted readers (i.e., mostly progressive women) to beware of fake wokesters in sheep’s clothing.

If this was an article published in Munich’s Völkischer Beobachter in the 1930s, the advice would be “beware, frauleins, of insincere believers in National Socialism…callow young men who shamefully pretend to have read ‘Mein Kampf’ in order to get into your pants.”

Without further comment, here are excerpts from a Maxine Leonard press release about David Mamet’s “Assination”, a thriller about the time-machine killing of “President John F. Kennedy, Jr.” in 1963.

Let everyone understand that weddings are not occasions from which thoughtful film discussions are launched.

When young, neither Robert De Niro and Al Pacino were conventionally “hot.” They were good-looking (symmetrical features, soulful eyes) as far as it went, but primarily they simply were who they were. They had a certain hot-wired urgency and commitment to the emotional moment, but that’s neither here nor there in terms of hottitude.

Young De Niro was always a bit on the geeky side, especially when he smiled. He was physically beautiful in The Godfather, Part II but less so in 1900 and Taxi Driver.

Pacino’s brown cow eyes (especially in the early to mid ‘70s) made him seem more vulnerable, I suppose. But think again of his Michael Corleone cold-fish expressions in the first two Godfather films. (He transformed into a warm contemplative fish in The Godfather, Part 3.)

This morning I slept through the 6:30 am alarm. Because I’d forgotten to turn on the sound. Which was partly due to last night’s exhaustion. All my fault, of course, but reserving press screening seats has nonetheless become a mad, breathless online Darwinian scramble.

I hate this. It’s on me, of course, but I really hate this. I’ve been attending the Cannes Film Festival for over 30 years (my first was in ‘92). It was never a walk in the park, but now it’s insane. Now if you fail to aggressively sign in and reserve press tickets at the required hour like an Olympic Games Nazi (i.e., before 7 am Paris time), you’re fucked for screenings four days hence…COMPLETE, slacker!!

Not to mention the Cannes press system crashing and this morning’s “page indisponible.”

I found this Covid-inspired system infuriating last year; doubly so this year. I’ll never stop coming to France, but I’ll almost certainly never do Cannes again. Comparatively speaking Telluride is a pleasure cruise. Eff this Côte d’Azur jazz…really.

Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, a 1969 doc about the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi occupiers during World War II, runs 251 minutes. The two-part, Oscar-nominated film was immortalized by two significant mentions in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (‘77).

Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, a soon-to-be-screened Cannes doc about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II, whips Ophuls’ film in terms of running time — 262 minutes. A24 will be releasing it stateside.

Occupied City is based on a 2019 illustrated book “Atlas of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” written by author and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, who’s been marred to McQueen since…I’m not sure but they’ve been partnered for a good 20 years, give or take. (I think.)