Elle Fanning is very animated, very Carole Lombard-ish in this just-up trailer for Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York. A complex demimonde suffused with a fizzy, peppy vibe. The games that eccentric New Yorkers or witty weekend visitors play. Sniffing around for angles and opportunity, sometimes betraying each other romantically, etc. Allen’s famously delayed romantic comedy will almost certainly debut at the Venice Film Festival, after which it’ll open commercially in Italy and other European territories.

At some point during Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton, a TV actor having trouble breaking into features, finds work in a couple of Italian-made cheapies — this thing and a spaghetti western (or so I’ve read).

Once again Tarantino is paying tribute or otherwise wink-winking at Italy’s half-century-old exploitation film industry, which has been one of his key passions since he began working at that Manhattan Beach video store (Video Archives) in the ’80s. The poster is basically saying “wow, those cheesy Italian schlock movies of the late ’60s, right? Great primitive cinema!”

The biggest single plot element in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood involves the brutal slaughter of five people (Sharon Tate, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Steven Parent) in a home just down the street from Dalton’s rental, which he shares with stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). But there hasn’t been the slightest hint of this in the marketing materials this far. Not the slightest little tease.

It’s been amply reported that Game of Thrones star Richard Madden has been offered a chance to succeed Daniel Craig as strong>James Bond, particularly following his performance in Bodyguard. I’m a bit late to the table on this (as in six months late), but after watching Madden in Rocketman, I agree that he’d be an excellent successor. He’s got it — definitely Connery-esque.

#Rocketman star Taron Egerton is shaking and stirring the rumors that Richard Madden could be the next James Bond https://t.co/yYmvhgBkUC pic.twitter.com/TeDmvmpU1b

— Variety (@Variety) May 17, 2019

The first line of Elton John & Bernie Taupin‘s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me” (’74) is “I can’t light no more of your darkness.” I know this song well, but for decades I heard the line as follows: “I can’t line no more awwgey dogness.” And for decades I sang it that way in the shower or whenever the tune played on the car radio. Did I ever ask myself what “awwgey dogness” means? Yes, a few times, but I could never make heads or tails of it.

I went into Rocketman with an attitude, but I felt pleasantly turned around soon enough. I was more taken with the first 30 to 40 minutes (Elton John‘s childhood, taking piano lessons as a teen, teaming with young Bernie Taupin) and less with the remainder, which is basically about Elton becoming more and more of a booze-swigging, coke-sniffing party animal and his life downswirling into addiction and self-destruction.

I respect Dexter Fletcher‘s decision to not tell Elton’s saga Bohemian Rhapsody-style, using a linear “this happened and then that happened” approach. Instead he chose a more creative and dynamic (not to mention more cinematic) scheme by making it into a punched up, inventively choreographed, mad-brush Ken Russell musical.

The framing device is Elton confessing all during an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Out of this comes a looking-back-at-my-life, All That Jazz-type deal that uses several John-Taupin songs as emotional backdrops or undercurrents for various biographical moments.

The film isn’t biographically accurate in some respects (i.e., certain songs are played at the wrong time) and there’s a lot more interest in a glitter-and-glam aesthetic than any kind of semi-realistic presentation of how things really went down, but this is the film they chose to make.

It’s “cinematic”, yes, but I’m betting that down the road an ambitious director and a gifted choreographer will transform Rocketman into a Broadway stage musical.

My dissatisfaction with Egerton’s singing voice, which sounds only vaguely like John’s, remains. Now that I’ve seen the whole magillah, I can say definitively that Egerton’s singing moments are only mildly sufficient (they don’t stop the film in its tracks but they don’t quite knock you out either), and that I would have felt a lot more satisfied or soothed if he was capable of delivering a more Elton-like sound.

Egerton seems a little taller and more muscular that the Real McCoy (he’s 5′ 9″ compared to John’s 5′ 7″) but I wouldn’t call that an actual quibble.

Variety‘s Justin Kroll is reporting that Robert Pattinson is in negotiations to play The Batman in Matt Reeves’ forthcoming superhero film, which will open on 6.25.21.

Kroll explains that the RPatz thing isn’t a done deal, but that the former Twilight star is “the top choice and [the deal] is expected to close shortly.” Reeves and Pattinson will start shooting this summer.

RPatz will presumably be visiting Cannes this weekend to take bows for his performance in Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which costars Willem Dafoe.

Is Pattinson brawny and muscular enough to play Batman? He’s tall with moderately wide shoulders, but isn’t he a bit on the wirey and willowy side?

It’s ironic that just as Pattinson has solidified his rep as the Intrepid Indie King (Cosmopolis, The Rover, Maps to the Stars, The Lost City of Z, Good Time), he’s been sucked right back into a big-studio franchise. He’s only in it for the money, of course, and who wouldn’t be?

Several top-tier critics attended Thursday night’s gala premiere of Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman, the Elton John musical biopic, and their reviews began to pop just before 2 am Cannes time. I’ve read four or five so far, and the general verdict seems to be that it’s less interested in rock biopic realism (i.e., who John actually was and how he found his voice) and more interested in selling the flamboyant glam aspects of John’s early career.

In short, Rocketman sounds (and please stop me if you think I’m overdoing it here) like an Elton John flick for simpletons — for superficial minds, the easily impressed and your none-too-hip iTunes purchasers of one of John’s greatest hits albums.

I’m alluding to people who associate Elton more with his having sung the Lady Diana version of “Candle in the Wind” or perhaps for his Ceasar’s Palace gigs in Las Vegas than, say, his first serious industry gig at West Hollywood’s Troubadour in August ’70, or for his legendary, self-named 1970 debut album or the equally great “Honky Chateau” (’72).

Before I post a couple of review excerpts, I want HE regular Bobby Peru to consider the following line from Peter Debruge’s Variety review, to wit: “It’s Taron Egerton’s voice doing most of the singing here. He’s solid, but he’s no match for Elton’s pipes.”

HE to Debruge: No shit?

Another Debruge line: “Rocketman isn’t really about Elton as a musician.”

TheWrap‘s Steve Pond: “Bohemian Rhapsody acted like a standard biopic with concert and recording scenes thrown in, [but] Rocketman takes a wilder, bolder approach: It’s a full-fledged musical, using dozens of Elton John songs to tell his life story in a way that freely mixes reality and fantasy.

“This is a jukebox musical for the big screen, Mamma Mia! forced into a vaguely biographical form or one of the Broadway shows that use an artist’s music to tell their story, among them Jersey Boys and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.”

“But it’s about Elton John, so that means it’s bigger, wilder, more extravagant and more excessive than those works. Sometimes that means it’s more fun, too, but it can also be a melodramatic slog when it’s not embracing the craziness of its musical numbers. And some of those numbers, to be honest, are far more diverting than others.

“As someone who hated Bohemian Rhapsody‘s factual errors, I can respect a biopic that announces from the start that it’s not to be taken seriously as an account of what actually happened. So while I struggled with a narrative that uses songs years before they were written, I know the rules of this particular game == and if what we see onscreen has a little crazy poetry in it, and it captures a bit of how things might have felt to Elton way back when, that’s all that matters.”

The big gala screening for Rocketman began a half-hour ago, but the first press screening doesn’t happen until 11 am tomorrow, followed by a 1:30 pm press conference. The tweets will start flying around the same time (roughly 4:15 am Pacific, 7:15 am Eastern).

Six or seven years ago Thomas Vinterberg‘s handsomely produced The Command (aka Kursk) would have warranted a stand-alone theatrical opening followed by a Bluray/DVD release three or four months later. Now it’s launching on DirecTV on 5.23 before simultaneously hitting theaters and VOD on 6.21. Screenplay by Robert Rodat; costarring Matthias Schoenaerts, Léa Seydoux as his wife, Artemiy Spiridonov as his son, and Colin Firth as Royal Naval Officer David Russell. 127 minutes.

I arose at 7 am (after crashing three and a half hours earlier) to catch this morning’s Beanpole screening at 8:30 am. I went home to write but nothing would come — too whipped. So I hit the local Carrefour for a couple of things. I finally got down to the Beanpole review around 2 pm, but finishing meant blowing off the 4 pm screening of Mati Diop‘s Atlantique (aka Atlantics), which was probably a bad idea considering the rave reviews. (The French-Senegalese Diop is the first black woman to have a film in competition here.) Now it’s pushing seven, and I’m determined to catch a 90-minute nap before seeing Ken Loach‘s Sorry We Missed You at 10 pm.

A week before leaving for Cannes I streamed Kantemir Balagov‘s Closeness (’17), a dark kidnapping drama set in a sodden Russian backwater. The idea was to prepare for Balagov’s Beanpole, a psychological survival tale set in Leningrad just after the ravages of World War II. I saw it early this morning. It’s just as grim if not grimmer than Closeness, but it’s also more ambitious in an atmospheric, large-canvas sense. And a whole lot sadder.

Balagov is only 27, but he’s already delivering the studied chops and immaculate directorial control that are par for the course among accomplished directors twice his age. Beanpole is basically about two shell-shocked women, scarred by the horrific siege of Leningrad and trying to re-assemble their shattered lives and emotions and somehow move on.

I respected the hell out of Beanpole but I honestly couldn’t derive much levitation or transcendence. To me it felt slow and trying and dirge-like. As much as I adore the idea of a 27 year-old creating a film as jarringly realistic and well assembled as this, it still left me feeling drained and dispirited. Plus it runs 134 minutes, which struck me as needlessly prolonged.

Balagov is quite the portraitist (and, to go by a just-posted Variety interview, quite the cultured film scholar), but he’s too much of a gloom-head, at least from my perspective. For this haunting portrait of post-war devastation is counter-balanced by glacial pacing and a strange reluctance or aversion to dealing with the death of a young boy…my God.

I felt sorrow and pity for each and every character, of course, but it feels too sludgy and oppressive, even for a story like this one.

Viktoria Miroshnichenko‘s titular character, Iya, is an all-but-catatonic, seven-foot-tall giraffe from whom verbal expression does not easily emanate. Why must she take 30 to 45 seconds to collect her thoughts before answering the simplest questions? Because that’s Balagov’s intention — to convey her destroyed inner state with traumatized expressions, gut feelings and minimal dialogue. I quickly ran out of patience with Iya’s blank stares, which is a way of saying that Miroshnichenko is not, in my judgment, a riveting actress.

Vasilisa Perelygina‘s Masha, Iya’s best friend, is far more interesting — more expressive and generally more alluring. If Perelygina had played the lead (which is to say if Iya had been eliminated), I would feel very differently about Beanpole. In my estimation she’s a natural movie star. But not Viktoria. Iya is impenetrable and burdensome and, as far as the afore-mentioned death of the child is concerned, inexplicable and even hateful.

The ghastly murder of Masha’s young son is “addressed” but not really dealt with, and I was simply unable to get past this. Balagov’s idea, I gather, is that if a character is profoundly devastated by war trauma, it’s within her realm to accidentally smother an innocent. In basic emotional movie-watching terms that’s simply not acceptable.

Does Masha react with shock and rage? No, she barely raises an eyebrow. Her attitude seems to be “that was horrendous what you did, of course, but the German army’s siege of Leningrad was equally awful if not more so, so I understand.” All she does, really, is insist that Iya lives up to a quid pro quo arrangement — you killed my child so get pregnant so I can raise another one.

Would any mother in the history of civilization react this way?

The principal characters (excepting a 50-year-old doctor and the rich, chilly parents of Masha’s amorous suitor, a dorky kid who has a nose like Vladmir Putin) are all numb and haunted-looking, which of course is fitting and necessary. This is not a film about steady keels and bright futures. If nothing else Beanpole is quite the sweeping statement on post-war devastation.

A late-arriving lesbian attraction element kicks in and allows for a semi-hopeful ending, but it arrives too late. If the romantic attraction aspect had been a factor early on (at least starting in the second act), I would have bought into it.

The best scene is a dinner-table conversation between Masha and the mother of Putin-nose, and as mentioned the general aura of post-war devastation throughout is certainly throttling from a general mise-en-scene perspective (camera lighting, art direction, rusty atmosphere), one that I can’t help but admire and respect from a certain distance.

If the story had been all about Masha, Beanpole would have been a much more absorbing film. I was mesmerized by Perelygina’s performance. She’s really got it.

But Beanpole is finally a movie for film festival and arthouse dweebs and not for guys like myself.

This is what many of us can’t stand about Joe Biden. He seemingly believes that a significant amount of Republicans will suddenly revert to “classic” conservatism (i.e., opposed to liberal policies but with a semi-practical, semi-constructive attitude) if and when Trump leaves the White House.

It’s accepted doctrine that 25 years ago (starting with Gingrich in ’94, doubling down with Obama in ’09) Republicans became the crazy party. Their electoral survival will always depend upon whipping up the bumblefucks and old-school Fox watchers, and that’s certainly not going to change if Biden succeeds Trump. Embracing a notion that they’ll suddenly modify their basic nature is woefully naive.

Money quote from a 2012 Washington Post op-ed piece by Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”