Jeff Wells If there’s one thing that Cannes is not about, it’s laid-back relaxation. Covering is like attending a demanding senior-level bar exam course. You have to be on your toes each and every minute. That said, it’s an honor to be here as an accredited journalist.
Edgar Wright directing Sydney Sweeney in a new Barbarella flick? Emptiness incarnate. Sweeney’s Barbarella could be one thing with an interesting, probing-mind director, but with Wright at the helm….forget it.
From my 10.29.21 review of Wright’s Last Night in Soho:
“I had suspected I would probably have a bad time with this, but my God, it’s dreadful. Mindless, gaudy throwaway trash. Not to mention dull by way of a mind-numbing repetition of a #MeToo mantra — older men with bulging wallets are toxic beasts.
“Wright got hold of something cool and throttled in the first two-thirds of Baby Driver, but now it’s gone. The bottom line is that he’s a completely untethered geek fetishist — he’s all about design and visual intensity and comic-book-level characters, and at the same time completely disengaged from anything even vaguely resembling an adult sensibility or, perish the thought, an ability to absorb and re-process life as a semi-complex, multi-layered thing.
“In short, Wright is 47 going on 14.
“In the mid ’60s context of Last Night in Soho, Wright isn’t interested in trying to (let’s get creative!) partially channel the spirit of Roman Polanski by way of recalling or reanimating the 1965 atmosphere of Repulsion…God, what a stone cold slasher masterpiece that film is, especially compared to the slovenly Soho. Repulsion and Last Night in Soho are one year apart, and at the same time based in entirely separate galaxies.
“Last Night in Soho essentially says one thing over and over. Ready? Older London men who went to flashy nightclubs in the mid ‘60s were cruel sexist pigs (which many of them doubtless were) and they all wanted to sexually exploit and abuse young women who needed the money. Which made them Hammer horror monsters of the darkest and scuzziest order.
“But that was mid ‘60s London for you! Forget the seminal beginnings of the rock revolution. Forget the Yardbirds. Forget the mid ’60s Soho club scene that had begun to be dominated by London’s rock virtuosos and their many followers. Forget the musical and spiritual explosions conveyed by Aftermath and Rubber Soul. Forget John Lennon and George Harrison being dosed by a dentist in ’65 and experiencing their first-ever acid trip. Forget all that.
“Because in Wright’s view, 1966 London was crammed with creepy, sex-starved, Sexy Beast guys in their 40s and 50s who worshipped the Kray brothers.
“Wright is a truly horrible director of actors. No modifying or keeping it plain and low-key, always presuming that the popcorn inhalers are complete idiots who need everything spelled out in boldface…everything turned up to 11.
“The more I think about it, the more I suspect that Repulsion probably was a major influence upon Last Night in Soho. The difference is that Polanski was and is a visionary, go-his-own-way genius, and Wright is an adolescent shoveller of familiar tropes and garish visual impressions.”
Followed early this evening by Quentin Dupieux‘s Meet The Parents — aka The Second Act — a “metacomedy” about actors playing real people but also being themselves. Costarring Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphaël Quenard and Manuel Guillot.
Anya Taylor Joy to N.Y. Times guy Kyle Buchanan: “’I’ve never been more alone than making [Furiosa],’” she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.’
“Her reticence reminded me of when I first spoke to the actors who had made Fury Road: During that shoot, the desperation of the characters bled into their real lives, and unpacking that experience took a very long time.
“Sensing that she was skirting a sensitive issue, I asked Taylor-Joy what exactly it was about Furiosa that had proved more difficult than she expected.
“For five long seconds, she contemplated giving me an answer. ‘Next question…sorry,’ she said. There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if a part of her had been left behind in that wasteland. ‘Talk to me in 20 years,’ she said. ‘Talk to me in 20 years.'”
George Miller‘s Furiosa screens in Cannes tomorrow night. Has Hollywood Elsewhere successfully reserved a ticket? Of course not. I’m trying to wangle a way in as we speak. If I fail, I’ll catch it at a Cannes commercial cinema ten days hence.
“Believe It, Democrats — Biden Could Lose,” Frank Bruni, N.Y. Times: “Donald Trump may be the presidential candidate whose midday snoozing has generated headlines and animated late-night comics, but President Biden is the one who needs to wake up.
“He’s a whopping 12 points behind Trump among registered voters in Nevada, according to polls by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer that were released on Monday morning (5.13). Biden won that state by nearly 2.5 points in 2020. [Plus] he’s behind among registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan — in all of the six battleground states surveyed except Wisconsin.
“That’s not some wildly aberrant result. It echoes alarms sounded before. It speaks to stubborn troubles.
In short, Bill Maher was 100% dead-on seven months ago when he stated that by insisting on running for re-election instead of allowing a younger and more vigorous sensible Democrat to step into the breach, Joe Biden “is going to turn the country back over to Trump, and go down in history as Ruth Bader Biden — a person who doesn’t know when to quit and [thereby] does great damage his party and his country.”
Every time I’ve brought this up in the succeeding months, 80% of HE readers have pooh-poohed me…it’s early yet, calm down, Americans will come to their senses, stop doomsaying.
“[This is] difficult for Democrats to believe,” Bruni wrote. “I know: I talk regularly with party leaders and party strategists and I’ve heard their incredulity. They mention abortion and how that should help Biden mightily. They mention the miserable optics of a certain Manhattan courtroom and a certain slouched defendant. They mention Jan. 6, 2021. They note Trump’s unhinged rants and autocratic musings and they say that surely, when the moment of decision arrives, a crucial share of Americans will note all of that, too, and come home to Biden.”
A foam-at-the-mouth, anti-Democracy criminal sociopath will become President next January, and this is partly the symbolic fault of those complacent HE commenters.
Over the years I’ve never been more aware of the cries of seagulls than during the Cannes Film Festival. If you’re staying anywhere near the marina (as Hollywood Elsewhere is) their squawking cuts through the night air like an ambulance siren…wailing, aarking, “wake up, you sleepyheads.” Scavengers by nature, gulls are “often heard very early in the morning”, according to their Wiki page, but I’m telling you they are very nocturnal…2 am, 3 am, 4 am. And exacerbating my inability to sleep.
I brilliantly forgot to bring my ambien tablets this year, and so last night I was trying to ease up and let slumber come naturally and failing for the most part. Partly (largely?) because the gulls wouldn’t stop partying.
It’s 11:20 pm and my midnight London flight is boarding, but the hugely crafty, creatively penny-pinching, super-influential Roger Corman — an industry giant, indisputably titanic, the godfather of hip-pocket cinema in the ’50s, 60s, ’70s and ’80s — has passed at age 98, and I’ve only time to say that anyone who doesn’t know who Corman was, is and always will be is absolutely required to watch Alex Stapleton‘s Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.
Just watch it already — the whole amazing saga crammed into 95 minutes.
Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported two days ago that Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker) will direct a “hot script”, penned by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), about “the White House reacting in real time to ballistic missiles headed for America.”
Which sounds like a fairly close cousin of Sidney Lumet‘s Fail Safe, no?
Keep in mind that Oppenheim’s Jackie script wasn’t really the basis of Pablo Larrain’s 2016 film. Here’s how I explained it three years ago:
“Oppenheim’s Jackie was originally going to be directed by Darren Aronofsky with Rachel Weisz playing Jackie Kennedy. Oppenheim’s script told the story of what happened that weekend and pretty much how it went down on a beat-for-beat, conversation-by-conversation basis,
“[In 2016] it seemed brash and brilliant for Larrain, who took over the project sometime in ’15, to forsake the historical and sidestep that mass memory and not deliver a rote recap of what Mrs. Kennedy, only 34 at the time, went through that weekend, but to make a kind of art film — to give her portrait a kind of anxious, fevered, interior feeling.
“Which is why I wrote that Jackie really is ‘the only docudrama about the Kennedy tragedy that can be truly called an art film…it feels somewhat removed from the way that the events of that weekend looked and felt a half-century ago…intimate, half-dreamlike and cerebral, but at the same time a persuasive and fascinating portrait of what Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (Natalie Portman) went through between the lunch-hour murder of her husband in Dallas and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery three days later.
“But after re-watching Jackie a couple of weeks ago I went back and re-read a draft of Oppenheim’s script, which is a whole different bird. Pablo cut out a lot of characters and a lot of interplay and a general sense of ‘this is how it happened’ realism, focusing almost entirely on Jackie’s interior saga.
“And honestly? I discovered that I liked Oppenheim’s version of the tale a little more than Pablo’s.
“The script is more of a realistic ensemble piece whereas Larrain’s film is about what it was like to be in Jackie’s head. I respect Larrain’s approach, mind, but I felt closer to the realm of Oppenheim’s script. I believed in the dialogue more. The interview scenes between Theodore H. White (played by Billy Crudup in the film) and Jackie felt, yes, more familiar but at the same time more realistic, more filled-in. I just felt closer to it. I knew this realm, these people.”
Like everyone else, I’m stunned by the sudden death of KTLA entertainment reporter Sam Rubin, 64…felled by a heart attack.
I can’t say I “knew” Rubin all that well, but I certainly ran into him at parties and press junkets over the last 25 or 30 years…joshingly, good-naturedly…and can say he was a smart, devotional movie hound…good fellow, disciplined pro, quick with a quip and a real eager beaver.
I’m very sorry that his curtain came down (or “rang” down as it were) this early. Tragic.
Emotionally Sam’s passing feels like the death of the well-liked Meet The Press moderator Tim Russert, who also died quickly from a heart attack. Tim was 58.
Condolences to Sam’s friends, family, colleagues, KTLA fans, industry acquaintances, etc.
Death has this occasionally rude habit of paying a call when it damn well feels like it, and when your number’s up, you’re done.