Jeff Wells

I went into this morning’s Horizon screening totally pumped. I wanted to embrace and celebrate a classic-styled American western, which is what the advance-word crowd has been calling it. I wanted to see Open Range 2: Westward Ho The Wagons. Give it to me, bruh…make it happen!

Alas, it pains me to admit that Kevin Costner‘s big-swing western isn’t all that good.

Costner said during today’s lunch-hour press conference that Horizon “is a journey…it’s not a plot movie.” But that’s exactly what I wanted! I wanted a solid, gripping wagon-train saga with a commanding narrative — the kind of movie in which characters say and do what they must because of who they are and what they need and so on. And that didn’t happen, and I’m all but weeping as as result. Seriously…real tears.

I don’t hate Horizon — it just doesn’t do the proverbial thing, and I feel crestfallen about that.

Costner’s 181-minute film is kind of a mess, truth be told. It feels like the start of a ten-part miniseries, and it just feels odd to be sorting through several characters and locales and situations over a three-hour period and asking “when is the actual movie going to start?”

Because this is a Hulu or Paramount Plus or Apple miniseries with a big movie star (i.e., Kevin), and his Gary Cooper-like character, Hayes Ellison, doesn’t show up until the 65-minute mark and he really doesn’t do or say a hell of a lot throughout the whole film except shoot a crazy-evil guy (played by Jamie Campbell Bower) at the halfway mark.

Maybe the “movie” will kick in when Part Two rolls along in August, but with the exception of a couple of rousing action scenes (my favorite is a moonlit horseback chase) the film I saw drifted and meandered and dragged at times. It does a whole lot of talk-talk-talking and scenery-gaping, and I felt kinda trapped watching all these unfamiliar faces rambling on and on. Why am I listening to you guys trying to sort stuff out? Who are you? Why should I care what you think about anything? You mean nothing to me.

You know who’s just as good as Costner, charisma- and authority-wise? Luke Wilson as wagon master Matthew Van Weyden. I was also down with costars Sienna Miller (although she’s really too pretty for the proverbial “room”), Sam Worthington, Jena Malone and Abbey Lee (ditto).

At times Horizon struck me as indecipherable and incomprehensible, due to the yokel accents. What the fuck is that character saying…what?

There are too damn many story lines, and way too much “acting.” And way too much familiar-sounding movie music, I felt. The composer shouldn’t have been John Debney, who plays it safe and square and music-cues just about everything. It should have been the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, who passed last year.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review: “There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But Horizon, simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries.

“Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction. And [this] feels like a major disappointment. As a stand-alone film (which it isn’t, but let’s pretend for a moment), Horizon is by turns convoluted, ambitious, intriguing, and meandering.

“But it’s never quite moving. It’s too busy laying down narrative tracks and hammering out the minutiae of situations that don’t feel like they’re leading anywhere special.”

One thing I was asking myself over and over was “why is the pacing so leisurely and lackluster?” I know, I know — because the foundational basics need to be established before the dramatic urgency kicks in three months hence. But I kept feeling I was suspended in a time vacuum. Nothing seemed to matter much.

Gleiberman: “Just about every Western of the studio era came in at two hours or less, and so did most of the revisionist Westerns (and some of those were complicated). There’s a reason for that. It’s all the time they needed.”

There’s a degree of irony, methinks, in Demi Moore starring in The Substance, a riveting David Cronenberg-ian body-horror flick about the fear of aging among older women and the application of artificial enhancements, when it’s been apparent for some time that Moore herself has been augmenting nature with the usual costly touch-ups.

Not that I have the slightest problem with this. Born during the Kennedy administration, Moore looks great (and I’m saying this as a veteran of three Prague procedures so don’t tell me) but c’mon…her character, an aging actress and workout-show host named Elizabeth Sparkle who injects herself with a radical youth drug, isn’t that far from self-portraiture.

Sparkle’s radical de-aging situation conveys a certain parallel or reach-back to Oscar Wilde‘s Dorian Gray, of course, but I’m also thinking of poor, anguished Norma Desmond. Imagine her post-Sunset Boulevard, non-mental-asylum life with the benefit of today’s plastic surgery techniques. She might not have wound up shooting William Holden‘s Joe Gillis, and he might have become Betty Schaefer‘s permanent writing partner!

(Who speculated that Gillis might have somehow been the father of American Gigolo‘s Julian Kaye? Was it David Thomson?)

Directed by Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a whipsmart body-horror flick. Urgency, punch and pizazz feeds into this synthetic-feeling, slickly assembled piece of feminist (i.e., male-asshole-hating) agitprop, and obviously with a bullhorn message, to wit: Women, throw off the yoke of male assholery and their imposition of bullshit beauty standards and live for yourselves.

There are only two problems with The Substance.

One, it’s not just about Moore’s Sparkle de-aging herself after being fired from her TV show (i.e, too old) but about being replaced by Margaret Qualley‘s Sue, a 20something who emerges, Cronenberg-style, from within Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Sue have some kind of alternating arrangement in which they take turns strutting around in the big, bad city. And I couldn’t understand the rules…how and why of it all.

And two, the film goes on too long. It wore me down and I started glancing at my watch repeatedly….c’mon, wrap this up already.

The New Yorker‘s Justin Chang is calling The Substance “a shoo-in for the Palme d’Or.” Sure thing. If they gave to Titane, why not?

Either you get with the program and drop to your knees as you enthusiastically agree that Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez is a wowser transgender musical masterpiece, or you’re a sourpuss or a problematic person or worse (i.e., perhaps even a transphobe).

The Croisette cultists have spoken, and Greta Gerwig‘s jury is almost certainly going to go along. What choice do they have? I respect the impact factor — you can sense it, feel it.

And there’s no question that Karla Sofia Gascon, a trans biomale who plays the titular character, will be awarded the festival’s Best Actress prize.

Repeating: “Emilia Perez is certainly a nervy big-swing movie, and I’m certainly giving it points for this…it’s not an altogether fascinating film but is certainly one that fascinates from time to time…it’s up to something fairly novel in a wackazoid sort of way, and in my book there aren’t enough films of this sort so I’m definitely giving portions a solid pass.”

From David Rooney’s Hollywood Reporter review: “It’s highly probable that some will find the film too changeable to feel cohesive.”

F. Murray Abraham, Paul Schrader, Sharon Stone, Liam Neeson…who else has recently come out and said “it’s time to ease up on Kevin Spacey…stop trying to kill this guy and let him return to work. He’s too good to keep on the bench.”‘

Please try to process today’s Emilia Perez buzz about how mindblowing it is and what a wild and wonderful genre ghoulash it is and so on…regard all that gush-gush blather with a grain of salt because the huge raves are coming from your Cannes Film Festival cultists, which is to say a secular critical mob composed of two co-existing social-focus groups — the woke whoo-whoo gay brigade along with straight critics who are terrified of not sounding like honorary members of said organization.

Emilia Perez is certainly a nervy big-swing movie, and I’m certainly giving it points for this…it’s not an altogether fascinating film but is certainly one that fascinates from time to time…it’s up to something fairly novel in a wackazoid sort of way, and in my book there aren’t enough films of this sort so I’m definitely giving portions a solid pass.

To make things extra clear this is not a pan but a “yes, a good and sometimes applause-worthy film but y’all need to calm down” review.

I was turned on and rather lit up during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes, which is when you’re initially realizing that Jacques Audiard‘s film is a few things mashed together…(a) an “all hail the emotional glory of becoming trans and forsaking coarse male attitudes and behavior” soap opera, (b) a tasty Pedro Almodovar-styled musical by way of Dancer in the Dark, (c) a Mexican cartel crime drama (but not a “crime comedy”) that actually only glances at the world of the cartels and particularly the cartel psychology, and (d) one of those crazy stories that’s impossible to believe in but you’re stuck there and watching it so what the hell…go with it.

But after Audiard decides to jettison that feeling that all grade-A films impart, that feeling that says what you’re watching is reflecting a primal, no-bullshit understanding of human behavior that most of us have picked up along the way…once Emilia Perez detaches itself from the world that many of us know and understand, it becomes more and more off-the-planet, which is to say unhinged and wackazoid. But in a way that fleetingly reminds you at times of the mood of ’80s and ’90s Pedro films.

The musical aspects are quite delightful at first…confident, well-choreographed and snazzily delivered until it all goes around the bend at the 40-minute mark, give or take.

Zoe Saldaña, now in her mid 40s, is frustrated and despairing Mexico City attorney Rita Moro Castro. She’s hired by a major cartel monster called Manitas Del Monte (played by transitioned biomale Karla Sofia Gascon) to help him facilitate a final transition into womanhood.

Which right away feels like bullshit. No Mexican drug lord would think “yeah, I need to become a woman and commune with my gentler, more tender and nurturing side”…no way in hell. The macho crust on those psychos is permanent and corroded and damn near terminal. The concept is just absurd.

So it was actually early when I stopped feeling delighted and started to become Don Logan in an emotional or mental-capacity sense….”all right, what’s this?…oh, here come the honorary gay brigade by way of a cooler-than-shit French director with an idea that will inspire druglord fantasies of shooting up mutiplexes when Emilia Perez opens commercially…the idea of a richer-than-Cresus druglord who figures that hiring an Israeli surgeon to chop his dick off and give him bouncy boobs is a viable plan when it comes to scenarios about disappearing from the Mexican drug scene….yeah, that works!”

It’s really crazy, Audiard’s film…”instantly divisive”, as Variety‘s Peter Debruge has admitted…long and nutso and all over the map in an emotionally supportive, left-progressive, let’s-put-an-end-to-coarse-Mexican-machismo fashion.

The good part is that it renounces and condemns ugly male machismo, but it also rejoices in the rebirth of a drug lord after he transitions to female realm…c’mon! It’s feisty and flourishy at first but once the transition occurs it stops being a believable story and you’re left saying “good heavens, bruh…this is turning wacko and I’m pulling back for safety’s sake because I don’t trust this shit.”

But the Salle Debussy crowd whooped and cheered when it ended. It’s right up the trans woke pro-women, anti-brutalist alley….let’s all link arms, girls, and get rid of these toxic ayeholes! An idea, by the way, that HE completely supports in a gay-brigade-meets-Don Logan sort of way.

From David Rooney’s Hollywood Reporter review: “It’s highly probable that some will find the film too changeable to feel cohesive.”

HE to Rooney while channeling Steve Martin‘s “Neal Page” in Trains, Planes and Automobiles: “Do ya think so???”

By the way: Selena Gomez plays Jessi, wife of Del Monte and mother of their two kids. She’s devastated when the news media falsely reports that he’s been killed, but we’ve also been informed early on that Juan has been undergoing standard pre-transition hormone therapy for two years. Are you telling me Gomez hasn’t noticed any changes in her husband over the last 24 months? Hard to believe.

Debruge explains;

Paul Schrader‘s Oh, Canada isn’t as good as First Reformed, but it’s definitely better than the last two (The Card Counter, Master Gardener), and it surprises a bit by reaching inward and letting go.

It’s basically about the last dying days of cancer-afflicted radical left documentarian Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), and an Errol Morris-type interview he submits to in order to shake it all off and confess (or maybe imagine) as much as possible.

It’s basically a cut-the-crap, take-it-or-leave it, taking-stock-of-the-boomer-legacy film, and kind of an an old-school thing in a good way…very earnest and solemn, carefully and cleanly written, and it gets sadder as it goes along.

Gere’s white-haired, worn-down appearance and performance are riveting and a little startling, especially if you think back to his sexy-cat beauty and swagger in Schrader’s American Gigolo (’80).

Full respect and 90% satisfaction are felt from this corner. Pic hopscotches all over the place but always feel somber, reflective, sincere…a respectable clean-out-the-cobwebs, stop-lying-to-yourself movie for grown-ups.

Excellent supporting performances are given by Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli.

Start the press conference at the 20-minute mark…

I heard yesterday about this 2016 video of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs assaulting Cassie Ventura, but I didn’t see it until today. As bad as it gets. Guilty.

Early this morning I was late to my 8:30 screening of Emanuel Parvu‘s Three Kilometres to the End of the World, a small-town Romanian drama about homophobia and a hate crime. But I had 15 minutes to make it to the Salle Agnes Varda, a relatively short distance from the pad, and figured I had a fighting chance. I had my laminated pass, my bar-code ticket…this could work.

But I didn’t have a fighting chance…not really…as the Cannes Film Festival security guys have set up too many blocking gates, lines and security checks.

I tried to walk directly to the A.V. from the Place Maritime entry gate, which I’ve done dozens of times in the past. Nope — your press pass isn’t sufficient, go around the Grand Palais, enter from the other side. But after doing that I was confronted by a long, terribly slow, shuffling-nightmare line. After getting through that soul-suffocating gauntlet and climbing the A.V. stairs I was blocked yet again by security staff. After being allowed to pass I was blocked a fourth time from entering the theatre.

And this wasn’t just me — a sizable crowd of credentialed journos had the same beef and were trying to beg, argue and cajole their way in. They all failed.

It was that beefy Place Maritime guard and that long behind-the-Palais line…the one-two punch that killed my spirit and sent me plunging into the pit.

…that women as attractive as Sienna Miller, Abbey Lee, Jena Malone and Ella Hunt were part of the common community of westward-travelling settlers during the Civil War era.

I’m glad they were cast in Kevin Costner‘s Horizon, but I don’t believe that hotties were even dreamt about until much later in the 19th Century and more likely into the 20th.

Nor do I believe that women as attractive as Red River costars Joanne Dru and Coleen Gray were wagon-trainers during the same era. I’m glad Howard Hawks cast them but, etc.

Does anyone have faint memories of Westward Ho The Wagons (’56), a Disney-produced, wildly unrealistic western about covered-wagon settlers heading for Oregon? A family-friendly saga, settlers vs. Native Americans, etc. Fess Parker, Kathleen Crowley, Cubby O’Brien, Jeff York, Sebastian Cabot, David Stollery and George Reeves (Superman’s final feature film).

Most of us have a basic impression about the late Dabney Coleman, who passed yesterday at age 92. Aside from being a dependable, professional-grade character actor, he mostly played sexist jerks, stubborn asshats and comic foils.

But by my scorecard Coleman lucked into at least two interesting characters and did very well by them — (1) “Mayo”, the assistant Olympic ski team coach (subordinate to Gene Hackman) in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69), and (2) “Dr. Bill Ray”, Jane Fonda‘s sensible, good-natured boyfriend in On Golden Pond (’81).

Mostly, however, he played dicks, and his best-known in this regard were “Ron Carlisle,” the sexist soap opera director in Tootsie (’82) who antagonized Dustin Hoffman‘s “Dorothy” and vice versa and the sexist, jerkwad boss in 9 to 5 (’80). Both were broad, boilerplate performances.

I’ll post the official festival video of the just-concluded Megalopolis press confererence when it pops through…sometimes it takes a few hours.

“Admirable Coppola,” posted 2 and 1/3 years ago:

We’re always adapting — all of us, but especially Type-A creative types. Maturing, cranking up, calming down, adjusting, shape-shifting — always in response to a changing world. It follows that no 40 year-old director is exactly the same in terms of craft, choices and sensibility as he/she was at age 30.

I think Francis Coppola (whom I had the pleasure of doing a two-hour phone interview with 41 years ago) was one guy when he made The Godfather, The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II. He was a slightly different guy when he made Apocalypse Now, and a faintly altered version of the Apocalypse Now guy when he made One From The Heart. He was a whole different dude when he made Jack — that’s for damn sure. And a much different guy when he made Tetro, Youth Without Youth and Twixt.

Coppola has said he’s planing to invest over $100 million of his own dough in Megalopolis, which he’s called “a love story that’s also a philosophical investigation of the nature of man.”

It is my prediction that however good or bad it turns out to be, Megalopolis won’t connect with Joe Popcorn. Some will see it (I certainly will) but most won’t, and it’ll just end up as a streaming selection. That said, Coppola is living righteously for an artist who’s nearly 83 — still striving, still dreaming. Here’s hoping he makes Megalopolis and that it satisfies those who are willing to take the journey.

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From David Ehrlich’s 5.16 IndieWire review of Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis: “Madison Square Garden has naturally been reimagined as a sandy colosseum. The exterior shots don’t look anything like the world-famous arena they’re meant to represent, but the interior ones get MSG’s iconic ceiling exactly right.”

Ehrlich was thinking of Manhattan’s current Madison Square Garden, which opened in ’68 and stands on Eighth Ave. between 31st and 33rd, above Penn Station.

Coppola’s version, of course, is based on the funky, gunky older version of the garden, the one that stood on the west side of Eighth Ave.between 49th and 50th streets with the neon Nedick’s sign…the one in which Laurence Harvey shot Angela Lansbury through the head in John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate (’62)…the one in which Terry Malloy took “a dive for the short-end money”…the one in which Marilyn Monroe sang “happy birthday, Mr. President” to JFK in May ’62.

Coppola’s version:

Actual late ‘50s version: