This may seem silly or wasteful or low-rent (it’s all these things), but watch the segment that starts at 4:18.

From Kyle Buchanan’s 5.25 report about Thursday’s “Rendezvous with Quentin Tarantino”: “Asked if he had ever watched a film where the violence wasn’t justified, Tarantino at first appeared so stumped that the audience chuckled.

“Eventually, he cited Patriot Games, the 1992 Harrison Ford thriller. Tarantino had found the motivations of the villain [i.e., Sean Bean‘s “Sean Miller”] so relatable, he said, that he rebelled when the character took a late swerve into psychopathic violence.

“‘Just the fact that the villain was this much understandable, that was too much as far as the filmmakers were concerned,” QT said. “So they had to make him crazy. That’s what I got morally offended by.'”

Tarantino’s Patriot Games riff is actually 29 years old. He first articulated his feelings in a chat he had with Dennis Hopper on 3.17.94.

“I keep using the movie Patriot Games as an example of uptight American action movies: It’s supposed to be a revenge movie, all right, and as far as I’m concerned, if you’re going to make a revenge movie, you’ve got to let the hero get revenge. There’s a purity in that. You can moralize after the fact all you want, but people paid seven dollars to see it. So you set it up and the lead guy gets screwed over. And then, you want to see him kill the bad guys with his bare hands, if possible. They’ve got to pay for their sins.

“Now, if you want to like deal with morality after that, that’s fine, but you’ve got to give me what I paid for. If you’re going to invite me to a dance, you’ve gotta let me dance.

“But the thing that is very unique, I mean, that is very indicative of American films, in Patriot Games, is the fact that the bad guy actually had a legitimate reason to want revenge against Harrison Ford, [who had] caused the death of his brother. So he actually had a legitimate reason to create a vendetta against him. But the studio was so scared that we would even identify with the bad guy that much to the point of understanding his actions that it turned him into a psychopath. I never thought that he was a psychopath, and it took legitimacy away from what he was doing. Then he bothers Harrison Ford so much that now Harrison Ford wants revenge. So you’ve got these two guys who both want revenge, which is an interesting place to be.

“But then they get into this stupid fight on this boat, and they do the thing that my friends and I despised the most: Harrison Ford hits the guy and he falls on an anchor and it kills him. And it’s like you can hear a committee thinking about this and saying, ‘Well, he killed him with his own hands, but he didn’t really mean to kill him, you know, so he can go back to his family, and his daughter, and his wife and still be an okay guy. He caused the death but it was kind of accidental.”

“And as far as I’m concerned, the minute you kill your bad guy by having him fall on something, you should go to movie jail… all right? You’ve broken the law of good cinema. So I think that that is a pretty good analogy for where some of these new, relentlessly violent movies are coming from.”

…is that it didn’t have a great Elmer Berstein score to activate the grandeur, which is why I’ve always preferred the John Sturges version to Akira Kurosawa’s. I’m sorry but that’s how it is.

In a 5.25 assessment of the Cannes Film Festival (“At a Particularly Strong Cannes Film Festival, Women’s Desires Pull Focus“), N.Y. Times critic and gender celebrationist Manohla Dargis totally dismisses Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Black Flies, calling it “ridiculous.”

Black Flies, which I approved of in a 5.19 review, is based upon Shannon Burke‘s same-titled 2008 book, an account of his own rough-and-tumble experience as a NY Fire Department paramedic.

So this Tye Sheridan-Sean Penn film is what it is, but in Dargis’s view it isn’t underwhelming or overly generic or bludgeoning. No, it’s worthy of ridicule!

HE to Dargis: Does Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead also qualify in this regard?

In the same article Dargis swoons over Todd Haynes‘ May December, which I found strained, clumsy and, at times, borderline infuriating.

One of May December‘s forehead-slappers is a scene in which Julianne Moore‘s Gracie Atherton, a somewhat neurotic and brittle 60something who runs a dessert-cooking business out of her Savannah home, suffers a near-hysterical meltdown because a wealthy client has cancelled a birthday cake order.

Right away you’re asking yourself “if Gracie shrieks and wails over a cancelled cake order, how would she react if, God forbid, a pet was killed or if something horrible happened to one of her children?”

Concepts of proportion and restraint don’t seem to exist in Haynes’ creative realm.

Then it hit me — a Black Flies reshoot that, once integrated, might persuade Dargis to not call it “ridiculous.”

HE to Dargis: What if the Black Flies producers add Julianne Moore to the film and give her a glorified cameo? Have Sean Penn and Tye Sheridan visit her spacious Cobble Hill apartment, having heard from a concerned neighbor that she’s shrieking and wailing and possibly in major distress. They arrive only to realize that Moore is experiencing an emotional breakdown due to a client having cancelled a birthday cake order. The client has promised to pay for the cake but Moore is nonetheless heartbroken and bawling her eyes out.

Whaddaya think, Manohla? Would this scene, if added, help to rescue Black Flies?

Hollywood has long practiced the art of conflicted moral messaging, or the pushing of lofty moral or ethical aspiration while simultaneously enticing the crowd with cheap highs and tawdry pleasures.

For decades this was Cecil B. DeMille‘s game, especially with films like Sign of the Cross and The Ten Commandments — give the peons sex, glamour and lavish spectacle while preaching somber adherence to the Old Testament gospel.

Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street employed a similar strategy, revelling in Jordan Belfort‘s lifestyle of drugs, depravity and debauchery while condemning Wall Street’s culture of greed and exploitation.

I’ve never forgotten LexG saying at the time that he liked The Wolf of Wall Street “for the wrong reasons” — i.e., he’d had so much fun with the party-boy behavior that the moral message barely registered.

The latest trailer for Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie seems to be following suit. On one hand it’s clearly a satire of girly-girl shallowness and empty Coke-bottle personalities and pretty-in-pink aesthetics, but on the other hand many who will pay to see it (are we allowed to say that younger women are apparently the target audience?) will be adoring the abundant plastic materialism and smiley-face attitudes that the film is telling its audience to maybe think twice about.

Trust me, there will be millions who will love Barbie “for the wrong reasons.”

Critic ratings of Cannes competition films rarely (or only occasionally) synch up with the preferences of juries. But if you’re willing to throw caution to the wind for the sake of spitballing, the likeliest Palme d’Or and Grand Prix winners (to be announced tomorrow night) will probably come from six films rated 2.8 or higher.

The highest rated (3.2) is Aki Kaurismaki‘s Fallen Leaves, a tragicomic love story that I wasn’t able to see. Then again HE regulars understand that I have a long record of missing Cannes prize-winner screenings. It’s almost uncanny. I have a special nose.

Todd Haynes‘ May December, which I found grating and at times infuriating, and Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall are both rated 3.

Four have 2.8 ratings — Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest (which I respected more than admired), Wang Bing‘s Youth (which I never even thought about catching), Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s About Dry Grasses (tried to see it, failed for reasons I’d rather not go into) and Tranh Vanh Hung‘s The Pot Au Feu (my personal favorite).

For what it’s worth the derision thrown at the traumatic and walloping Black Flies (1.3) was and is completely off the mark. Jessica Hausner‘s Club Zero, an anti-woke parable, deserves a lot more than a lousy 1.7 grade.

Juries almost always give the Palme d’Or for social-political-moral motives to prove their woke bonafides. This suggests that The Zone of Interest may take the top prize.

I’ll be flabbergasted if The Pot au Feu, easily the most nourishing and pleasurable film of the festival, wins the Palme d’Or.

My final Cannes ’23 screening will be Alice Rohrwacher‘s La Chimera, which screens at the Grand Lumiere at 3:30 pm.

Pic costars Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini. Filming began in Tuscany roughly 15 months ago. Dictionary definitions of “chimera” seem elusive: (a) “A fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail,” and (b) “a thing which is hoped for but is illusory or impossible to achieve.”

Packing and cleaning up this evening, and then catching a train back to Paris at 11:24 am.

And the more pearl-clutching, ashen-faced Scott Menzel types who come out of the woodwork next month, the better.

Repeating: One way or another JLaw needs to save herself from what’s been happening to her career for the last seven or eight years. No Hard Feelings might do the job. The new trailer (which isn’t the least bit offensive) can only be watched on YouTube