I wanted to post and discuss these Barry clips before getting on yesterday’s flight, but one thing and another kept getting in the way. I still haven”t seen the Barry and Succcession finales but at least I’m back in the zone. I totally know what happens in both finales, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
I also need to see You Hurt My Feelings at the earliest opportunity.
It’s 7:20 am in West Orange, New Jersey (Jett and Cait‘s place). I woke up at 3:25 am. My French Bee flight left Orly around 7:25 pm last night; it arrived around 8:25 pm at Newark. I sat in a forward coach section…not horrible, not great. Unless you’re in first-class or business, eight-hour flights are generally agonizing as a rule.
Nobody “gives” their life in combat — they fight as best they can to achieve victory or at the very least not get killed, and sometimes fate tilts against them. That’s it — that’s all it boils down to.
If there’s one must-to-avoid in terms of conversational observations about famous human beings, it’s deciding who’s “nice” and “not nice”.
Whenever I hear someone say that a famous person he/she has run into socially is “sooo nice” or “not nice,” I give them a death-ray look that would stop Gort in his tracks. “Nice” is welcome, of course, but overrated. What matters to me is “does a famous person I’m speaking to really mean what they say, or are they some kind of performative orangutan going through the motions?”
The thrust of Beale’s post was “oh, lordy, did Ben Kinsgley behave like an asshole when I interviewed him 30 years ago or what?” As well as “oh my God, Ian McKellen is such a sweetheart….I love the guy!…he’s a gift from God sent to earth to make all of our lives better and sweeter!”
Beale: “Ben Kingsley was interviewed a few days ago in ‘Headliner,’ a regular New York Times arts section feature, where celebrities are asked to name ten of their favorite things. The intro mentions that since Kingsley was knighted years ago, he likes to be referred to as ‘Sir Ben.’
“I interviewed ‘Sir Ben’ back in the ’90s, when I was a staff writer at the New York Daily News. I found him to be an insufferable, pompous bore. He sneered at my questions, treated the film’s publicist like dirt, and refused any posing suggestions from the staff photographer who accompanied me. He has since become my default answer when people ask me what was the worst interview experience I ever had.
“What resulted was the only truly nasty celebrity interview I’ve ever written, in which I compared ‘Sir Ben’ to the alien slime thing in the B-grade sci-fi film Species, which he was supposedly promoting.
“Not long thereafter I interviewed Ian McKellen, who had also been knighted. When I asked him if I should refer to him as ‘Sir Ian,’ he smiled broadly and said, ‘No, just call me Ian.’ He was a sweetheart.”
HE to Beale: I’ve chatted with Mr. McKellen three or four times over the years, and he’s always been a smooth, bright, learned, warm-hearted, unpretentious, cosmopolitan fellow.
There is also, however, room for edgy, prickly fellows like Kingsley from time to time. When you interviewed him he clearly had some kind of disturbance going on inside, perhaps due to the fact that he hated Species (or hated making it or both) and was ashamed to be promoting it.
Okay, he was a dick that day but does he have to be tied to the whipping post for this? Kingsley really has a wonderfully wicked and perverse sense of Don Logan-type madman humor inside, and was also beyond great in Schindler’s List (’93) and (never forget this!) masterful in David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), not to mention Gandhi (’82) and Bugsy (‘91) and…what was that adaptation of Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal called?
Why does oddball Ben or Kingsley-the-shithead necessarily have to be condemned? Not every person is conventionally likable in a way that you might prefer. It’s very easy and, I would argue, even somewhat meaningless to behave in a “nice” way. We all have a “nice” face or, if you will, a “nice” mask — it’s just a matter of putting it on.
Don’t get me wrong as I greatly prefer the company of nice, charming, gracious people with a twinkle in their eye, but I also accept or understand that sometimes unusual or interesting or even volcanic people are playing a different kind of game, or at least sometimes they are. They’re not evil — just possessed or mortified or their feelings have been hurt or something in that vein.
From Michael Herr‘s “Evolution of the Term ‘Hipster’, Pt. III” (excerpt posted eight years ago by Brecht Anderson):
“He haunted the Museum of Modern Art and the few foreign-film revival houses, the very underground Cinema 16 and the triple-feature houses along 42nd Street…he was already careless, even reckless in his appearance, mixing his plaids in wild shirt, jacket, and necktie combinations never seen on the street before, disreputable trousers, way-out accidental hairdos… (Even…in the late 50s, when he was working in Hollywood, the insouciance of his attire was remarked upon by many producers and actors, who thought that he dressed like a beatnik.) He was jazz-mad and went to the clubs, and a Yankees fan so he went to the ball games, all of this in New York in the late ’40s and early ’50s — a smart, spacey, wide-awake kid like that, it’s no wonder he was such a hipster — a ’40s-bred, ’50s-minted, tough-minded, existential, highly evolved classic hipster. His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruce‘s than to any other director’s, and this was not merely an aspect of his. He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.”
“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.'”
“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.”
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?
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.
