We all know the French are seemingly attached to smoking, but even in Paris there’s a lot less of it than, say, 20 or 30 years ago. It’s nonetheless striking how many festivalgoers this year are lighting up all over the place. Are they chipping because they’re here and it’s community party time so what the hell? Mainly young people because they think themselves bulletproof, but dudes of all ages, it seems.
Posted on 11.30.08: “You have to smoke in movies like you don’t give a damn, like you don’t need it, like you don’t care one way or the other if you have any on you, like your Zen-ness is rooted in your soul and not in the way you look when you light up, you desperate asshole.
“Once an actor looks as if he anxiously wants or needs a smoke to stabilize or enhance his currency with an audience, he’s a dead man. Once an actor pulls out a cigarette in order to have something to do during a scene (and you can always spot actors who do this), the man has permanently surrendered his cool. He’s finished, discredited.”
Thomas Ngojil‘s Untamable (Quinzaine des Realisateurs / Director’s Fortnight) is aces. Ngojil directs and stars in a solid, tight, straightforward ensemble drama about Billong, a strictly moral, highly intelligent and demanding detective who not only plays it rough, tough and judgmental on the job, but also at home with his wife and five or six kids.
It’s basically a character study with a murder investigation (a fellow investigator shot in the back) driving the narrative.
I dropped the ball in attempting to reserve my press seat for Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great. Woke up a bit late (7:15 am), jumped in the shower before initiating the process…too late.
My only recourse during this afternoon’s rainstorm was to wait in the last-minute, badge-only line. Better luck next time.
And then, determined to be the mouse who doesn’t quit, I Ubered over to Cannes La Bocca to try and finally see Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest. Shut down again.
Notice how the woman looking for a free ticket does an Auda Abu Tayi at the 13-second mark, and then flashes a look of alarm with a kind of plea. “In this, a festival about world cinema in which everyone is snapping pics and videos of everyone else, I am a private person engaged in a private enterprise of sorts…please.”
I shot the video because I felt moved by her aloneness along with the rain, the umbrella and the red sign, which she was holding upside down at first. She flipped it around when a kindly passerby tipped her.
Timothy Snyder, leading historian of authoritarianism, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe: “The most obvious winner, of course, is Vladimir Putin and Russia. The Russians started a war that they couldn’t win without American assistance. And then, for the last year or so, they made it very plain that their game plan was to keep the war going in the hope and expectation that Donald Trump would return to power. And now that Trump is in power, he’s conceded on behalf of the Ukranians, so to speak, pretty much every major issue — territory, NATO, Russia’s legitimacy in the international system, trade with Russia. [Trump has] conceded all of these things without asking for any concession from Russia, and meanwhile has pressured Ukranians to take a much worse deal.”
I’m trying not to feel overly hopeful about Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which I’ll be seeing late Wednesday night (10:30 pm). Over-investing + sight unseen often (always?) leads to some degree of disappointment.
But with only two major winners on the HE chart so far (Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague and Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake) it’s hard to restrain myself.
The central dynamic is an estranged relationship between Renate Reinsve (actress) and Stellan Skarsgård (her celebrated film director dad). Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning and Cory Michael Smith costar.
Highest 2 Lowest star Denzel Washington is a no-show at Tuesday morning’s press conference, but he was certainly present during last night’s red carpet event.
I’m still pissed off that snagging a digital ticket to Spike and Denzel’s film was all but impossible. Besides last night’s gala the only other shot was this morning’s 8:30 am Salle Bunuel screening…smallest room in town, fills up immediately. (I’m not counting today’s Cannes la Bocca screening at 2:30 pm….too unwieldy.)
Highest 2 Lowest will open theatrically on 8.22, and will begin streaming on Apple TV+ on 9.5.
Gray skies, rainshowers and lightning are the defining elements as we speak. There can be no disputing that the sound of crackling thunder is wonderful.
I should have attended last night’s 10 pm screening of Julia Ducournau‘s Alpha, which has attracted considerable loathing thus far. But I succumbed when a friend asked about sharing a dinner, as I haven’t had a nice sit-down meal anywhere since I arrived seven days ago. We kicked it all around for nearly three hours.
The back-up plan was to catch Alpha at this morning’s 8:30 am screening, but I had to stay up late in order to install measures that will hopefully remedy an HE trauma that I’ve been dealing with for several days (i.e., relentlessly attacked and repeatedly shut down my malicious IPs from China). Didn’t drop off until 2:15 am; too exhausted to get up at 7 am. I hereby apologize to all the HE piss-sprayers who will attack me for not being hardcore enough.
I’ll be catching Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor The Great (an Oscar nom for 95-year-old June Squibb is said to be likely) at 2 pm.
No locked-in ticket for Rebecca Zlotowski‘s Vie Prive (Grand Lumiere, 7 pm…Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira) but last-minute access is an option.
I saw Alejandro G. Inarritu, in town for a screening of the restored Amores perros (Salle Agnes Varda, this evening at 7:15 pm), strolling toward the Palais early last evening. A few minutes later I ran into An Education‘s Lone Scherfig. We hadn’t spoken since the debut Sundance screenng in January 2009.
I have an 11:15 am screening of Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s The Secret Agent (158 minutes) breathing down my neck, but I can at least file brief reactions to films I haven’t yet posted about, etc.
1. It’s not important or even noteworthy, trust me, to explain the plotline of Wes Anderson‘s exactingly composed The Pheonician Scheme. Because it’s just (stop me if you’ve heard this before) another serving of immaculate style mixed with ironic, bone-dry humor — another signature tableau exercise in WesWorld stuff — wit, whimsy, staccato dialogue, a darkly humorous attitude, faintly detectable emotional peek-outs. Plus the usual symmetrical framings, immaculate and super-specific production design and the Anderson troupe reciting their lines just so.
I’ve written repeatedly over the last couple of decades that Wes needs to recover or re-charge that old Bottle Rocket / Rushmore spirit and somehow climb out of that fastidiously maintained Andersonville aesthetic and, you know, open himself up to more of the good old rough and tumble. Maybe there’s no remedy. Maybe we’re all just stuck in our grooves and that’s that. What’s that Jean Anouilh line from Becket? “I’m afraid we can only do, absurdly, what it has been given to us to do. Right to the end.”
2. Dominik Moll‘s Dossier 137 is a sane, sensible, mid-level drama about an internal investigation of an incident in which a young yellowjacket protestor was seriously injured by a Parisian policeman during a back-and-forth. Lea Drucker plays the chief investigator for the General Inspectorate of the National Police (IGPN); she is tasked with figuring out which cops, if any, acted rashly or irresponsibly. I felt a certain degree of satisfaction all through it, and emerged knowing I’d seen something of moderate substance. No harm, no foul.
3. Oliver Laxe‘s Sirat is a serving of raw 16mm realism, and yet deliberately made without attention paid to certain visual or narrative or logistical basics. 56 year-old Sergi López, an excellent Spanish character actor who probably peaked with his performance as the fascistic Cpt. Vidal in Pan’s Labyrinth, is Luis, an overweight, gray-haired dad searching for his missing daughter in the parched wastelands of southern Morocco. Accompanied by his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and knowing that his daughter was a nomadic raver type, Luis shows her photo to several like-minded souls but learns nothing of substance. Luis then suffers a horrific trauma about halfway through, and his reaction is such that I inwardly quit the film without a second thought. I’ll explain later but what Laxe chose to show (and more particularly not show) struck me as intolerably bad filmmaking. I’ll let it go at that.
I have a couple of other films to get to but not now…
Joe Biden is not only a dead man in terms of his reputation as a liar and gaslighter who ushered in Trump’s election. He’s also literally looking at lights-out from prostrate and bone cancer, although who knows how much time he actually has left? A year or two? I’m not an oncologist.
If Joe hadn’t drooled and stammered and old-manned his way to abandoning his presidential campaign last July and had somehow, against all odds and in his dreams, beaten Trump, Kamala Harris would almost certainly be taking the oath of office by late ’25 or certainly in ’26…right?
Science Direct estimates, posted in April 2024: “Of all men with a Gleason score of 9–10, 34% were alive at the end of follow-up, while 43% died of prostate cancer and 23% died of other causes.”
It’s too late to bang out a review of Lynne Ramsay‘s Die, My Love, which I saw late Saturday evening, but I can at least pass along that while I respected what it was on about, the Debussy journos didn’t go for it. Too grim, too downish in a one-note sense, no plot pivots of any kind….just a downward swirl into Jennifer Lawrence‘s increasing postpartum derangement….down, down, down.
What is it really about? Just as Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds wasn’t so much a restrained horror film about malicious winged demons as an indictment of social complacency, Die, My Love isn’t so much about JLaw’s descent into self-destructive madness as a portrayal of the dull horror of doing almost nothing with your life while caring for a child…an indictment of middle-class, stay-at-home-and-burp-the-baby-while-baking-cookies momism.
…will go instantly down the drain, as this is a film that despises the sensibilities of Joe and Jane Popcorn…people will hate it, hate it, hate it. It will lose money hand over fist, and yet IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson and Ryan Lattanzio are either ignorant of this fact or curiously committed to furthering Sound of Falling‘s myth regardless. It’s this year’s Women Talking….a spoonful of cinematic Castor Oil if I’ve ever tasted one.
One morning in ’74 or thereabouts I strolled into a Hollywood Ralph’s in a semi-ratty neigborhood…Beverly Blvd. just west of Highland, something like that. I’m striding down one of the aisles and….boiinnnggg! — I came upon Doors keyboard guy Ray Manzarek, whom I instantly “made”. I experienced a simultaneous jolt of surprise and pleasurable adrenaline, as I’d long regarded the Doors as mystical-spiritual brethren and here I suddenly was, face to face.
A typical Doors fan would have geeked out and done the old babble-babble, asking Ray about the drug allusions in songs like “The Crystal Ship” and lyrics like “I’d rather fly” and what Jim Morrison was really like on personal terms and so on. But I didn’t want to do the hyper fan thing or even try to engage Manzarek in a conversation. I didn’t want to be just another breathless idiot. So without breaking stride…okay, I slowed down somewhat…I just let go with one of my cosmic grins and said “hey, man!” Manzarek smiled right back and repeated these same words, and that was it.
I didn’t think of myself as any kind of kindred spirit of Manzarek’s but in a Bhagavad Gita way I sorta kinda was (or we were), and so, you know, two souls exchanging some nice, tingly vibrations in a supermarket aisle…the same thing would’ve happened if I’d run into Jimi Hendrix (although he’d been dead for four years)…move on, dream on.
