Jeff Wells

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

I’m sorry but David Corenswet isn’t quite axe-blade handsome enough — he has agreeable facial features, but is also a teeny-weeny bit funny-looking. Corenswet has a face that sorta kinda looks like a villain in a John Wick film. But at least he’s not gay or trans.

Rachel Brosnahan is three years older than Corenswet, and what’s with her big, thick-soled, lace-up boots?

Pruitt Taylor Vince, 64 going on 79, plays Superman / Clark Kent’s adoptive father, Jonathan Kent.

…but all through it I was saying to myself, “This is a smart and aggressive political satire of sorts…a crazy relationship-driven thing…a pronounced antagonism film but this small-town ‘western’ set in May 2020 is basically just a narrative version of the same X-treme left vs. X-treme right insanity that we’ve all been living with since the start of the pandemic, if not 2018 or ’19…

“I appreciate the vigor and the pacing and the increasingly lunatic tone, but it’s a miss, I’m afraid…it’s just not happening…I’m not hating it or looking at my watch, but I’m not caught up in it either. I felt detached and distanced…I was in my seat and Eddington was up on the screen….different realms.”

Until, that is, Eddington abandons all sense of restraint and it becomes The Wild Bunch on steroids.

Friendo (half-hour ago): “How was Eddington?”

HE: “It’s a very smart, increasingly intense, ultimately surreal reflection of the stark raving madness of the COVID years. If you remove the over-the-top violence of the last 45 or so, it’s basically a movie about the same polarizing rhetorical shit we’ve all been living with since 2020 (or, in my head at least, since 2018). JUST YOUR BASIC AMERICAN POLARIZED MADNESS. Take away the bullets and the brain matter and it reminded me of the comment threads from Hollywood Elsewhere over the last five or six years.

One reason I didn’t fall for it or kind of resisted the vibe is that Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance as Joe Cross, the rightwing-ish, initally not-too-crazy, anti-mask sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico…Joaquin’s performance is fairly weak…it’s almost like he’s playing Napoleon again…I understood and had no argument with the arc of Cross’s journey and all, but I simply didn’t like hanging with the guy. There’s something flaccid and fumbling and inwardly uncertain about him. He’s not “entertaining”.

Pedro Pascal‘s performance as Ted Garcia, the sensibly-liberal mayor of Eddington, is much more grounded and appealing. Emma Stone is pretty much wasted.

Another reason I didn’t feel all that charmed or aroused is that Eddington doesn’t have any big keeper scenes or any dialogue that I would call signature-level in the manner of Scarface (“You fucked up too, Mel…The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls”) or Heat (“Because she’s got a….great ass!”) or Tony Gilroy‘s Devil’s Advocate (“He’s an absentee landlord!”)…

I’m not calling it a “bad” or ineffective film or anything, but it’s basically unexciting and kind of drab and sloppy and not much fun, really. And the chaos is…well, certainly predictable. It has some bizarre surreal humor at times, but mostly it’s a fastball thrown wide of the batter’s box.

The thing Eddington was selling never plugged in, never spoke to me beyond the obvious. It’s all about X-treme left bonker types vs. gun-toting, righty-right over-reactions. Okay, I felt taken when it became a bloody bullet ballet over the last 45 or so minutes, or do I mean the last 60 or so? I can’t remember.

,/p>A

All hail Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, which I saw this morning at 8:45 am. It’s EASILY the best Cannes ’25 film thus far…EASILY.

The only thing that scares me is that I saw Netflix’s Albert Tello at the screening, and it would be awful if Netflix were to capture this jewel of a children’s adventure film and bury it in their streaming feed. Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term, and it needs to be seen theatrically….please. It’s my idea of an instant classic — all but guaranteed to be nominated for a Best Int’l Feature Oscar.

I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.

Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion, it’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).

The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.

And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.

Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.

Nayef and Qasem are not only perfect in a way that only non-actors can be, but they blend together beautifully.

The brilliant cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru and the nimble editing by Andu Radu are genius touches.

Eric Roth and Marielle Heller helped bring Cake to life from a Sundance Screenwriting Lab. Roth: “It’s a small miracle…dear Hasan has a poet’s soul…in this too public business of absorbing the blows of outrageous fortune, Cake is that sweet taste of honey.”

Chris Columbus and Michelle Satter also pulled strings on the film’s behalf.

A U.S. distribution deal is presumably imminent, but please, God…please don’t let it be picked up and smothered by Netflix.