If there’s one thing that Cannes is not about, it’s laid-back relaxation. Covering is like attending a demanding senior-level bar exam course. You have to be on your toes each and every minute. That said, it’s an honor to be here as an accredited journalist.

Edgar Wright directing Sydney Sweeney in a new Barbarella flick? Emptiness incarnate. Sweeney’s Barbarella could be one thing with an interesting, probing-mind director, but with Wright at the helm….forget it.

From my 10.29.21 review of Wright’s Last Night in Soho:

“I had suspected I would probably have a bad time with this, but my God, it’s dreadful. Mindless, gaudy throwaway trash. Not to mention dull by way of a mind-numbing repetition of a #MeToo mantra — older men with bulging wallets are toxic beasts.

“Wright got hold of something cool and throttled in the first two-thirds of Baby Driver, but now it’s gone. The bottom line is that he’s a completely untethered geek fetishist — he’s all about design and visual intensity and comic-book-level characters, and at the same time completely disengaged from anything even vaguely resembling an adult sensibility or, perish the thought, an ability to absorb and re-process life as a semi-complex, multi-layered thing.

“In short, Wright is 47 going on 14.

“In the mid ’60s context of Last Night in Soho, Wright isn’t interested in trying to (let’s get creative!) partially channel the spirit of Roman Polanski by way of recalling or reanimating the 1965 atmosphere of Repulsion…God, what a stone cold slasher masterpiece that film is, especially compared to the slovenly Soho. Repulsion and Last Night in Soho are one year apart, and at the same time based in entirely separate galaxies.

“Last Night in Soho essentially says one thing over and over. Ready? Older London men who went to flashy nightclubs in the mid ‘60s were cruel sexist pigs (which many of them doubtless were) and they all wanted to sexually exploit and abuse young women who needed the money. Which made them Hammer horror monsters of the darkest and scuzziest order.

“But that was mid ‘60s London for you! Forget the seminal beginnings of the rock revolution. Forget the Yardbirds. Forget the mid ’60s Soho club scene that had begun to be dominated by London’s rock virtuosos and their many followers. Forget the musical and spiritual explosions conveyed by Aftermath and Rubber Soul. Forget John Lennon and George Harrison being dosed by a dentist in ’65 and experiencing their first-ever acid trip. Forget all that.

“Because in Wright’s view, 1966 London was crammed with creepy, sex-starved, Sexy Beast guys in their 40s and 50s who worshipped the Kray brothers.

“Wright is a truly horrible director of actors. No modifying or keeping it plain and low-key, always presuming that the popcorn inhalers are complete idiots who need everything spelled out in boldface…everything turned up to 11.

“The more I think about it, the more I suspect that Repulsion probably was a major influence upon Last Night in Soho. The difference is that Polanski was and is a visionary, go-his-own-way genius, and Wright is an adolescent shoveller of familiar tropes and garish visual impressions.”

Press reservation tickets for Sunday’s (5.19) 6 pm screening of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga were due to be available this morning (5.15) at 7 am.

I signed in at 7 am on the dot only to discover that tickets are completely inaccesible, or “complete.” Unfair! Not cool!

Now I have to find the Warner Bros. team and beg for a ticket. Not the way it’s done, guys. Yes, there’s a Salle Agnes Varda screening on Monday morning at 8:30 am, but that theatre isn’t as big as the Salle Debussy, where a parallel screening should have been scheduled concurrent with Sunday’s Grand Lumiere 6 pm show.

From Steve Rose’s Guardian hit piece (5.14) on the allegedly eccentric Francis Coppola and the reportedly occasionally fraught making of Megalopolis, which Hollywood Elsewhere will see on Thursday, 5.16:

If you’re any kind of kneejerk wokester who has more or less believed in the innate malice of white culture since the explosive reaction to the 5.25.20 death of George Floyd, the term “manifest destiny” almost certainly rubs you the wrong way.

Because it basically alludes to a hallowed belief in European-descended immigrant pioneers of the 20th and 19th centuries having brought about essential strengthenings and advancements in the expansionist saga of the U.S. of A.

It also sounds vaguely racist in the view of non-whites (African Americans, Native Americans) who’ve had significant issues and disputes with whites over the last 400 years, to put it mildly.

And yet in a frank, brass-tacks 5.13 interview with multi-hypenate Kevin Costner, director of the soon-to-be-unveiled Horizon: An American Saga — Part One (Warner Bros, 6.28), Deadline’s Mike Fleming, who has apparently seen Horizon, has described the three-hour, covered-wagon saga as “a sprawling film about Manifest Destiny.”

If I was a hair-trigger progressive, I would regard Fleming’s description with a certain degree of alarm. Which is why I, a staunch anti-wokester for the last five or six years, posted a related article two weeks ago, to wit:

THR ‘s James Hibberd indicated as much in a 2.26 interview with Costner.

Horizon will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival early Sunday evening, 5.19.

Followed early this evening by Quentin Dupieux‘s Meet The Parents — aka The Second Act — a “metacomedy” about actors playing real people but also being themselves. Costarring Léa Seydoux, Vincent Lindon, Louis Garrel, Raphaël Quenard and Manuel Guillot.

Anya Taylor Joy to N.Y. Times guy Kyle Buchanan: “’I’ve never been more alone than making [Furiosa],’” she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I don’t want to go too deep into it, but everything that I thought was going to be easy was hard.’

“Her reticence reminded me of when I first spoke to the actors who had made Fury Road: During that shoot, the desperation of the characters bled into their real lives, and unpacking that experience took a very long time.

“Sensing that she was skirting a sensitive issue, I asked Taylor-Joy what exactly it was about Furiosa that had proved more difficult than she expected.

“For five long seconds, she contemplated giving me an answer. ‘Next question…sorry,’ she said. There was a faraway look in her eyes, as if a part of her had been left behind in that wasteland. ‘Talk to me in 20 years,’ she said. ‘Talk to me in 20 years.'”

George Miller‘s Furiosa screens in Cannes tomorrow night. Has Hollywood Elsewhere successfully reserved a ticket? Of course not. I’m trying to wangle a way in as we speak. If I fail, I’ll catch it at a Cannes commercial cinema ten days hence.

“Believe It, Democrats — Biden Could Lose,” Frank Bruni, N.Y. Times: “Donald Trump may be the presidential candidate whose midday snoozing has generated headlines and animated late-night comics, but President Biden is the one who needs to wake up.

“He’s a whopping 12 points behind Trump among registered voters in Nevada, according to polls by The New York Times, Siena College and The Philadelphia Inquirer that were released on Monday morning (5.13). Biden won that state by nearly 2.5 points in 2020. [Plus] he’s behind among registered voters in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan — in all of the six battleground states surveyed except Wisconsin.

“That’s not some wildly aberrant result. It echoes alarms sounded before. It speaks to stubborn troubles.

In short, Bill Maher was 100% dead-on seven months ago when he stated that by insisting on running for re-election instead of allowing a younger and more vigorous sensible Democrat to step into the breach, Joe Biden “is going to turn the country back over to Trump, and go down in history as Ruth Bader Biden — a person who doesn’t know when to quit and [thereby] does great damage his party and his country.”

Every time I’ve brought this up in the succeeding months, 80% of HE readers have pooh-poohed me…it’s early yet, calm down, Americans will come to their senses, stop doomsaying.

“[This is] difficult for Democrats to believe,” Bruni wrote. “I know: I talk regularly with party leaders and party strategists and I’ve heard their incredulity. They mention abortion and how that should help Biden mightily. They mention the miserable optics of a certain Manhattan courtroom and a certain slouched defendant. They mention Jan. 6, 2021. They note Trump’s unhinged rants and autocratic musings and they say that surely, when the moment of decision arrives, a crucial share of Americans will note all of that, too, and come home to Biden.”

A foam-at-the-mouth, anti-Democracy criminal sociopath will become President next January, and this is partly the symbolic fault of those complacent HE commenters.