19 days ago I predicted that certain Cannes critics would take issue with Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (which HE is seeing on Monday morning, 5.20, at 8:30 am). The issue, I wrote, would be a complaint that the Native American side of the settler saga hasn’t been explored with enough thoroughness or deference.
“It’s curious that, almost 35 years on from Dances With Wolves — a revisionist Western that still feels radical in the way it reframed the genre’s moral and narrative point of view to Native American peoples — Costner has turned traditionalist in Horizon.
“That’s in the nature of the well-researched story, co-written by Costner and newcomer Jon Baird, which centers on the enormous challenges facing early settlers in the American West, who were trying to make a life in an untamed land which didn’t belong to them.
“But you choose your stories, and the single, underdeveloped narrative thread that is dedicated to a First Nation community here feels like a corrective, rather than a commitment.”
Either you get with the program and drop to your knees as you enthusiastically agree that Jacques Audiard‘s Emilia Perez is a wowser transgender musical masterpiece, or you’re a sourpuss or a problematic person or worse (i.e., perhaps even a transphobe).
The Croisette cultists have spoken, and Greta Gerwig‘s jury is almost certainly going to go along. What choice do they have? I respect the impact factor — you can sense it, feel it.
And there’s no question that Karla Sofia Gascon, a trans biomale who plays the titular character, will be awarded the festival’s Best Actress prize.
Repeating: “Emilia Perez is certainly a nervy big-swing movie, and I’m certainly giving it points for this…it’s not an altogether fascinating film but is certainly one that fascinates from time to time…it’s up to something fairly novel in a wackazoid sort of way, and in my book there aren’t enough films of this sort so I’m definitely giving portions a solid pass.”
Kevin Costner’s Campari Lounge sitdown with THR exec editor Scott Feinberg ended about 40 minutes ago. It lasted a good 65 or 70 minutes, and Costner looks so “movie star”, really great — radiant golden-gray hair, magnificent white suit, slender physique, cool black shades, sheepish grin. Plus he had the charm + candor levels turned up to 11.
While the Horizon director-star passed along many inspirational insights and some great stories about Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Robert DeNiro and Burt Lancaster, Feinberg’s meticulous, career-spanning questions appeared to drain Costner’s energy toward the end (“You’re gonna wear these people out”) and his patience was wearing thin (“Fuck, this is taking long!”, although he said so joshingly).
Quote: “Writing is the blood of what we do.” Quote #2: “I like movies the way you guys do…when the curtain opens I want something to happen…and I miss that curtain!” Quote #3: “I need some more money [to shoot parts 3 and 4 of Horizon with]…I really do, although I’ve shot three days’ worth of chapter 3 and when I get back I’ll be shooting another six days.” Quote #4: “When you go see Horizon and when the lights start to dim, go back to being a little girl or a little boy, close your eyes for two or three seconds, and then open them and go for a ride with me.”
We met in the down elevator after it ended. We’d gotten to know each other during the promotion of Mike Binder’s BlackandWhite. Small talk, chit-chat. And it meant something (to me at least) when Kevin gave me a bro back-pat.
Scott Feinberg’s Awards Chatter podcast interview with Horizon maestro Kevin Costner begins in a few minutes so distraction levels are high, but there’s no question whatsoever that Halfdan Ullmann Tondel’s Armand, which I caught earlier this morning, is the finestfilmhere, and I mean way, WAY above the level of Emilia Perez. All hail RenateReinsve (TheWorstPersoninthe World)!
F. Murray Abraham, Paul Schrader, Sharon Stone, Liam Neeson…who else has recently come out and said “it’s time to ease up on Kevin Spacey…stop trying to kill this guy and let him return to work. He’s too good to keep on the bench.”‘
Please try to process today’s Emilia Perez buzz about how mindblowing it is and what a wild and wonderful genre ghoulash it is and so on…regard all that gush-gush blather with a grain of salt because the huge raves are coming from your Cannes Film Festival cultists, which is to say a secular critical mob composed of two co-existing social-focus groups — the woke whoo-whoo gay brigade along with straight critics who are terrified of not sounding like honorary members of said organization.
Emilia Perez is certainly a nervy big-swing movie, and I’m certainly giving it points for this…it’s not an altogether fascinating film but is certainly one that fascinates from time to time…it’s up to something fairly novel in a wackazoid sort of way, and in my book there aren’t enough films of this sort so I’m definitely giving portions a solid pass.
To make things extra clear this is not a pan but a “yes, a good and sometimes applause-worthy film but y’all need to calm down” review.
I was turned on and rather lit up during the first…oh, 35 or 40 minutes, which is when you’re initially realizing that Jacques Audiard‘s film is a few things mashed together…(a) an “all hail the emotional glory of becoming trans and forsaking coarse male attitudes and behavior” soap opera, (b) a tasty Pedro Almodovar-styled musical by way of Dancer in the Dark, (c) a Mexican cartel crime drama (but not a “crime comedy”) that actually only glances at the world of the cartels and particularly the cartel psychology, and (d) one of those crazy stories that’s impossible to believe in but you’re stuck there and watching it so what the hell…go with it.
But after Audiard decides to jettison that feeling that all grade-A films impart, that feeling that says what you’re watching is reflecting a primal, no-bullshit understanding of human behavior that most of us have picked up along the way…once Emilia Perez detaches itself from the world that many of us know and understand, it becomes more and more off-the-planet, which is to say unhinged and wackazoid. But in a way that fleetingly reminds you at times of the mood of ’80s and ’90s Pedro films.
The musical aspects are quite delightful at first…confident, well-choreographed and snazzily delivered until it all goes around the bend at the 40-minute mark, give or take.
Zoe Saldaña, now in her mid 40s, is frustrated and despairing Mexico City attorney Rita Moro Castro. She’s hired by a major cartel monster called Manitas Del Monte (played by transitioned biomale Karla Sofia Gascon) to help him facilitate a final transition into womanhood.
Which right away feels like bullshit. No Mexican drug lord would think “yeah, I need to become a woman and commune with my gentler, more tender and nurturing side”…no way in hell. The macho crust on those psychos is permanent and corroded and damn near terminal. The concept is just absurd.
So it was actually early when I stopped feeling delighted and started to become Don Logan in an emotional or mental-capacity sense….”all right, what’s this?…oh, here come the honorary gay brigade by way of a cooler-than-shit French director with an idea that will inspire druglord fantasies of shooting up mutiplexes when Emilia Perez opens commercially…the idea of a richer-than-Cresus druglord who figures that hiring an Israeli surgeon to chop his dick off and give him bouncy boobs is a viable plan when it comes to scenarios about disappearing from the Mexican drug scene….yeah, that works!”
It’s really crazy, Audiard’s film…”instantly divisive”, as Variety‘s Peter Debruge has admitted…long and nutso and all over the map in an emotionally supportive, left-progressive, let’s-put-an-end-to-coarse-Mexican-machismo fashion.
The good part is that it renounces and condemns ugly male machismo, but it also rejoices in the rebirth of a drug lord after he transitions to female realm…c’mon! It’s feisty and flourishy at first but once the transition occurs it stops being a believable story and you’re left saying “good heavens, bruh…this is turning wacko and I’m pulling back for safety’s sake because I don’t trust this shit.”
But the Salle Debussy crowd whooped and cheered when it ended. It’s right up the trans woke pro-women, anti-brutalist alley….let’s all link arms, girls, and get rid of these toxic ayeholes! An idea, by the way, that HE completely supports in a gay-brigade-meets-Don Logan sort of way.
By the way: Selena Gomez playsJessi, wifeofDel Monteandmotheroftheirtwokids. She’s devastated when the news media falsely reports that he’s been killed, but we’ve also been informedearly on thatJuan has been undergoing standard pre-transition hormone therapy for two years. Are you telling me Gomez hasn’t noticed any changes in her husband over the last 24 months? Hard to believe.
Paul Schrader‘s Oh, Canada isn’t as good as First Reformed, but it’s definitely better than the last two (The Card Counter, Master Gardener), and it surprises a bit by reaching inward and letting go.
It’s basically about the last dying days of cancer-afflicted radical left documentarian Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), and an Errol Morris-type interview he submits to in order to shake it all off and confess (or maybe imagine) as much as possible.
It’s basically a cut-the-crap, take-it-or-leave it, taking-stock-of-the-boomer-legacy film, and kind of an an old-school thing in a good way…very earnest and solemn, carefully and cleanly written, and it gets sadder as it goes along.
Gere’s white-haired, worn-down appearance and performance are riveting and a little startling, especially if you think back to his sexy-cat beauty and swagger in Schrader’s American Gigolo (’80).
Full respect and 90% satisfaction are felt from this corner. Pic hopscotches all over the place but always feel somber, reflective, sincere…a respectable clean-out-the-cobwebs, stop-lying-to-yourself movie for grown-ups.
Excellent supporting performances are given by Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli.
…at the end of yesterday afternoon’s Salle Debussy screening.
It’s a kind of darkly humorous, oddly grotesque, Bunuelian satire of middle-class misery…an attempt to capture the cold, deathly emptiness of things…the self-loathing, the horrifying banality. It’s basically asurrealelevatedhorrorfilm…dead-eyed zombies and slithering serpents and empty robots eating food, talking about their fears, manipulating each other, indulging in wife-swapping, diving into empty pools, a husband asking a wife to cut off a finger and serve it as a snack, and then deciding to give it to the cat instead…you get the idea.
There’s a point to all this coldrepellentantisepticshit, and I respect that the humanity-hating Lanthimos had a deeply perverse vision in his head as he put it all together, but unlike Bunuel he hasn’t much chuckle in him, and when a film gets booed, even if only by two or three malcontents, it usually meanssomething.
Early this morning I was late to my 8:30 screening of Emanuel Parvu‘s Three Kilometres to the End of the World, a small-town Romanian drama about homophobia and a hate crime. But I had 15 minutes to make it to the Salle Agnes Varda, a relatively short distance from the pad, and figured I had a fighting chance. I had my laminated pass, my bar-code ticket…this could work.
But I didn’t have a fighting chance…not really…as the Cannes Film Festival security guys have set up too many blocking gates, lines and security checks.
I tried to walk directly to the A.V. from the Place Maritime entry gate, which I’ve done dozens of times in the past. Nope — your press pass isn’t sufficient, go around the Grand Palais, enter from the other side. But after doing that I was confronted by a long, terribly slow, shuffling-nightmare line. After getting through that soul-suffocating gauntlet and climbing the A.V. stairs I was blocked yet again by security staff. After being allowed to pass I was blocked a fourth time from entering the theatre.
And this wasn’t just me — a sizable crowd of credentialed journos had the same beef and were trying to beg, argue and cajole their way in. They all failed.
It was that beefy Place Maritime guard and that long behind-the-Palais line…the one-two punch that killed my spirit and sent me plunging into the pit.
…that women as attractive as Sienna Miller, Abbey Lee, Jena Malone and Ella Hunt were part of the common community of westward-travelling settlers during the Civil War era.
I’m glad they were cast in Kevin Costner‘s Horizon, but I don’t believe that hotties were even dreamt about until much later in the 19th Century and more likely into the 20th.
Nor do I believe that women as attractive as Red River costars Joanne Dru and Coleen Gray were wagon-trainers during the same era. I’m glad Howard Hawks cast them but, etc.
Does anyone have faint memories of Westward Ho The Wagons (’56), a Disney-produced, wildly unrealistic western about covered-wagon settlers heading for Oregon? A family-friendly saga, settlers vs. Native Americans, etc. Fess Parker, Kathleen Crowley, Cubby O’Brien, Jeff York, Sebastian Cabot, David Stollery and George Reeves (Superman’s final feature film).
Most of us have a basic impression about the late Dabney Coleman, who passed yesterday at age 92. Aside from being a dependable, professional-grade character actor, he mostly played sexist jerks, stubborn asshats and comic foils.
But by my scorecard Coleman lucked into at least two interesting characters and did very well by them — (1) “Mayo”, the assistant Olympic ski team coach (subordinate to Gene Hackman) in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69), and (2) “Dr. Bill Ray”, Jane Fonda‘s sensible, good-natured boyfriend in On Golden Pond (’81).
Mostly, however, he played dicks, and his best-known in this regard were “Ron Carlisle,” the sexist soap opera director in Tootsie (’82) who antagonized Dustin Hoffman‘s “Dorothy” and vice versa and the sexist, jerkwad boss in 9 to 5 (’80). Both were broad, boilerplate performances.
