The Cannes jury press conference happens today (Tuesday, 5.8) at 2:30 pm, but there’s nothing to see until Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows screens this evening. It screened last week for Parisian press, and the loose talk during last night’s La Pizza gathering was that it might be on the “meh” side. One journo said he’d heard it was similar to Farhadi’s About Elly, another said something about it being Farhadi’s Personal Shopper or — I’m reaching here — possibly in the vein of Almodovar’s Volver. The general feeling is one of slight apprehension rather than excitement.

One of the above said he can’t be specific, but that he understands that a major American film is probably going to get booed. Which is not a difficult achievement here, and is sometimes not that meaningful in the long run. (The journalists who booed Personal Shopper a couple of years ago look like idiots now.)

If the “going to get booed” thing is correct, the likeliest candidates would be David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake, which runs 139 minutes, or Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman. They’ll debut roughly a week from now (Lee’s film on 5.14, the Mitchell the following day). The possible booing recipient could also be Ron Howard‘s Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The BlacKkKlansman rumor is that it’s a “buddy comedy,” but Lee did his best to shoot that notion down on Instagram [see above].

A friend who saw Under The Silver Lake some time ago: “Loved [Mitchell’s] Myth of the American Sleepover, and really like It Follows. I like some of Silver Lake” — presumed to be kind of an impressionistic cultural panorama of present-day hipster Los Angeles a la The Big Lebowski with a dash of Fellini Satyricon — “and I love Riley Keough, but Andrew Garfield is so flaccid and without any charisma or sexuality, and this movie really needs that. There are some great fun sequences and it certainly looks great, but all in all it just feels silly with a donut hole in the lead role.”

I’m making a point of catching Jim Cummings‘ Thunder Road, a father-daughter drama that was well received during South by Southwest 2018 and is screening on Saturday evening under the ACID Cannes program.

A fair amount of make-up sleep yesterday (two-plus hours on the Paris-to-Cannes train, close to three at the Cannes apartment) has resulted in another middle-of-the-night wakeup…yes! There’s nothing like the reassuring feeling of being loved and caressed by Almighty God as you lie stone-cold awake at 2:45 in the morning, contemplating your fate. I look outside at the pitch-black nothingness and feel the chill air sink into my bones. It’s too early even for the crying seagulls, but I can hear Ingmar Bergman‘s wee-hour wolves scampering around outside the building below, panting and whimpering as they lick arterial blood off the cobblestones.

Honest-to-God snap from living room window of the Cannes blackness — Tuesday, 5.8, 3:15 am.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (’75), there’s a scene in which the four brute fascists (Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti) are dressed in drag with particularly ornate women’s hats. Pasolini clearly meant this charade to seem grotesque and perverse. Flash forward 43 years to former Olympic figure skater, sports commentator and LGBT activist Johnny Weir dressed in similar fashion at the 2018 Kentucky Derby. Times change, context is everything.

At 5:45 Cannes time an email arrived from High10 Media’s Jimmy Harney:

“Matt Belloni, Editorial Director at The Hollywood Reporter, will be at Cannes Tuesday 5/8 — Saturday 5/12, and is available and willing for any expert interview needs to talk about the festival.”

That’s ungrammatical, isn’t it? Correction: Belloni will be attending the Cannes Film Festival (“in” might work but “at” alludes to Belloni attending a single event). And he can’t be “willing for any expert interview,” etc. The idea, to clear things up, is that Belloni, a seasoned trade journalist who may know a bit more about the festival than, say, myself or Toronto Star critic Peter Howell or Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman or HE’s own Jordan Ruimy…Monsieur Belloni is hereby willing to comment, expound and generally ruminate about this, possibly the most underwhelming Cannes Film Festival in history.

And so, in Harney’s words, “please feel free to reach out for any opportunities you might need Matt’s expertise for.”

Tonight at La Pizza between 7:30 and 9 pm, Hollywood Elsewhere along with Howell, Gleiberman, Ruimy and several other critics will be available for comments, projections and sage thoughts about the 71st Cannes Film Festival.

We may not be able to shed quite as much light or share as much in the way of perception and perspective as Belloni, but we are nonetheless available and “willing for any expert interview needs,” etc.

Having slept two and half hours on the train, I arrived in Cannes at 12:40 pm. Right away I didn’t care for the vaguely misty, milky-ish light, as if everyone was seeing everything through the eyes of Janusz Kaminski (i.e., HE’s second least favorite cinematographer after Bradford Young). My usual pink-wth-yellow-pastille badge is now dark gray with a rectangular pink-plus-yellow-dot strip, and it’s slightly smaller than before. The official carrying bag is cool — dark-denim colored and lightweight.

I went right back to the Old Town pad and slept again, bagging another two-plus hours. Now I’m unpacking and preparing to head over to La Pizza for the annual Cannes journalist soiree, which will start around 7:15 or so.

Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows, which may have problems, will be the first film out of the gate. The first press-access screening happens tomorrow night at the Salle Debussy at 7:15 pm, about 75 minutes before the 8:30 pm public screening inside the Grand Lumiere. Follow-up press-access screenings will happen daytime Wednesday. If you have a high-grade badge (white, pink with yellow pastille, pink) you’ll definitely get into the first-look press screenings, but the blue and yellow badgers may have to wait. It would so much simpler if the festival would just stick to the old system with a demand that embargos on reviews and tweets (i.e., concurrent with late afternoon or evening public screenings) be respected.

I couldn’t sleep last night for fear of sleeping through the 5 am alarm. I have to hail an Uber at 6 am to be at Gare de Lyon in time for my 7:19 am train to Cannes. The anxiety levels were such that I couldn’t sink into it. After three hours of not quite nodding off, I gave up and rose at 4:30 am. Showered, finished packing, wrote a quick piece about Tully. It’s 5:30 am now. Paris-to-Cannes takes five and a quarter hours. My new concern is that I’ll fall asleep on the train three or four hours into the trip and doze right through the Cannes stop and wake up in Italy somewhere. I can set the iPhone alarm to ring three or four times before the 12:35 pm arrival, but I worry all the same.

10:30 am update: Went under as train was pulling out of Paris; out for 2 and 1/2 hours, woke 20 minutes ago. We’re pulling into Marseilles. 11:20 am: Toulon.

Partly a pissed-off family sitcom and partly a tricky psychological drama, Jason Reitman‘s Tully is a decent-enough thing. I wasn’t head-over-heels when it ended, but before the last 15 minutes (which contains a surprise) I was mildly engaged. How did it play in HE land this weekend? The 88% Rotten Tomatoes score was encouraging, but the 74% audience score indicated that Joe and Jane Popcorn had issues.

It wound up with a mildly disappointing $3.18M from 1353 theatres, or a per-screen average of $2350. Will Tully triple that figure before petering out? You tell me.

I liked it more than New Yorker critic Anthony Lane did, but I agree with his final paragraph: “[Tully] all but collapses when Reitman engineers a final twist — the opposite of the twist in The Sixth Sense, say, which enriched everything that had come before. Here the whole saga is hollowed out and thinned.”

In my 1.26.18 Sundance review, I said that “the ending of Tully is interesting but not, I have to say, altogether satisfying. The plot strands don’t entirely mesh.

“Remember the old film-school lesson about how every story starts with an inciting incident, and how this incident should ideally arrive between page 25 and 30? Well, Tully doesn’t have a big inciting incident. Things just move along on a beat-by-beat, nudge-by-nudge basis. I was asking myself ‘is anything going to happen here or what?’ And then something finally does in Act Three.

“Still, Tully is a better film than Reitman’s disastrously received Labor Day and Men, Women & Children, so it’s an image-burnisher to some degree. But it’s on the slight side.

“Diablo Cody’s script is amusingly sharp and sardonic, and Charlize Theron’s portrayal of Marlo, a stressed suburban mom coping with pregnancy and child care, is her boldest since playing an alcoholic writer in Reitman and Cody’s Young Adult (’11) and her most Raging Bull-ish performance since Monster (’03). Her performance is angry, open-hearted, prickly, lived-in — an obvious awards-level thing.”

Rob W. King‘s Distorted (Mind’s Eye, 6.22) is a paranoid thing (obviously) that may be insubstantial. It’s certainly familiar. The general idea seems to be “beware of any kind of big schmoozy sell because there’s always a malevolent agenda.”

If, upon arriving at a new upscale apartment complex, some red-haired guy were to greet me with a repulsive salesman’s smile, open his arms in a well-practiced manner and say, “Welcome to 21st Century living, the ultimate in comfort and tranquility”…if that were to happen, I would say “thanks but no thanks”, that I’m a 20th Century guy who likes to keep things simple and familiar, and that I generally avoid any kind of “ultimate” experience of any kind.

Christina Ricci and John Cusack, fine, but I don’t like Brendan Fletcher, who plays Ricci’s husband. He’s too short, for one thing, and I don’t like his beard. His big previous credit was a supporting role in Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant but I don’t remember his performance and I’ve seen that film three times.

Boilerplate: A 32-year-old woman (Ricci) suffering from bipolar disorder comes to suspect the proprietor of the state-of-the-art “smart apartment” she and her husband (Fletcher) just moved into is using the building’s residents as unwitting guinea pigs for a “synthetic telepathy” brainwashing plot with dire global ramifications.

I’ve only just watched Ronan Farrow‘s Loyola Marymount University commencement address. It was posted yesterday. He spends most of the speech talking about the intense trauma he went through as he worked on his big Harvey Weinstein expose, which was ultimately published by The New Yorker last October, and which resulted in the winning of a Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service (shared with The New York Times). The story begins around the 3:30 mark.

The legendary Pierre Rissient, the French producer, publicist, super-cineaste and film-festival whisperer whose life was dissected and celebrated in Todd McCarthy‘s Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, has passed at age 81. I didn’t know him at all, but I knew he mattered a great deal to many people of consequence, and I’m very sorry.

I appreciate that few HE regulars will have much to say because the Rissient realm was very inside baseball. You were on to him (via McCarthy’s 2007 doc or personal experience) or you weren’t.

So far I can’t find any way to stream Man of Cinema…irksome.

Rissient’s death was announced by director Bertrand Tavernier via twitter: “Pierre Rissient died last night. His wife Yung Hee asked me to let you know this, and, thinking of her, it is with infinite sadness that I write this message. Pierre was a great human being and an total cinephile. We will miss him.”

(More…)

Eight years ago I posted about an unfortunate decision by Universal Home Video to present a Psycho Bluray in 1.85 rather than 1.37. It actually would’ve been great if Universal had decided to present Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film in both aspect ratios a la Criterion’s On The Waterfont Bluray.

Hitch composed in 1.37 to protect the film for TV airings, but also because 1.37 compositions were perfectly balanced and added to the general intrigue for the extra detail. I ran several comparison shots that showed the differences.

The ’50s and early ’60s were transitional times with many suburban and rural theatres continuing to present films within 1.37 and 1.66 aperture plates, despite 1.85 fascists insisting that the 1.37 to 1.85 changeover was absolute and unequivocal beginning in April 1953. Boxy is beautiful, and it will never stop being so.

The recently released Twilight Time and Indicator Blurays of Joseph L. Mankiewicz‘s Suddenly Last Summer (’59) are another case in point. It was shot a year before Psycho, and the same dual framing aesthetic applies. Both versions crop Jack Hildyard‘s images down to 1.85, even though the 1.37 framings deliver a great sense of compositional balance, wholeness and breathing room.

There’s no explaining this, of course. Either you understand that the 1.37 image of a kneeling Elizabeth Taylor looking up at some anonymous beach stud is preferable to the 1.85 version, or you don’t. Either you appreciate seeing a little more water at the top of the frame and the buried-in-sand feet of the beach stud, or you don’t. Either you get that the 1.37 version is perfectly framed and balanced and that the 1.85 image is less fulfilling and that God himself prefers the former, or you don’t. And if you don’t…well, I’m sorry you feel that way. But you have no eyes.