Bill Maher: “There are only two kinds of movies — the blockbuster…robots and monsters and superheroes…and movies like this [i.e., First Reformed] that I see in a hotel room.”
Ethan Hawke: “We’re all only as good as our time period…only as good as our community. Take One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. A great film and it was made by a studio, studio put it out in the malls, everyone went to see it, it’s got a sad ending but it got awards but…what, is it an art film? I don’t know if they would make that today.”
Maher: “They wouldn’t, they wouldn’t.”
Hawke: “It’s a strange thing. You more you feed people popcorn, the more they just want popcorn.”
Today (Saturday, 5.12) is relatively light with only three events (two films and an interview) on the schedule. At 1:30 pm (or 70 minutes from now) is a screening of Bergman — A Year in A Life at the Salle Bunuel. At 4 pm in the same venue Christopher Nolan will talk about this and that, but mostly, I presume, about the original negative, non-restored version of 2001: A Space Odyssey that he’s been promoting. Finally at 8 pm is a screening of Jim Cummings‘ Thunder Road at Les Arcades.
Late last night I saw Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra‘s Birds of Passage, an indigenous drug-dealing film which many Cannes critics have been creaming over. It’s been justly celebrated as a fresh nativist take on the Columbian drug boom of the ’70s and ’80s, using the perspective of the Wayuu culture. I appreciated this distinction, and all of that is fine.
But the dramatic theme is roughly the same we’ve been seeing in drug-dealing movies for decades, which is that (a) dealing will pollute your soul and (b) sooner or later anyone who seeks to profit from big-time drug dealing will wind up dead on the floor. Sooner or later all dealers form gangs and go to war with each other, etc. The principal Wayuu characters start out simple and pure and just looking to better their lives, and by the end they’ve all taken a bullet or several.
The perspective is interesting, but it’s basically the same bouillabaisse.
During the last third you’re saying to yourself, “Okay, everyone’s gonna die, this scourge will consume itself, the black birds of death are circling so let’s just get it over with….kill everyone, it’s late, I’d like to go home and catch some zees.”
I believed at first that the lack of English subtitles on last night’s print (the Spanish-language drama was shown with French subtitles) wouldn’t be a problem — I understood the gist of almost all the scenes. But after a while I began to feel irritated that I was missing out on countless particulars contained in the dialogue. I expect I’ll see it again someday with English subtitles, and then we’ll see what goes.
Principal photography under original directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller began on or about 1.30.17, but it took Solo producer Kathy Kennedy and co-screenwriter and consigliere Lawrence Kasdan four and a half months to decide that they didn’t agree with L&M’s semi-comic approach (they were apparently going for something akin to Guardians of the Galaxy)? At the time of their dismissal Lord and Miller had nearly completed principal photography.
Kennedy wanted Howard to steer the project back to “the spirit of the original trilogy.” Howard began re-shooting in June 2017, and “had to direct almost the entire movie from scratch,” according to an 5.10 Indiewire summary of the WSJ article.
Posted 11 months ago, or on 6.21.17: “Why did producer Kathy Kennedy wait four and a half months to cut Lord and Miller loose? What does it say about Kennedy’s hiring instincts that she chose a couple of guys with whom she so disagreed that ‘she didn’t even like the way they folded their socks,’ according to Brent Lang‘s Variety story?
Qualifier #1: Even from the fanboys, the consensus seems to be that Solo‘s first act is clunky and that it takes a while (what, 30 to 40 minutes?) to find its footing but once Donald Glover arrives and “the Kessel Run heist plot kicks in, it’s a whole lot of fun.” There’s also agreement that it takes a while to settle into Alden Ehrenreich‘s Han Solo (i.e., mini-Han) but that you just have to accept that the young-Harrison-Ford template is out the window and that Ehrenreich is playing Jake Gittes. Qualifier #2: All I’ve said from the get-go is that Ehrenreich is a bad fit for the part, but I’ve projected nothing at all about the film itself. Qualifier #3: I’m concerned that Bradford Young, Hollywood Elsewhere’s second-least favorite cinematographer for his tendency to make everything look slightly murky and covered in pea-soup, is Solo‘s dp.
Tonight’s big film is the highly regarded Birds of Passage, a Directors Fortnight entry showing at 10:30 pm. Directed by Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, it’s about “the origins of the illegal drug trade in Colombia in the 1970s” as well as “a family story set within an indigenous community.”
Someone speculated earlier that I might avoid Gaspar Noe‘s Climax. Bullshit — I’ve never sidestepped an opportunity to see a Noe film, ever. Previously titled Psyche, Climax was allegedly “shot in just two weeks, and focuses on an urban dance troupe that embarks on a kind of Dionysian frenzy in an abandoned school.” (Wild Bunch’s Vincent Maraval has said this information is incorrect.) For years Noe has been promoting the idea of his being some kind of sensual Satanic figure. The effort continues.
A few hours ago I was forced to choose between the 11 am press conference for Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War or catch a Salle Bazin screening of Joe Penna‘s Arctic at the same hour. I chose the press conference. It was announced soon after that Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. and select international rights for Arctic.
From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review: “Five years ago, All Is Lost premiered at Cannes to deserved acclaim. But when it opened later that fall, the film was a noteworthy commercial disappointment (it made just $6 million domestic), and the awards magic never happened for Robert Redford.
“I think I understood why. All Is Lost was ingeniously made, and a true experience, yet the stark fact is that it was slow. Arctic, as effective as it is, may face a similar challenge (at least in the U.S.), precisely because of the rough-hewn, trudging-through-the-tundra, one-step-at-a-time honesty with which Joe Penna works. The movie, in its indie way, is the anti-Cast Away. Yet that’s what’s good and, finally, moving about it. It lets survival look like the raw experience it is.”
It was reported three days ago that the GOP-led House of Representatives had voted to kill guidance from a consumer protection agency aimed at preventing lenders from charging minority consumers more on car loans — obviously a discriminatory practice. Republicans don’t care, of course; they just want to diminish government regulations. All hail Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for calling out those who would deny that discrimination takes place in this realm. “This resolution is one part of a widespread Republican effort to make it more difficult to hold financial institutions responsible,” said Waters.
Watch Congresswoman Maxine Waters rip a GOP Rep in half who interrupted her and was being racist: “I do not yield. Not one second to you. Not one second,” Waters said. This is how it’s done. We are done with their BS. No more. Not one second more. pic.twitter.com/vzHlTioSyN
“This is really a movie about chain of command, and about people diminished and decimated by authority. In this case you have a colonel who’s middle management, and with middle management you can look up or look down. And when you have a system without oversight, about power fortifying itself at the expense of the non-powerful, this is what you get.” — David Simon, creator, executive producer, head writer and show runner for all five seasons of The Wire (’02 to ’08). (Essay posted on 5.10.18.)
In a word, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War is brilliant — an impressively grim, beautifully shot, wonderfully concise portrait of a compulsively hot if constantly frustrating love affair. Romantic bindings can be fatiguing, turbulent, infuriating, painful or even destructive, but the fires are not easily quenched.
Right now Cold War is the leading candidate to win the Palme d’Or, hands down.
Set in ’50s-era Poland and France (mostly Warsaw and Paris) and spanning about a decade, it’s about a musician-arranger (Tomasz Kot) and a headstrong femme fatale singer (Joanna Kulig) who are drawn to each other but never quite come together or achieve even a semblance of stability, much less synchronicity.
Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski, actress Joanne Kulig during this morning’s press conference — Friday, 5.11, 11:35 am.
Kot pursues, wins, then loses Kulig, over and over. But she keeps returning, affirming her love then changing her mind and ducking out the side door.
Pawlikowski employs the same glorious black-and-white palette and 1.37:1 aspect ratio that he used for Ida, and it’s just pure dessert, an ice-cream sundae — I was in boxy heaven.
And Cold War is only 84 minutes. I love it when a world-class director reminds us all that narrative discipline and pruning things down to essentials are still active options.
Heralded as a kind of African-cinema breakthrough, banned in Kenya for encouraging homosexuality and finally becoming the first Kenyan film accepted by the Cannes Film Festival, Rafiki is…well, pretty good. Set in low-rent Nairobi, it’s a nicely finessed lesbian love story that plays in familiar ways.
Wanuri Kahiu‘s second film is good and winning but in a mild (but not meh) sort of way. The lovers, Kena and Ziki (Samantha Mugatsia, Sheila Munyiva), are daughters of opposing political candidates, which obviously piles on the pressure. Kahiu’s decision to deal head-on with Kenyan homophobia and intolerance is understandable, but the result is that the first half loses its aura of intimacy and tenderness. The second half is a little too adamant and on-the-nose. There should have been one or two straight characters who don’t give the couple so much grief.
But I loved the two leads (especially Munyiva); ditto Kena’s mom (Muthoni Gathecha). And I loved getting to know native Nairobi culture to some extent.
