Yesterday Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy mentioned a couple of dozen interesting possibilities for the 2015 Cannes Film Festival (5.13 to 5.24), which is only nine weeks away. McCarthy starts with two locks I’ve heard about myself — Todd Haynes‘ Carol, a period lesbian romance, adapted from Patricia Highsmith‘s “The Price of Salt,” with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, and George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road, a likely festival opener as it debuts in France on 5.13 and stateside two days later. McCarthy is also more or less predicting that Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland, which will open in the U.S. on 5.22, will make the trek.

I’m not saying these are the hottest attractions, but they’re the first three to be more or less vaguely confirmed for Cannes, and I for one am feeling underwhelmed. Mad Max is fierce popcorn, Tomorrowland might very possibly be infected with the meandering mood virus of co-producer and co-writer Damon Lindelof, and Carol…okay, maybe, but it’s not gobsmacky enough.

I’m just going to offer a suggestion for the hell of it: Thomas McCarthy‘s Spotlight, the drama about the Boston Globe‘s 2001 investigation of sexual molestation by Catholic priests with costars Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schrieber, Johnny Slattery, Jamey Sheridan, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Billy Crudup and Stanley Tucci. Financed by Participant Media and due to be U.S.-distributed by Open Road, Spotlight is just low-profile and modest-sounding enough for Open Road to perhaps seek out an agreeable bump from Cannes that will help it stand up to the competition during award season. Plus McCarthy needs to remind the industry that he’s not the guy who directed The Cobbler, the Adam Sandler film that wiped out in Toronto, but a guy who’s got his mojo back with a moralistic journalism drama.

I’ve mentioned repeatedly that I’m a total fool for color photography taken during the shooting of classic black-and-white films. Today I happened upon this snap of Fred Zinneman and crew shooting the breakup scene between Deborah Kerr‘s Karen Holmes and Burt Lancaster‘s Milt Warden during the filming of From Here To Eternity in Oahu. The shot below was taken by yours truly in May 2001 during a break from my coverage of the Pearl Harbor junket. The location is Halona Cove on the southeast coast of Oahu, where the famous sexy beach love scene between Lancaster and Kerr was filmed.

A couple of days ago director Abel Ferrara didn’t call, as scheduled, to discuss his dispute with Wild Bunch honcho Vincent Maraval and IFC Sundance Selects over the decision to offer an R-rated cut of Welcome To New York on 3.27 (theatrical and VOD) instead of Ferrara’s original cut, which Ferrara believes was contractually guaranteed to be shown. But Ferrara did call today and so we kicked it around for 15 minutes or so. Ferrara insisted that he hasn’t worked without final cut “for the last 30 years” and that his final-cut rights are absolute and sacrosanct. He said that Maraval’s characterization of him as a tempestuous artist who compulsively “bites the hand” is “bullshit.”

During our chat Ferrara sent along the following statement: “As a filmmaker and a human being I detest the destruction of my film Welcome to New York, which is now being distributed by IFC and Wild Bunch and exhibited on Showtime and in IFC theatres. Behind all these entities are individuals, in this case Arianna Bocco, Jonathan Sehring and Vincent Maraval, who feel they can deny my contractual right of final cut, which is simply my freedom of expression. Some people wear hoods and carry automatic weapons; others sit behind their desks but the attack and attempted suppression of the rights of the individual are the same. I will defend the right of free speech until the end and I ask all who believe as I do to not support the showing of this film, on their networks, in their theatres, or wherever.”

A happy life is, I think, mainly about serenity, discipline, curiosity and the right kind of stimulation. Either you’re curious about stuff or you’re not, and “the right kind of stimulation” obviously means everything except drugs, alcohol and compulsive eating. Serenity has many ingredients, but I tend to define it as good enough, taking care of yourself, great theatre, soul-stirring music, nothing terrible or toxic, bills paid on time, healthy food, exercise, long walks in big cities, great cappucino, spirituality if you want it, even-keel relationships, et. al.

The problem for most people, I suspect, is that the kind of happiness they knew or at least occasionally tasted in their late teens and early 20s resulted from the riding of a special kind of spiritual wave with really close friends, good drugs, breathtaking sex, etc. This kind of life led at times to feelings of joy, ecstasy and even a form of transcendent satori, but it simply can’t be sustained when you embark on your solo journey to adulthood and have to start focusing and getting ahead and shouldering responsibilities.

Most adults aren’t fully honest when you ask them if they’re “happy”, but if they were they’d probably answer, “Well, yeah, mostly…I mean, I was truly happy at times during my sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll days but that stuff’ll kill you.”

From a 9.11.14 Toronto Film Festival review by Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth: “With a premise based on the salacious murder trial of Amanda Knox, the most curious aspect of Michael Winterbottom‘s The Face Of An Angel is that it’s not about the case at all. Instead, the filmmaker takes a self-indulgent approach, reorienting the project to tell the story of a director (Daniel Bruhl) researching and writing a movie about the sensational crime and who promptly begins to spiral out of control the more he keeps digging for the truth. A mismatch of genres, coupled with a pretentious attitude regarding the art of moviemaking, this film strains for significance, referencing Dante in the same breath as Knox.

Winterbottom’s film will open later this month in England, and on 6.30 in the States. Almost four months from now? We’re living through a dull, dispiriting season. It should appear concurrent with the British release.

“Shot by Hubert Taczanowski (The Look Of Love, The Opposite Of Sex), the film is visually lifeless, [using] a grimy visual palette that matches Bruhl’s perma-sour demeanor. And the overall tone never coheres, partially due to the shifting nature of the triptych-ish structure. The film’s auntish indictment of tabloid culture is tedious, and as a portrait of an artist grappling with truth and his own personal demons, Thomas just isn’t all that interesting. He’s his own worst enemy, and it’s hard to care about what he’s going through if he doesn’t either.

Superhero movies had a certain punch or value in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, but they don’t mean nearly as much to the culture today. They’re basically opiates for losers. I’m not saying that only losers are into them, but losers certainly are. Is that putting it too harshly? Okay, I’ll tone it down. The more emotionally invested you are in superhero dreams, the less mature, interesting and formidable you are as a person. I know that if I walk into a home and there are four or five people on the couch who have nothing but contempt for superhero films and four or five in the kitchen who live for them, I’m on the couch.

Alex Gibney doesn’t pull punches. His reputation as our country’s leading documentarian rests upon that notion, so it’s unlikely that Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (HBO, 4.5 and 4.6), a two-part, four-hour doc about Frank Sinatra, will take a softball approach. Meaning, I presume, that Gibney won’t brush aside Frank’s wise-guy connections or the thing with Jack Kennedy (Peter Lawford once reportedly commented that Sinatra “was Jack’s pimp”) or the mob wanting Sinatra to get the Kennedy administration to go easy. Well, the trailer alludes to this stuff but how deeply will Gibney get into it?

The only thing that scares me is a claim on the website that the doc is “told in [Sinatra’s] own words from hours of archived interviews, along with commentary from those closest to him.” So all the quotes except Sinatra’s are from people who had won his favor or friendship and were otherwise invested in the legend?

In the view of Chris Ashton, “the 20 greatest, or most powerful, uses of slow-motion in film” can be found in Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs, Chariots of Fire, Watchmen, Hurt Locker, Matrix, Zombieland, The Untouchables, Thelma & Louise, The Darjeeling Limited, Ferris Bueller’s Day off, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Raging Bull, Matrix Reloaded, Inception, Spider Man, 300 and a bullshit boxing sequence in Robert Downey‘s Sherlock Holmes. The list excludes two landmark ’60s films that put slow-mo on the map and pretty much revolutionized the aesthetic by turning rifle-fire death into strangely beautiful ballet — Arthur Penn‘s Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch. Ashton presumably omitted these two because he’s youngish (late 20s, early 30s) and considers films made in the ’80s to be ancient history and anything earlier to be prehistoric. Or he’s under-educated. Or he just forgot.

I always feel suspicion and hostility toward films in which an Average-Joe father is desperately trying to protect his family from (a) intruders, (b) kidnappers or (c) anti-American revolutionaries and terrorists. The Taken films have really poisoned this particular well. Nor do I like films about average American families having to deal with bad people in a foreign country. The underlying message is “you don’t want to venture outside the safety of your American shopping-mall lifestyle…you’re just asking for trouble if you go overseas and particularly to unstable Asian or third-world countries…stay home, go to the mall, enjoy a backyard barbecue or watch an old movie on Netflix or Vudu from the safety of your basement den.” On top of which this kind of thing is way outside Owen Wilson‘s safety zone.

Legendary fly-on-the-wall documentarian Albert Maysles, who with his brother David cranked out classics such as Salesman (’68), Gimme Shelter (’70) and Grey Gardens (’76), has passed at age 88. For years I mispronounced his last name as MayZELLES when the proper pronunication was MAYzuls. My three favorite Maysles brothers docs, to be perfectly honest, weren’t the above three but their ’64 doc about the Beatles’ first visit to the States, Meet Marlon Brando (’65) and With Love From Truman (’66). These guys wrote the manual on grainy, neutral-minded, you-are-there docs in the ’60s and ’70s, but eventually grabby docs that were more cinematic and opinionated (“this is how I see a situation so fuck ‘fair and balanced'”) took over. Maysles-styled docs are still being made, of course, but they don’t seem to be punchy enough.

An allegedly riveting period crime flick, Cedric Jimenez‘s The Connection (Drafthouse, 5.12) seems to be exactly what the doctor ordered for the March-April doldrums. If it were opening this weekend I’d bolt right out of the house. Naturally Drafthouse has decided to release it in mid May. Of course!

Stretching from ’75 to ’81, the French-produced drama “pits Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche against each other as a real-life Marseille judge and an elusive kingpin, distilling actual events into a procedural epic whose complicated narrative is propelled by visceral action sequences and an unusually thrilling soundtrack,” wrote Hollywood Reporter critic John DeFore.

Over the last day or so I’ve been scratching my head over more bad information on the Great Innocents Mumps Mystery, but after calling and sifting around for a couple of hours an answer came along that seemed to finally make sense. I’m frankly getting sick of this story so I’m just going to cut to the chase. Problems with Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lenses during the ’50s were the cause of the syndrome called the CinemaScope mumps, which made images (particularly faces) in the 2.35:1 image look wider or fatter than they naturally were. It turns out there were three kinds of B & L CinemaScope lenses between ’53 and the early ’60s. The very early kind, which delivered serious mump distortion, was used on The Robe, How to Marry a Millionaire and Beyond The Three Mile Reef. Then another lens was developed and used during the mid to late ’50s, one which lessened or modified the mumps without making them disappear. And then came the third kind of Bausch & Lomb CinemaScope lens, which was known as the E-series or blue lens as the housing was colored blue as opposed to grey with the earlier versions. The E-series went a long way to correcting the mumps altogether, and The Innocents dp FreddIe Francis used the E-series lens during most of the shooting, hence the absence of mumps in that film. It’s all explained on a certain page within American Widescreen Museum. And that’s it. I won’t be touching this topic again.

The E series or blue lens used, apparently on a preferential basis, by dp Freddie Francis on filming of The Innocents.