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I don’t want to give Russell Crowe a hard time over his direction of The Water Diviner (Warner Bros., 4.24), a melancholy, handsome period drama about love, loss and grief. Okay, with pretty landscapes and occasional action scenes. I felt as if it was always trying to soak me with emotion. Or yank it out of me. I found it more meandering than mesmerizing but let’s be gracious and acknowledge that Crowe tried like hell to be Peter Weir here. Give him a B for effort at least. There’s always the next time.

On top of which Crowe gives a balmy, kind-hearted performance as an Australian farmer, Joshua Connor, who’s looking for some kind of closure over the loss of his three sons who were killed during the terrible battle of Gallipoli, which took the lives of 46,000 Allied soldiers (over 8000 Australians) and wounded 250,000.

The film is basically about Connor travelling to Turkey in 1919 to find his son’s bodies and if possible lay them to rest with a prayer, but what can happen with all three having suffered so horribly with so little to show? We know the answer from the trailer. This recently widowed man of 50 will fall in love with an alluring Turkish woman (Olga Kurylenko) who’s a good 20 years younger. But right away this feels a bit off. The problem (and I’m not trying to be an asshole here) is that Crowe has become too girthy to play a romantic lead. Maximus has morphed into Peter Ustinov in Spartacus, and grown a thatch of gray hair in the bargain. I know he wasn’t this gutty in Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah so you tell me.

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I’ve never attended the opening day of Cinemacon as a rule, and tomorrow morning I’ll be missing the 9:30 am Paramount presentation…sorry. My flight from Burbank arrives in Las Vegas around 1 pm so I’ll have my “Admit One” pass and be inside Caesar’s Palace in time for the Warner Bros. presentation (Tuesday, 4:30 pm). I’m also committed to sampling the 4DX experience as well as IMAX laser projection, Dolby Vision and Barco DP4K-60L laser projection. I always love my first 24 hours in Vegas but can’t wait to escape after 48.

From David Rooney’s THR Berlin Film Festival review of Bill Condon‘s Mr. Holmes (Roadside, 7.15): “[Pic] represents an agreeably old-fashioned alternative to all the modernized reinventions of Arthur Conan Doyle‘s venerable detective in recent years. Those include the television updates Sherlock and Elementary, with their contemporary attitudes, humor and gadgetry, and the overblown action-comedy film franchise, with its aggressive cartoon gloss on steampunk style.

“Mr. Holmes is a ruminative film of minor-key rewards, driven by an impeccably nuanced performance from McKellen as a solitary 93-year-old man enfeebled by age, yet still canny and even compassionate in ways that surprise and comfort him. Its emotional swell creeps up with a subtlety and grace that will make this Miramax/Roadside Attractions release appeal especially to older audiences.”

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“With his first martial arts film, Hou Hsiao-Hsien‘s The Assassin will rate as the # 1 attraction of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival,” proclaims Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy.   He admits, however, to “lingering apprehensions…because Hou’s measured pacing and careful style would seem to be the antithesis of what is normally called for in what is broadly known as action cinema; it’s kind of like Terrence Malick undertaking a Michael Bay project. It’s very difficult to imagine what this film is going to be like, which is reason alone for genuine curiosity.”

To which I can only add there’s nothing like strongly suspecting that a certain film is going to try your patience if not make you feel completely miserable and yet knowing you’re required to sit through it and give it your full attention and commitment, etc.

McCarthy adds that “advance reports suggest that Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario will be quite strong. [And] the fact that Woody Allen‘s Irrational Man is being described as one of his ‘dark’ films in the vein of Match Point has given me hope. [And] I’m extremely keen to see Todd Haynes‘ Carol, based on Patricia Highsmith‘s captivating second novel, ‘The Price of Salt’, in which Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara seem ideally cast.”

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Hollywood Elsewhere respectfully declines to attend the 2015 Cannes Film Festival screenings of Mark Osborne‘s The Little Prince. Even if I was more favorably disposed, the fact that Jeff Bridges voices “the Aviator” would be a problem for me. His voice has become less and less appealing as he’s gotten older. He opens his mouth and it’s like “schnawwrr-roahhrrahhr-yeahhhrrauhp.” His young-man voice in Stay Hungry, Last American Hero, The Last Picture Show and Against All Odds had a dynamic vitality that worked. I was even down with his going-to-seed voice in The Big Lebowski. But starting around four or five years ago (Crazy Heart, Tron: Legacy, True Grit) Bridges began to sound like Foghorn Leghorn.

The Little Prince – International Trailer 2 by Orangefr

Daniel Espinosa‘s Child 44 deserves points for investing in historical realism (1953 Soviet Russia) while telling a murder-mystery tale, but it’s way too slow and long and grim. And my God, the whitewalls! The exact same Hitler Youth haircuts that were surrounding me at Whole Foods the other day are worn by Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Joel Kinnaman and Vincent Cassell, among others. The bottom line is that you just don’t want to “be” in this film. There’s no disputing that Stalin’s Russia was a relentlessly gray, morose and repressive place, but who wants to spend two hours and 17 minutes in the hell-hole of Child 44? It’s all about Hardy’s Leo Demidov, a deposed Ministry of State Security agent, trying to catch a serial child killer, but while catching or killing this monster will obviously save children’s lives, it won’t make any difference to anyone else. After a half-hour or so I was feeling a profound longing to escape from Child 44, but I had another 90 minutes to go. After 45 minutes I stretched out on the seats and caught a 20-minute nap. But I caught the last hour’s worth.

I’ve written a couple of times about the currently filming remake of Ben-Hur (Paramount, 2.26.16), which is being directed by Russian low-life Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter). In a recently posted chat with Immersed in Movies’ Bill Desowitz, Bekmambetov indicates that in some respects Ben-Hur “will be just as edgy and cutting edge as Unfriended,” which Bekmambetov produced. The Russian helmer makes it especially clear that his version of the chariot-race sequence will be markedly different than William Wyler’s.

Jack Huston (Judah Ben-Hur) and Nazanin Boniadi (Esther) during filming of Timur Bekmambetov’s Christian-pandering Ben-Hur.

“I’m using more of YouTube videos to find ideas and style for the camera work and how people behave,” the director said. “The chariot race today is like Formula 1. It’s a different technique, with a lot of whip pans and zooming [and VFX by Mr. X].” Desowitz mentions that “there’s an assortment of digital cameras being used on the movie — Red, Alexa, GoPro.”

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Josh Trank‘s Fantastic Four (20th Century Fox, 8.7) is a franchise reboot and the first grade-A film based on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby‘s 54 year-old Marvel comic book. Are Marvel superhero flicks about anything other than the making of money? Anything at all? Do they contain any echoes or metaphors about some aspect of 21st Century life, which the X-Men films had before Brett Ratner came along? Two reasons for concern: (a) one of the producers is Matthew Vaughn, which indicates that the film might have the same tone of cheap, candy-realm escapism as Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service; and (b) Fantastic Four was shot in Louisiana, which doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll have that craven “shot on a budget in Louisiana” vibe…but it might.

Matteo Garrone‘s The Tale of Tales, an English-language adaptation of Giambattista Basile’s same-titled fairy-tale omnibus (a.k.a., “Il racconto dei racconti”), will screen at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. The phrase that comes to mind off the top of my head is Garrone’s Satyricon minus the sex. The full title of a recent edition of Basile’s book includes the phrase “entertainment for little ones.” The Wiki page says Gerrone was drawn to Basile’s stories “for their mix of the real and the unreal, and because he found the themes in many of them to still be highly relevant.”

HE to Immersed In Movies’ Bill Desowitz: “You wrote the other day about the new IMAX laser projection system, which was demonstrated in Los Angeles a few days ago. There’s also Dolby Vision, of course. So is the competition mainly between IMAX laser and Dolby Vision, or is it more of a three-way if you thrown in the Barco DP4K-60L laser projector? Is there an overlap here? Or is the IMAX laser projection strictly IMAX-centric with the other two duking it out in non-IMAX theatres? I’m confused.”

Desowitz back to HE: “I don’t know how Dolby and Barco differ, but IMAX stressed at the demo that their design breaks from the industry standard of using prims and xenon bulbs, which they believe sets them apart along with now filling the big screen without aspect ratio limitations (the featurette explains some of the tech). What I saw was very impressive. But yes, there appears to be three competitors. I need to find out about 60 frames from IMAX, which would allow them to show the upcoming Avatar films as well, which likely will be shown at 60 fps.”

Most of the time I wash the car at one of those do-it-yourself, compressed-water-spray operations that cost about three bills. They also have quarter-in-the-slot vacuum deals. But every so often I splurge on a bells-and-whistles car wash facility. There’s one on the west side of La Cienega and just south of Melrose, called Royal Car Wash, that I visited today. I was there for only about 25 or 30 minutes and two unfortunate things happened in that time slot — (a) a case of sexual favoritism that I took exception to and (b) a bearish, gray-haired guy who moaned and “ahhh”-ed too loudly when he was in one of those quarter-in-the-slot massage chairs.

I was getting a massage myself in the chair right behind this guy and probably enjoyed it just as much, but being a New Jersey/Connecticut WASP, I hold that shit in. I really love it when those machine-fingers start working on my lower backbone but I don’t let go with “aaaahhh, God!,” “Aahhwwww!,” “Oh, Jesus…oh man, I don’t believe this!” and so on. His moans were so appalling I was starting to feel badly about experiencing the same device. You’re lowering the property values, dude.  If I hadn’t been facing the opposite direction I would’ve given him the old stink-eye. So many people treat public areas like their living rooms or bathrooms.

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Press screenings of Child 44 and Unfriended happened last Tuesday (the former at 3 pm, the latter at 7 pm), and I missed them both. Naturally. God help me but I’m thinking about catching both today. Unfriended and Child 44 have 65% and 27% Rotten Tomato ratings, respectively.  Neither are likely to be pleasant experiences. Honestly? The more I think about this, the weaker in the knees I’m getting. One or the other, but not in tandem.  I need to man up or cut bait.  This is my life.  This is April.