I’ve suddenly decided to re-watch Roger Corman‘s Premature Burial (’62), in which a mid-50ish Ray Milland played Guy Carrell, a cataleptic, death-obsessed British aristocrat. (Milland was at least 15 years too old for the part.) My chief recollection is a dream sequence in which Carrell, having seemingly but not actually died, awakes inside his burial vault and finds that none of the escape mechanisms work.

Poor Milland — in ’54 he had played the elegant ex-tennis star Tony Wendice in Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder, but eight years later under Corman he was staring into a silver chalice filled with maggots.

From “‘The House Is the Monster’: Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle,” posted on 8.25.23.

I can’t pound out a ten-paragraph review of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things as it’s nearly 11 pm and I’m really whipped (I only slept about four hours last night) but it’s totally fucking wild, this thing — it’s too sprawling to describe in a single sentence but I could start by calling it an imaginatively nutso, no-holds-barred sexual Frankenstein saga.

The production design and visual style are basically pervy Lathimos meets Terry Gilliam meets Jean Pierre Juenet…really crazy and wackazoid and fairly perfect in that regard.

Set in a make-believe 19th Century realm that includes fanciful versions of London, Paris and Lisbon, Poor Things is at least partly The Bride of Frankenstein by way of a long-haul feminist parable about a underdog woman eventually finding strength and wisdom and coming into her own.

It swan-dives into all kinds of surreal humor with boundless nudity and I-forget-how-many sex scenes in which Emma Stone, giving her bravest and craziest-ever performance, totally goes to town in this regard save for the last, oh, 20 or 25. The film runs 141 minutes.

Poor Things is easily Lanthimos’ finest film, and all hail Stone For having gone totally over the waterfall without a flotation device…giving her boldest, most totally-out-there performance as she rides the mighty steed, so to speak, while repeatedly behaving in a “big”, herky-jerky fashion as Tony McNamara’s screenplay, based on Alasdair Gray‘s same-titled novel, whips up the perversity and tests the boundaries of what used to be known as softcore sex scenes.

The costars include Mark Ruffalo (giving a totally enraged, broadly comic performance as a middle-aged libertine), Willem “Scarface” Dafoe as Dr. Godwin Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Dafoe’s assistant and Christopher Abbott as as an upper-class London slimeball, plus four stand-out cameos by Margaret Qualley, Kathryn Hunter, Suzy Bemba and 79-year-old Hanna Schygulla.

I’ll add to this tomorrow morning but this is one serious boundary-pusher…wow.

Several weeks ago a dismissive Cannes review of Aki Kaurismaki ‘s Fallen Leaves lowered my want-to-see. But at the urging of SBIFF kingpin Roger Durling I caught it yesterday afternoon, and was glad that I did. It’s a simple but pleasing romantic fable — bare bones, wholly believable, well acted and genuinely touching.

Nobody’s urging me to see Rustin, which screens at the Palm at 4:15. The reviews have been tepid. Trusted critic friend: “It does exactly what you expect it to do,” I’ll be attending but I won’t use one of my early-entry passes. It’s not worth it. If I don’t get in, fine. Pretty Things is at 7:30 pm.

Serious respect for the late Jimmy Buffet, who lived large and luxuriously off an enduring music career that stretches back to the ‘70s. Laid-back beach vibes, Caribbean atmospheres + rum and crushed ice in the blender, shots of tequila and “that frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”

I never related all that strongly to the Buffet legend or sensibility or whatever, which was basically about cynicism and resignation. But he did come to represent a “fuck it”, sandal-wearing, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing attitude toward the tensions and stresses of modern life, and you can’t say it didn’t resonate.

Smarthouse audiences will derive satisfaction from Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall, which is a longish investigative procedural-slash-courtoom “thriller”. Not to say it’s especially thrilling — it isn’t — but you can’t say it’s not thorough.

It’s about a renowned, middle-aged writer named Sandra (Sandra Huller) facing official suspicion over the possibly accidental (or not) death of her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), also a writer but a less successful, more financially struggling one.

Theirs has been a turbulent relationship involving casual infidelities on her part, and the authorities suspect that Sandra may have pushed Samuel from the third floor of their A-framed Grenoble chalet.

The main takeaway is that Huller, best known for Toni Erdmann and currently also costarring in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, is a major Best Actress contender.

Huller and Triet spoke prior to yesterday’s 1 pm screening at the Pierre.

I found Anatomy of a Fall fairly gripping (i.e., not spellbinding but fully deserving of my attention) but my knees were absolutely killing me in the tiny Pierre theatre, which affords no leg room.

I’m not so sure that Joe and Jane Popcorn will like it as much. It’s almost entirely set in the A-frame and in a courtoom, and it goes on for two and half hours.

It’s now 8:05 am with my first screening happening 55 minutes hence, and I have to be there no later than 8:30 am.

Two festival days gone, three more to go. Today’s lineup is The Taste of Things at 9 (and those who frown on my re-seeing a sublime Cannes film can go fuck themselves), possibly Janet Planet at 1 pm, Rustin (groan) at 4:15 pm and then Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things at 7 pm (Herzog).

A screening of Andrew Haigh‘s much-celebrated All Of Us Strangers just ended an hour ago, and I’m…well, I’m a dissenter to some extent.

I’m sorry but as rooted, refined, well-written and emotionally palatable as this film is, being about a present-tense gay relationship in London, it’s slow as molasses (as in largely or at least somewhat boring) and the often whispered and mumbled dialogue is hard to make out, and when you boil it all down Strangers is basically 135 minutes of beard stubble rendered in widescreen close-up.

And yet it’s primarily about three or four conversations with ghosts.

Story-wise it’s kind of a gay Midnight in Paris, except instead of hanging with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway the time traveller in question (a screenwriter named Adam, played by the mid-40ish Andrew Scott) spends a lot of time with his late parents, who are miraculously alive and their old glorious selves, and played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy.

Their get-togethers allow Adam, of course, a chance to explain to them both (well, his mom) that he’s been gay (he doesn’t relate to queer) for decades but that being so inclined is no longer the socially uncertain, vaguely uncomfortable thing it was when mum and dad died in a car crash, back in the ’80s.

Strangers is certainly a classy, ultra-swoony, top-tier capturing of an intimate gay relationship. Then again I’m trying to imagine a hetero love affair portrayed or paced in this fashion (i.e., not much of a narrative, mostly about the past by way of dead-parent conversations) and I can’t.

Scott is a subdued, gentle-mannered, first-rate actor with classically handsome features and dark watery eyes (he once played Paul McCartney), and Harry, his lover, is played by the 27-year-old Paul Mescal, an HE non-favorite who wears a moustache and Van Dyke goatee in this thing and has generally horrible taste in clothing. Their performances are flawless; ditto the acting by Bell and Foy.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that watching Mescal and Scott get down with this and that intimate activity…beard-stubble eroticism with drooling kisses and leg rubbings and tender hair-stroking is…there’s no way to honestly react to the physical intimacy stuff without sounding like a conservative rube, and so, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m “not allowed” to say that such scenes are not my cup of tea.

Plus I’m used to gay sex scenes a la Brokeback Mountain or Call Me By Your Name…you know, the old-fashioned, straight-friendly kind.

But there’s no questioning the quality of it all. This is an honest, mature, sophisticated film about serious intimacy and the unpeeling of the usual layers.

Bottom line: If you’re going to make a film that vaguely borrows from Midnight in Paris, you should probably try to make it as diverting as that 2011 Woody Allen film.

I don’t care what the orientation of a pair of given lovers might be, but it’s generally not a good idea to make a boring love story… a love story in which nothing really happens between the here-and-now lovers (except for some fucking early on). All that happens is “gee, my dead parents are back in the old house and so I can talk to them about everything, and maybe introduce them to my boyfriend,” etc.

It goes without saying that All Of Us Strangers will play best in blue coastal cities, and that the kind of rapturous reception it’s gotten from major-outlet critics thus far reflects a certain form of self-protective political posturing (i.e., show approval or be branded a homophobe) that no one will admit to. But then most of us knew that going in.

Posted in response to HE’s Saltburn review:

I’ve just come out of Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn, and it’s all about diseased psychologies and relentlessly dislikable people except for the delectably good-looking Jacob Elordi…it reeks of class hatred, oddness, perversity, arch upper-crust attitudes, callousness and class resentment, the slurping of dirty bath water, a nude Greek satyr finale featuring a fairly sizable schlongola, “wrong time of the month” fingering + cunnilingus, high-impact visual punctuation for the sake of high-impact visual punctuation. Or, if you will, bold style amounting to absolutely nothing except bold style.

Yeah, it’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, all right — Barry Keoghan, owner of the most famous and obtrusive bee-stung nose I’ve ever been forced to contemplate in film after film, is Matt Damon, and the incredibly beautiful Jacob Elordi is Jude Law, and the Keoghan-the-interloper is one slinky, clumsy, weird-ass sociopath who hates himself, his parents, rich people, all people….he loves only Elordi except he’s not gay as much as (quoting Alison Oliver‘s Venetia character) a moth…a moth attracted to a glittery, super-wealthy flame.

Saltburn is deeply divisive, inspiring intense like-hate reactions…fans so far include Matt Neglia, Erik Anderson, Clayton Davis, Greg Ellwood. Haters include myself, David Ehrlich, Peter Debruge, David Rooney.

I despised it so much that I took a 10-minute lobby break around the 70-minute mark.

TheWrap‘s Tomris Laffly: “Saltburn works as a distinct and wildly entertaining probe into familiar waters of privilege, rather than the definite word on it.” Except it’s not a “distinct and wildly entertaining” anything unless you have some kind of incurable aesthetic cancer festering inside you.

I’m catching Anatomy of a Fall at 1 pm, and then the widely praised All Of Us Strangers at 7:30 pm.