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In a 1.21.14 Sundance Film Festival review, I confessed to bailing on Jim Mickle‘s Cold in July and that much of my inability to stay with it was due to a hair-styling decision by Mickle and his star, Michael C. Hall. “The part I saw felt like a Jim Thompson melodrama mixed with the kind of low-rent VOD film that throws in a totally unexpected third-act plot twist because viewers won’t expect it. I’d read the reviews, I knew what was coming…later. But the main issue (and I’m not saying this just to sound eccentric or obstinate) is Mickle’s decision to have his lead actor, Michael C. Hall, wear a mullet.

“My heart sank when I saw it. A brick wall. I tried to get past it but I couldn’t. I should have just walked out when I saw the damn thing but I stupidly hung in there.

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Yesterday a Daily Mail piece about columnist Baz Bamigboye visiting the set of Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth (’15) appeared. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard portray Mr. and Mrs. M with Sean Harris, Paddy Considine, Elizabeth Debicki and David Thewlis costarring. I’ve seen my share of Macbeths (including the notoriously panned 1980 Peter O’Toole stage version at the Old Vic), and my hands-down, all-time favorite is Roman Polanski‘s 1971 film version with Jon Finch in the title role.

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If you speak ‘strine, you’d be pronouncing David Michod‘s The Rover (due to play the Cannes Film Festival’s midnight section) as “the Rohvah!” Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy, Anthony Hayes, Gillian Jones. Michod quote: “You put cars in the desert in Australia and people are going to think of Mad Max, And with all due respect to that film — and I stress that — I think The Rover is going to be way more chillingly authentic and menacing.” RPatz looks better with longer hair.

Clint Eastwood‘s Jersey Boys (Warner Bros., 6.20) is going to be at least half-decent. It’s obviously going to play it right down the middle and maybe feel a little old-fashioned, but that’s appropriate in this context. John Lloyd Young‘s voice is dead-on but couldn’t they find a guy who actually looks like Frankie Valli? (Young looks like a thin Bruno Kirby.) The Four Seasons delivered an Italian-American New York area “doo-wop,” also known among hardcore aficionados as “wop rock.” (Perhaps the most classic manifestation being The Tokens‘ “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”) Everyone thinks doo-wop peaked in the mid to late ’50s, but the Four Seasons didn’t even begin to be famous until 1962. My favorite FS tune was always “Candy Girl.”

I was put down earlier today by HE contrarians for saying I felt “a tiny bit gloomy about the just-announced selections for 2014 Cannes Film Festival” and for wondering “where’s the No Country for Old Men-level rocket fuel?” But many others have expressed similar views, to go by Justin Chang‘s Variety piece (posted at 1:58 pm) called “Cannes: Looking Past the Hype and Hate.” Excerpts: (a) “Some festgoers, surveying the actual lineup today with a mild sense of deflation, even disappointment, can too often lapse into a posture of whiny, disgruntled self-entitlement when our anticipated favorites don’t materialize when and where we want them to”; (b) “Annoyed by what we’re not getting, we sure as hell aren’t going to be excited about what we are getting; (c) “One of the more general complaints you’re likely to hear over the next few weeks about Thierry Fremaux’s latest lineup is that it’s overly safe and short on surprises: What, Mike Leigh again? Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg again? Naomi Kawase again?”; and (d) “It strikes me as…premature to be criticizing programming decisions and dismissing films sight unseen — not that it hasn’t stopped some from piling on the criticism, declaring this year’s lineup ‘pathetic‘ or ‘lame and limp-wristed,’ to name some of the choice adjectives that have been thrown around this morning on Twitter.”

This TMZ video shows Bryan Singer’s accuser Michael Egan and attorney Jeff Herman during today’s press conference in Beverly Hills. Egan said his mother reported the sexual abuse allegations to the LAPD in 2000, but they were ignored. He thereafter “buried it within me as deep as I possibly could,” he said, and that the reason he didn’t file a lawsuit until yesterday (i.e., for a period approaching 15 years) is because he “had a problem with drinking” until 2012, and that he found the resolve to file the lawsuit after going through trauma therapy over the last 11 months. Herman said the timing of the lawsuit had nothing to do with the release of Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past (20th Century Fox, 5.23), but was mandated by a 4.24 statute of limitations cutoff date in Hawaii.
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20th Century Fox spokesperson Chris Petrikin has stated the following on behalf the studio: “These are serious allegations, and they will be resolved in the appropriate forum. This is a personal matter, which Bryan Singer and his representatives are addressing separately.”

In a civil lawsuit filed yesterday (4.16) in Hawaii, Bryan Singer, the 49 year-old director of X-Men: Days of Future Past (20th Century Fox, 5.20.14) was accused of sexually abusing a 17-year-old lad in 1999 and forcing him to take cocaine and basically using him like a chicken hawk. The plaintiff, Michael F. Egan III of Nevada, is now 31 years old. His attorney is Jeff Herman, who has handled many other sexual-abuse cases.

This is obviously a shakedown operation, pure and simple. Egan and Herman want Singer’s money — that’s all that’s going on here.

They apparently timed the lawsuit to coincide with the upcoming release of X-Men: Days of Future Past in order to gain leverage and maximize the pressure.

You could call this the second major attempt to shake down Singer over alleged inappropriate liberties taken with younger males. Remember the Apt Pupil “boys in the shower” brouhaha? Here’s a link to Mark Ebner’s New Times piece about that.

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I feel a tiny bit gloomy about the just-announced selections for 2014 Cannes Film Festival. As my eyes scanned the list I was saying to myself “okay, some of these sound pretty good but where are the high-octane blowout titles? Where’s the No Country for Old Men-level rocket fuel?” At best this is going to be a mildly good festival. I don’t feel bummed exactly — don’t get me wrong. There are obviously some intriguing choices (like Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep) and some titles yet to be announced, but I’d be lying if I said I’m in a state of mild tumescence or Brian Wilson-styled excitation.

I stayed up until 2 am this morning to file, exhausted, but they didn’t start on time (i.e., at 11 am in Paris). So I took a 15-minute nap on the couch and they still hadn’t begun the press conference at 2:15 am (11:15 am in Paris) so the hell with it. And now I’m up again and reading the rundown and going “Uhm, okay…all right…wait, is that all there is?”

No big surprises, no major lightning bolts, all expected choices and no big strutting dogs with the absence of Paul Thomas Andersen‘s Inherent Vice and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Birdman. And no films that seem assured of being in the award-season conversation except for Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (i.e., Steve Carrell‘s lead performance) and possibly Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Search (a remake of Fred Zinneman‘s same-titled 1948 film, set in war-torn Chechnya and costarring Berenice Bejo and Annette Bening).

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Will 42 year-old Eli Roth ever attempt anything other than “ironic” exploitation fare about blood and organs and disembowelings? Of course not. Before he made The Green Inferno Roth hadn’t directed a film since ’07, but he seems perfectly happy being the Herschel Gordon Lewis of the 21st Century. (If he wanted to climb out of the genre dungeon he’d have made his move by now.) Compared to Roth, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who share his enthusiasm for grindhouse genre wallowing, are Samuel Fuller and David Lean.

We’ve been down this jungle trail before. The holy grail of cannibal movies, of course, is Ruggero Deodato‘s Cannibal Holocaust (’80). For what it’s worth I was totally down with Jonathan Hensleigh’s Welcome to the Jungle (’07).

Here’s a fanboy review of Green Inferno.

Allen Barra‘s 4.13 Salon review of Scott Eyman‘s “John Wayne: The Life and Legend” has at least two glaring factual errors. He writes that (a) The Petrified Forest, in which Humphrey Bogart launched his career as the fearsome Duke Mantee, was released in 1941 when it opened on 2.6.36, and (b) that The Big Trail, the 1930 Raoul Walsh western in which Wayne had his first major starring role, was in “Technicolor.” (It isn’t.) You’re obviously stuck with your errors in a print publication, but an online publication can correct wrongos immediately and repeatedly. (I post corrections almost every day.) Barr’s piece was posted last Sunday morning around 9 am, and yet as of right now — Wednesday, 4.16, at 3 pm — the errors are still in the article. What kind of bullshit absentee editing system does Salon have in place? If you want to acknowledge the errors, fine, but fix them. And not within days but hours if not minutes.

The interesting thing about some of Tom Junod‘s more colorful observations about Tom Hardy in the current Esquire (i.e., that he’s emotionally intense, has “taken swings at directors” and duked it out with Shia LaBeouf, that Mad Max: Fury Road costar Charlize Theron found him “weird and scary and wanted him kept away from her”) is that he radiates a Zen-like calm in Locke. The film “mostly works because of Steven Knight’s superior script and Hardy’s quiet, authoritative, carefully phrased performance…his best yet, I feel,” I wrote on 4.8. I ran into Hardy two or three years ago at the Four Seasons — he’s not a day-at-the-beach type but he’s no bullshitter and is basically cool.

Why is it that I find the the Heaven-accepting, death-defying premise of Warren Beatty‘s Heaven Can Wait deeply moving (especially the final scene inside the L.A. Coliseum), but the idea of watching Randall Wallace‘s Heaven Is For Real (Sony, 4.16) completely repulsive? Not just because of the loony-visions aspect (i.e., Jesus riding on a rainbow-colored horse), but because Gregg Kinnear‘s way of speaking to his on-screen son, played by Connor Corum, is horribly cloying and patronizing. (Never talk down to young kids — I always spoke to mine as if they were 30.) And Corum’s acting is quite grating. The trailer clips are oppressive enough — I can’t imagine sitting through the entire 100 minutes.

The film is based on Todd Burpo‘s 2010 book “Heaven Is For Real,” about a near-death death experience by his four year-old son Colton in which he visited a realm that he believed was “heaven.” Colton apparently claimed “that he personally met Jesus riding a rainbow-colored horse and sat in Jesus’ lap, while the angels sang songs to him. He also says he saw Mary kneeling before the throne of God and at other times standing beside Jesus.” Just reading that makes me quite angry. Seeing it in a film would be torture. Despite a 50% Rotten Tomatoes rating, Heaven Is For Real is expected to do very well commercially.