Yes, I’ve posted a clip like this before, but if you’re never going to go as a journalist this is how it feels and smells as you’re approaching the Grand Palais for a morning screening. No harm in repeating this, right?

A healthy portion of Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, which I saw this afternoon, is cool, snappy, rousing, well-cut and enormously likable. (And dancable.) That would be the first 30% or 40%, when the true-life tale of an Aboriginal Supremes-like group assembled and took shape in Australia in 1968. This 40-minute section may seem a little too slick and familiar to some, but it definitely works.

But the main reason the film delivers overall is Chris O’Dowd‘s performance as Dave, a charmingly scuzzy boozer and Motown fanatic who steers the four girl singers (played by Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell) away from country and towards soul music, and then takes them to Vietnam to entertain U.S. troops. Dowd’s manner and personality are a total kick — an absolute hands-down winner and the best reason to see The Sapphires, even when it turns sketchy in the last half or so. (He was Kristen Wiig‘s cop boyfriend in Bridesmaids.)

I was saying to myself during the first 10 or 15 minutes, “Whoa, this is pretty good…not as high-throttle razzmatzzy as Dreamgirls but I like it better.” And then it kept on going and hitting the marks for the most part. But then the quartet goes to Vietnam and the smoke and bombs and shrapnel become part of the narrative and the film, sorry to say, turns into a catch-as-catch-can slipshod hodgepodge — good music, relationships with guys, personal friction, exotic atmosphere. Unfortunate as this sounds, the Vietnam War is used strictly as a lively, occasionally dangerous backdrop as the girls sort out their various personal issues.

But when it’s not really working The Sapphires at least keeps the ball in the air with reasonable agility and sass. The analogy, come to think, isn’t really Dreamgirls as much as Hustle and Flow and The Commitments, at least during those first 40 minutes.

The soul classics are delightful to savor throughout. The music put me in a good mood right away and kept me there…well, during much of the running time.

Blair is a talented director who knows how to cut and groove and put on a show. It’s too bad that Vietnam and what appears to have been a slim budget overwhelm him somewhat. The script is by Aboriginal actor-writer Tony Briggs and Keith Thompson, and based on Brigg’s 2004 stage play, which was based on his mom’s true story (as the closing credits infom).

If I’m going to make the 3:30 pm screening of the Weinstein Co”s The Sapphires (“an Aboriginal Dreamgirls,” a friend tells me) I have to bolt in 20 so here’s what I tweeted about Michael Haneke‘s Amour earlier this morning:

Tweet #1: “Michael Haneke’s Amour is a very finely made, corrosively honest and delicately realized Chinese water-torture movie about slowly dying and loving mercifully right to the end.”

Tweet #2: “Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Emmanuelle Riva deliver frank affecting performances as an 80-something couple coping with drip-drip finality.”

Tweet #3: “But who apart from that certain strate of cultivated urban filmgoers will pay to see Amour? My 80something mom and her friends at her assisted-living facility would turn it off if they saw it on DVD, trust me. They watch escapist dreck in their TV room. Never films of substance.”

Tweet #4 and #5: “I spent half my Amour-watching time deciding what form of suicide I’ll choose when I get that old and my life becomes that pathetic. Pills. As romantic as it sounds, I don’t want to be torn apart by wild beasts. I want to expire on a nice couch while watching a Bluray of Derzu Usala.”

Tweet #6 and #7: “I don’t know how the boomers are going to handle death in their ’80s and ’90s, but I’m betting many will go by their own hand…but with flair. Amour is two hours and 7 minutes long. Sublime and refined and honest and sensitive, but old age and withering away with diapers is not for sissies. I know — I saw my father do it four years ago.”

Tweet #8 and #9: “Amour deserves and will get much respect critically, but nobody wants to die like this or watch this process. This is how it’ll possibly be, says Michael Haneke, if you’re lucky enough to have a partner who cares as deeply and tenderly as Trintignant does for Riva. Great!”

SPOILERS HEREIN: Those early wowser reviews for Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt turned out to be misguided, in my view. I just came out of an 11 am screening and no offense but it’s attractively photographed, well-acted, middle-of-the-road TV movie crap.

It’s a small-town drama is about an innocent divorced man (Mads Mikkelsen) accused of child molestation, and how all his asshole “friends” very quickly fall away from him. And then, after torrents of ugliness, how everyone does a gradual turnaround. And how turn-the-other-cheek Mikkelsen accepts this reversal and accepts.

The deplorable behavior and rank stupidity seem somewhat credible on one level, but on another level appallingly false. “Why does this movie feel so oppressively full of shit?,” I kept asking myself. Forget the Crucible-resembling element, and the old, old story about small-town panic leading to the near-ruination of a man’s life. The bottom line is that this isn’t a satisfying story. Stupidity reigns, evil walks, justice isn’t served and a bullet slams into a tree at the very end. Zinngg!

Would best friends and longtime drinking and hunting buddies (except for one or two) really turn on an old friend like that, even when law officials have found a significant flaw in his accusers’ stories? Would a five-year-old create a ferocious fantasy because she feels faintly slighted when a certain adult neighbor tells her that kisses on the lips are only for parents and grandparents? Are parents so rock stupid as to completely discount this five-year-old when she recants said fantasy more than once? Would small-towners really descend to the level of terrified blind steers in a situation like this?

Maybe all this has happened (perhaps even countless times) but I didn’t buy it, not for a second. Not as Vinterberg showed it to me. The b.s. meter was going off constantly. “Beep-beep-beep-beep-beeeeeep-beepity-beep-beep-beeeeeep!”

First Showing‘s Alex Billington tweeted that he wanted to punch out several characters or words to that effect. Yeah, me too.

Tweetos: David Jenkins called it “worst in show. A jumped-up, cynical TV movie with chronic lack of ambition & zero insight into human psychology.” Mike D’Angelo wrote “let’s just say you’ve more or less seen this one once you know the premise.” Billington called it “infuriating, frustrating…a film about lies, full of lies. Too long. Ugh.”

Wells to Ira Parks, sent this morning: “Complaints are insistent and building. Your meta inhabitings are better as punctuations and counterpoints. You need to stop blanketing the site with this stuff. Take it easy.”

With Toronto Star‘s Pete Howell, The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney and MCN’s David Poland singing praises thus far, it looks like Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt (showing at 11:30 this morning) is the one to see and perhsps stand by. Maybe.

Hold Up: It’s 8:17 am in the Grand Palais, waiting on Michael Haneke‘s Amour, and First Showing.net’s Alex Billington just told me he “hated” The Hunt. And the guy sitting next to him said “it should have played in the market.”

This evening around 9:25 pm, adjacent to area around Cinema de la Plage.

Here’s an excellent piece by Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday, appearing in tomorrow’s Sunday edition, about the transition from film to digital that’s been happening now for…what, 15 years now? Yes, it’s gratifying that she’s used my Ciinemacon reaction to the 48 frame-per-second product reel for The Hobbit for her second quote.

The screening of Brandon Cronenberg‘s Antiviral that I couldn’t get into broke a little while ago, and the Twitter consensus is that it’s outlandish, icky, cool, creepy, maybe a bit too long, and definitely influenced by dad.

My favorite so far is from Ben Kenigsberg, to wit: “Self-reflexive? Brandon Cronenberg infects himself with his dad’s greatest hits, which replicate (and thrive) like a virus.”

“A strong debut with a clear papa-influence aesthetic,” said Logan Hill, “but it only creeped me out, didn’t disturb me. But wow, is Brandon Cronenberg David’s son! Childhood Videodrome nightmares?

From Jake Howell: “Oh man, Toronto, Antiviral is crazy awesome.”

“Brandon Cronenberg’s stylish smart stab at celeb-worship loses momentum along with blood in last act,” says James Rocchi. “Some cutting wouldn’t hurt.”
52m Noah Cowan ?@noahlightbox

“Why are people calling Antiviral ‘outlandish’? Its a simple extension of celeb death watch group panic on Twitter/Facebook, etc.” — Noah Cowan.

Many have voiced dissatisfaction with the original 2009 Heat Bluray. The main beef is that the film looks like it was based on the original DVD master and upscaled to 1080p, and that the sound is nothing special. Now there’s a new version coming out on 6.19. Is this a re-mastering that’s expected to correct the earlier problems?

Xavier Dolan‘s Lawrence Anyways, which I have respectfully declined to see, runs two hours and 41 minutes. The joke passed around last night and today is that the ratio between the director’s age and the length of his/her film shouldn’t be any more than five, or five minutes for every year of life. Dolan is 23, so Lawrence Anyways shouldn’t have been any longer than 115 minutes. Dolan has extended the factor to 7 — i.e., 23 x 7 = 161.

David Lean was 53 when he began work on Lawrence of Arabia, which ran 216 minutes. By the rule of 5 he was entitled to make Lawrrence run 265 minutes, but he held himself in check. Peter Jackson was 43 when he began work on King Kong, which ran 187 minutes. By the 5 rule was permitted to make it 215 minutes long, so again — discipline! This is silly. I guess the 5 rule only applies to young directors.

A 4.18 Variety story by Nick Vivarelli reported that the new “redux” version of Sergio Leone‘s Once Upon A Time in America (which will screen tonight in Cannes for the second time) “adds 40 minutes of original footage to the 229-minute running time.” In other words, I calculated, it’ll run 269 minutes, or a minute shy of four and a half hours. But the festival program says the film runs 253 minutes, or 16 minutes shorter than Vivarelli’s version. A subsequent 5.15 Variety piece said the running time is 254 minutes.

In any event, people attending tonight’s 10 pm screening will get out at 2:15 am or thereabouts.