Late this morning I spent more than an hour tapping out a piece about HE’s ten favorite road films. It was called “Road Movies As Existential States of Mind.”

I’d been inspired by Ilya Povolotsky‘s Grace, a somewhat gloomy mood piece about a father and teenaged daughter drifting through Russia’s outlying regions and screening outdoor movies to small-town congregations.

When we sat down the other night Povolotsky emphasized that Grace is much more in the tradition of Wim Wenders‘ road trilogy than, say, Federico Fellini‘s La Strada (’54), which Grace bears a certain resemblance to but is far less emotional than.

I then wondered if it was fair to categorize road films into two groups — movies in which travellers seem to have succumbed to the idea of roaming around as a permanent state of being with no particular goal or destination in mind, and other road flicks that are defined by a single quest and a single journey that has a beginning, middle and end.

I then spent a long time deciding which are my favorite road films of the last 60 or 70 years, and then deciding on their proper order and whatnot and including links for all ten.

And then I saved the piece and my online connectivity somehow ruptured or collapsed. The article had failed to be acknowledged on the other end and was sent down a black tunnel-like hole, never to be recaptured. 90 minutes of hard work destroyed. I shrieked and wept like a nine-year-old boy whose dog had just died. I pounded on the armrest of a couch I was sitting on. I was so furious and distraught that it took me a good hour to recover and start over. But I’m on a clock and I can’t create another list with links…not now.

I know that The Last Detail was #2 on my list, and La Strada was #3 or #4. Easy Rider and Planes, Trains and Automobiles were somewhere in the top ten.

Note: Obviously Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is NOT a road movie.

Which well-known, big-name actors today have more or less admitted what Peter O’Toole‘s Alan Swann character shouted out in My Favorite Year — “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star”?

Actors, in other words, who’ve acknowledged that they’re very good in a certain type of role but that’s all? Actors who’ve said in so many words that they’re not Daniel Day Lewis or Laurence Olivier and are more or less cool with this?

Perhaps not as baldly or bluntly as Steve McQueen copped to decades ago, but actors who’ve said they’re good within a certain perimeter, playing a particular kind of film and conveying a certain mode or mood or attitude, and have decided this is good enough and that it’s better not to step outside their zone?

Clark Gable was one of these — excellent playing Gable-type roles but careful to stay within his perimeter. Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Robert Redford, Owen Wilson…pretty much all movie stars have figured out what their big-screen persona is and have boiled it all down and figured what works best for them.

In a recent CNN interview, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Roxborough obediently laments the presence of Johnny Depp during the opening-night festivities for Jeanne du Barry. We all understand that Depp’s louche, arrogant behavior (inflamed by alcoholism) was a factor in his turbulent marital relationship with Amber Heard, but wokesters should at least acknowledge the judgment of the jury in the Virginia defamation case, and allow for the possibility that Depp and Heard’s relationship was toxic from both sides and that she threw as many grenades as he did.

Roxborough says that the Cannes Film Festival “has a long way to go” in terms of gender parity, or a belief that an equal humber of male and female directors need to be represented on all the slates. Which means that celebrating quality isn’t as important as enforcing progressive political goals.

While choosing 19 films for the main competition, it’s conceivable that 12 goodies might be directed by women and 7 by men. Parity says that 3 female-directed goodies have to fall by the wayside (i.e., go to Directors Fortnight or Un Certain Regard) to make room for 3 slightly less satisfying films made by men.

Roxborough also pronounces Cannes like kick the can or can of sardines. It shouldn’t be pronounced with an “auughh” sound but with a middle-ground “Cahnnes.”

“It’s not a whodunit — it’s a who-didn’t-do-it?” — Martin Scorsese‘s press conference description of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Scorsese and Robert De Niro hadn’t attended Cannes together since the ’76 premiere of Taxi Driver — 47 years ago.

Lily Gladstone: “It wasn’t so much me finding the role as it finding me.” Her voice has an Indiana housewife sound…guttural, a bit twangy…she leans into her “rrrs” and pronounces golden like “gouhllduhn.”

As far as I’m able to figure, Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero is a satire of the academic woke insanity virus, which has been spreading among teachers and college professors throughout the progressive community for the last 20-plus years…a virus that has led to mental derangement and domestic terror and has triggered the culture wars .

Or at least, that’s how I read it.

Club Zero is about Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska). a chillingly self-possessed teacher at an elite private school, passing along a wacko food concept called “conscious eating,” which basically states that all foods from any source are kinda bad for you and should therefore be pretty much avoided. Eat less and thereby transcend.

Novak’s teachings require the slapping of foreheads, sure, but aren’t hugely different from insisting that (a) all descendants of European tribes (and white males in particular) are corroded and evil or (b) there are no clearly defined women or men any more (gender is a spectrum), or that (c) guys should get pregnant and deliver more babies and (d) the theology of trans people should be canonical and exalted above all other considerations and that (e) the jokes of Dave Chappelle are repugnant, etc.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis would never watch Club Zero (and certainly wouldn’t have the patience for it if he did) but if he somehow got through it he’d undoubtedly say “I endorse this film…two thumbs up!”

Style-wise Club Zero is quite dry and excessively poised and very soft-spoken in an Orwellian sense (which is the point, of course) and at the same time passionately out-to-lunch as far as recognizable human behavior is concerned. I didn’t really “like” it but any film that condemns wokery gets a pass from this corner.

Cannes — Monday, 5.22, 8:55 am: The first completely warm and sunny day since HE arrived seven days ago…seven half-suffocating days of threatening sprinkles, sprinkles and occasional rain, storm clouds, somewhat chilly air and a generally miserable atmosphere of dampness.

Tuesday, 5.23 will be my ninth day in Cannes. I’m now finding my second wind, but yesterday I was feeling sick of the press lines, the tourist throngs, the humping around and constant lack of sleep. All things being fair and equal I’m thinking more and more about blowing this pop stand.

Todd Haynes‘ May December, which I saw late last night, struck me as awkward and even silly at times. Haynes tries for a tone that mixes satiric whimsy and overheated emotional spillage while channeling Bergman’s Persona, but scene after scene and line after line hit me the wrong way.

It’s about a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), paying a visit to the pricey Savannah home of Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore), a somewhat neurotic and brittle 60something who runs a dessert-cooking business. Elizabeth’s plan is to study Gracie as preparation for a soon-to-shoot film about her once-turbulent life, which involved a scandalous sexual affair with a minor and a subsequent prison term. Elizabeth naturally wants her forthcoming portrayal to deliver something truthful, etc.

For her part Gracie is cool with the arrangement but at the same time a wee bit conflicted and anxious. She’s calculated that she’ll come off better in the film if she invites the pissing camel into the tent**.

Seemingly modelled on the late Mary Kay Letourneau, a former school teacher who was prosecuted and jailed for seduced a 13 year-old boy, Gracie is married to Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), a 36 year-old half-Korean dude who was also 13 when Gracie technically “raped” him while they were working together at a pet store, and with whom they now have two or three kids. (This is one of those films in which the exact number of kids in a given family is of no interest to anyone…zip.)

If I had the time I would list the eight or nine things that especially bothered me about this film. Suffice that my basic reaction was one of exasperation. I literally threw up my hands and loudly exhaled three or four times. I groaned at least twice. I’m pretty sure I muttered “Jesus!” a couple of times. I also recall slapping my thigh.

For what it’s worth Letourneau and Fualaau insisted from the get-go that their relationship was consensual; ditto Gracie and Jo in May December‘s backstory. After serving her prison term Letourneau married Fualaau and soon after had kids with him; same deal with Moore and Melton’s pretend couple.

** Exact Lyndon Johnson quote: “It’s better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”

The other day Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary offhandedly announced the death of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, the struggling, none-too-bright C-level actor who initially caught on with Bounty Law, slowly faded and then resurged in ‘69 after roasting Manson follower Susan Atkins (aka “Sadie Glutz”) with a flame thrower.

Retired since the late ‘80s, Dalton died in Hawaii at age 90.

I for one would have appreciated a photo of Dalton in his dotage (sparse snow-white hair, Gabby Hayes beard, drooping neck wattle), which would have been easy to compose with Photoshop or any decent manipulation software. Okay, perhaps Quentin and Roger didn’t have such a photo ready at the exact moment on 5.19, but why not since?

When I learned of Jim Brown‘s death a couple of days ago, I immediately thought of James Toback‘s “Jim: The Author’s Self-Centered Memoir on the Great Jim Brown.” I realize I’m not allowed to mention Toback these days, but this ribald…okay, hedonistic and affectionate memoir is what sold me on Brown’s settled, come-what-may coolness.

Not to mention his appearances on The Dick Cavett Show in the late ’60s and early ’70s (particularly the Lester Maddox walk-out episode). And I’ve always loved Brown’s ringside commentary during the Muhammud Ali-George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle”, and particularly his prediction that “I don’t think George is gonna make it.”

Before his directing and screenwriting career took off, Toback was allegedly assigned to write a negative magazine piece on Brown. But after getting to know his subject Toback decided that Brown didn’t deserve this, and was so taken with the ex-football player’s laid-back, cool-cat attitude that he decided to write “Jim” as a makeup. Brown was a bit of a Zen libertine back then, and the book relates how he and Toback embarked on an erotic adventure or two, or so I recall.

In last night’s Killers of the Flower Moon review, I failed to mention the general sense of pleasure and assurance and high-level articulation that you always get from a Martin Scorsese film. There are concerns, yes, about the occasionally plodding pace and the 206-minute length and a lack of sufficient dramatic payoff, but start to finish you know you’re in the hands of a master filmmaker who always works with good people.

Thelma Schoonmaker‘s editing never feels rushed or anxious or slapdash — every cut feels exactly right, barely noticed and smooth as silk. Early on Robbie Robertson‘s musical score ignites with a reverb-y guitar riff that heralds the mixed-blessing discovery of oil on Osage land, and soon after settles into a steady metronomic rhythm that suggests the sound of native drums in the distance. And every frame of Rodrigo Prieto‘s widescreen (2.39:1) cinematography is exquisitely framed and lighted.

The final import of Killers may win you over or not, but it’s always soothing to watch, and the moral undercurrent never dissipates.

It pains me to report that Killers of the Flower Moon-wise, there’s a little bit of trouble in River City. Not a huge amount of trouble, mind. I was moderately and at times actively engrossed and l certainly wasn’t in any kind of pain but…

It holds and occasionally fascinates in a dutiful, believable, step-by-step fashion, and it certainly radiates profound moral lament and heartache for the many Osage victims, but overall it doesn’t quite get there.

It’s basically a bit more than two hours of scheming and murder and fiendish plotting between Robert De Niro’s “King Hale” and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, and a bit less than 90 minutes of Jesse Plemons and his FBI team arriving in Oklahoma and getting to the bottom of it all — but at the end of the day Killers doesn’t really generate enough juice.

Killers is certainly watchable in a steady, methodical way, but it never really builds up a head of steam. Authentic period atmosphere (early to mid 1920s) and beautifully shot. It certainly feels real and lived in, but also lacking a certain fire in the belly quality — a bit too measured and matter of fact and low-flamey.

It’s a good film but it feels too quiet and subdued and even…no, I won’t say mezzo-mezzo. It holds your interest and never bores. But it never really excites either.

All I can say is thank God for Plemons and the G-Men, whose arrival kicks up the dramatic tension and delivers a certain limited gusto.

Cheers for sad-eyed Lily Gladstone (it’s definitely her movie — Native American actress wins acting Oscar!!) and a superbly suffering DiCaprio as the yokelish, none-too-bright, puffy-faced Burkhart — but the film is slowish and drawn-out and kinda plodding at times…obviously dialogue-driven but altogether rather quiet and far from any definition of incendiary. It never really combusts.

Was the 206-minute length really necessary? And was the massive budget really justified? Minus the stars and the enormous budget and visual sprawl it could have been a modest four-episode HBO movie that would earn respect…at least that. But with few jumping and shouting for joy.