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Gray Surprise

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I haven’t been on the James Gray train for years, but early Thursday evening I saw Armageddon Time, his latest, and I was seriously, solemnly impressed. It’s the first really good film of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

It’s a modest little moral tale — concisely written, very well acted (especially by first-timer Michael Banks Repeda plus Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway) and ridden with echoes, laments and (from its 1980 perspective) dark projections.. And it’s definitely a Best Picture contender — of this you can be certain.

Armageddon Time is Gray’s best film — the most unaffected, straight-shooting and plain spoken — in a dog’s age. I was a Gray fan during his peak decade (The Yards, We Own The Night, Two Lovers), which happened between ‘98 and ‘08. I fell away in the 20-teens but now I’m back, as is Gray himself.

Largely autobiographical, Armageddon Time is basically a Queens-based family drama, set in the fall of 1980 and focused on the moral and creative growing pains of 11-year-old Paul Graff (Repeda).

In its own unpretentious, quietly on-target way it grapples with ethics and ethnicism, grandfather comforts, morality, racism, the Age of Reagan and the early seeds of Trumpism, brutal parenting, “life is hard” and “the game is rigged.”

I don’t know why I’ve decided to call it “a modest little Truffaut film,” but that’s the phrase I’ve been using since last night.

It’s a film about a kid dealing with family demands (particularly a brutal father) and being sent to a Forest Hills prep school and absorbing the first whiffs of late 20th Century evil in this country — Reagan, Trump, elitism and the ever-present component of half-hearted, laissez-faire racism.

A friend asked last night if it’s woke and I said it’ll certainly strike a chord with wokesters, but it’s “not really a woke film…it’s certainly not about woke Hollywood lecturing the middle of the country or anything in that vein.

“It’s Gray telling an honest, unpretentious story of his own childhood. It’s simple and real and I believed it.

“Racism and unfairness in life are real — you can’t just swat them away like a fly. It’s not about today’s deranged left. It’s set in 1980. ‘Woke’ wasn’t a thing 42 years ago. It wasn’t a thing ten years ago, and was barely a thing give six or seven years ago.

“Stop trying to define everything by today’s toxic cultural terminology,” I concluded. “Respect this movie for what it does and doesn’t do. It’s not playing any tricky or underhanded games.

“Vep” Re-Imagined

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In late ’96 (or 25 and 1/2 years ago) Olivier Assayas‘ Irma Vep was released. Starring Maggie Cheung as herself, it was about a middle-aged French film director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) trying to remake Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires. Now comes Assayas’ new Irma Vep, an eight episode miniseries starring Alicia Vikander as a movie star who travels to France to star in a big-budget arthouse film.

Out of respect for Assayas and particularly his masterful Personal Shopper (’16), attention must be paid.

HE to Waggy, Keslassy & Donnelly: Try Fact-Checking

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Variety‘s Elizabeth Wagmeister, Matt Donnelly and Elsa Keslassy are shocked, shocked to discover that Woody Allen, Gerard Depardieu and Johnny Depp are featured in a celebrity mural on the 2nd floor of La Pizza, a popular eatery adjacent to the Cannes marina.

They’ve co-authored a 5.19 article that basically says “gasp!…why hasn’t La Pizza eliminated these three from the mural, particularly since we — crusading trade-paper wokesters casting a vigilant eye — don’t approve?”

Here’s something that I don’t approve of: Waggy, Donnelly and Keslassy falsely stating that Allen “was accused of rape by his then 7-year-old adoptive daughter, Dylan [Farrow], in 1992.” From the get-go the accusation has been about sexual molestation, not rape, and for three decades there’s been a mountain of evidence and testimony casting doubt upon the validity of Farrow’s claim.

“The La Pizza mural stands in conflict with recent changes trying to be implemented at the Cannes Film Festival,” the trio asserts, “[given that the festival] has attempted to become more inclusive to women and people of color (although progress has been slow). Festival organizers are making efforts to catch up to the industry at large, which has attempted to implement sweeping changes in the era of #MeToo.”

Denial As Insanity

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Though technically exacting and historically authoritative from a visual, atmospheric, production-design perspective, Kirill Serebrennikov‘s Tchaikovsky’s Wife is a perfectly miserable film to sit through.

It’s the story of Antonina Miliukova, a mentally unstable obsessive who persuaded the closeted Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to marry her (he needed a beard) in 1877 Russia.

For 16 years or until the composer’s death from cholera in 1893, Antonina refused to understand or accommodate herself to the fact that Pyotr was gay. Tchaikovsky realized very quickly that he’d made a terrible mistake. The marriage was almost nothing but misery for the poor guy.

Born in 1848, the headstrong Antonina married Tchaikovsky at age 28 — well past the appropriate age in late 19th Century Russia. She was 45 when he passed, and spent her last 20 years in an insane asylum. She died in 1917.

In short, the narrative of Tchaikovsky’s Wife has nowhere to go but down, and boy, does it ever! The viewer is condemned to endure Antonina’s delusion and denial for two hours. It feels airless and repetitive and de-oxygenated and terminal.

The muddy, murky, candle-kit cinematography made me feel like I was slowly going blind. I certainly felt as if I was dying of boredom, and it left me feeling afflicted with a form of spiritual typhoid fever.

I began to hate Tchaikovsky’s Wife almost immediately. Russians lived in a dungeon in the 1870s and 1880s…what a hellish environment. I couldn’t stand it, and was especially appalled by Serebrennikov’s refusal to let a little light into the situation by allowing us to revel in Tchaikovsky’s music. Ken Russell‘s The Music Lovers (’70) is not without issues, but it’s a much more arresting film than Tchaikovsky’s Wife.

For what it’s worth, Alyona Mikhailova, 26, delivers a sad, believable performance as Miliukova. As Tchaikovsky, Odi Biron is also fine or, you know, as good as the script permits.

HE agrees 110% with Owen Gleiberman‘s Variety pan.

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“Carol” Afterglow

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I took this video inside the Cannes press conference salon on 5.17.15. Call it a period of relative calm before the storm. The #MeToo movement would launch two years and five months later, and over the following year the first stirrings of the woke Robespierre plague began to be felt. Peak terror was felt during ’19,’20 and ’21. All in all the plague has been with us for four and a half years now, going on five. It’s just about run its course, but the real death throes won’t be felt until the November ’22 midterms.

From “The Moment I Realized Carol Was Toast With Older Viewers (i.e., Academy Voters)“, posted on 2.2016: Todd Haynes‘ Carol may have been, for me, the most emotionally affecting relationship film of 2015. I’m not going to rehash all the praise-worthy elements (Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara‘s fully felt performances, Ed Lachman‘s 16mm cinematography, the early ’50s vibe of repression and propriety). It so perfectly captured, for me, what it feels like to be in love (“I know how it feels to have wings on your heels”). I particularly remember what a high it was to see it in Cannes…everyone was levitating, it seemed.

“Then I saw it again six months later — in late October, or a month before it opened commercially on 11.20 — at the Middleburg Film Festival. Middleburg is a more conservative town than Los Angeles, of course, but it’s similar to the Academy in that it’s full of wealthy over-50 white people. And the instant Carol finished playing in the main conference room of Middleburg’s Salamander Resort and the lights came up, you could feel the vibe. They ‘liked’ and respected it, but they didn’t love it. The atmosphere was approving and appreciative, but a bit cool. And I said to myself, ‘Okay, that’s it…not even Christine Vachon dreamed that Carol could win Best Picture Oscar but after Cannes I thought it would probably be Best Picture-nominated because it’s so affecting and classy and poised….now I don’t think that’ll happen.’

“It went on to win big with critics and industry groups, but older whites never embraced it. They somehow didn’t see themselves in it.”

The Big Sleep

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A hideous creep journalist-critic, Charles Bramesco, posted this photo on Twitter, but what the hell. I don’t look like I’m napping in my seat — I look like I’ve just succumbed to a massive heart attack. But it’s just my natural, blessed ability to nap anywhere at any time. I close my eyes and I’m gone. In this instance I was merely escaping from the usual opening-night, pre-screening ceremonies.

Still A Matter of Dispute

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There’s a certain middle-aged Frenchman’s way of pronouncing “Anne” — it sounds a bit subdued and abbreviated with a slightly prolonged “nnn” sound. This is how you need to pronounce “Cannes.” Note to Forrest Whitaker: the “s” is silent.

Low-Altitude Fighter Jets Whooshing Over Croisette

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…to heighten the excitement factor for Top Gun: Maverick, which is having its big-ass, Grand Lumiere Cannes premiere as we speak…formally dressed Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly As it turned out Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller was in Canners, but not during the red-carpet photo call.

“Devils” Nostalgia

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It’s taken me nine and 1/2 years to finally get around to buying Richard Crouse‘s “Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils,” which was published on 1.1.12. It’s now in my Kindle archive. I’ve seen this 1971 film six or seven times. I own a British DVD of the restored 117-minute version, but where’s the Bluray version? Why hasn’t Criterion released one?

From Josh Stillman’s 10.1.12 EW review: “The story of 1971’s The Devils‘ is an unpleasant one. Based on Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudun’ and a play by John Whiting, the film details an episode of alleged demonic possessions and exorcisms — and the innocent priest who was executed for heresy — in 17th-century France. And that’s just the plot line.

“The real story of The Devils took place behind the camera, in the movie’s production process and its reception among censors, critics, and audiences. The intensity of the shoot cost director Ken Russell his marriage and tested the nerves of its stars, British screen legends Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave.

“Later, after facing numerous cuts from the British Board of Film Censors for material deemed inappropriate (or, according to the Catholic Church, blasphemous), The Devils received an abysmal response from critics, was banned in several countries, and basically vanished for three decades.

“In recent years, though, the movie’s seen a bit of a resurgence. Fan sites are popping up and bootleg copies with fewer cuts have surfaced (Russell lamented that a fully uncensored version simply doesn’t exist); critics, for their part, have begun to see the film in a different light, hailing it as a provocative masterpiece in league with A Clockwork Orange.”