Leos Carax’s musical collaboration with the Mael brothers is “an audacious folly that comes across as grandiose and joyless” — Screen Daily‘s Jonathan Romney.

I’m sorry but I don’t wholly disagree with the sixth paragraph in a 7.5 USA Today op-ed piece. It pains me to acknowledge that it was written by Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative Millennial who’s buddied up with Tucker Carlson and the vile Mark Meadows. I hate Trump-allied righties for the most part, but the sixth paragraph has validity.

Here’s Rufo in the 6.18 New Yorker:

“‘Political correctness’ is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits — they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race. It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening.

“The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain. Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’

“Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.And it’s not an externally applied pejorative. Instead, it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

The nub of Rufo’s rebuttal begin at 6:45, and they partly stem from Anastasia Higginbotham‘s “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness“, the controversial children’s book.

The word is out on Annette, and everyone has adjusted their expectations. Look at all those opening-nighters sitting standing right next to each other! Jodie Foster‘s fluent French is attractive.

Jodie Foster is intro’d at the Cannes opening ceremony, gets massive standing O, speaks fluently in French pic.twitter.com/Mq26NW5PKo

— Scott Feinberg @ Cannes (@ScottFeinberg) July 6, 2021

Adam Driver is still here, chatting with Pedro Almodovar pic.twitter.com/o6RPBVkoWC

— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) July 6, 2021

You’d think that movie distributors would want to mount garish billboards on the Carlton hotel’s facade, in keeping with decades upon decades of tradition. What is the Cannes Film Festival without vulgar signage along the Croisette? Except 2021 is a sleepy-ass year, and movie promos are few and far between.

Hugs and condolences for the family, friends, colleagues and fans of director Richard Donner, who was born on 4.24.30 and passed earlier today at age 91. Donner was no visionary auteur but an amiable, well-liked, good-guy journeyman — he behaved like a human being, always got the job done, kept his cool, smoked cigarettes, etc.

Hollywood Elsewhere is an unqualified fan of two things Donner directed — “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the 1963 Twilight Zone episode in which an airborne William Shatner grappled with the sight of a gremlin on the wing, and the original Lethal Weapon (’87), an anarchic, crazy-violent, occasionally funny cop thriller that helped launch a new idea in action films– i.e., the cop who was crazier than the criminals. (Angel Heart, which opened concurrent with Lethal Weapon, advanced the same notion.)

Be honest — the first Lethal Weapon was the only decent one, and it represented the only time in Donner’s career when he was truly the king of the hill and totally on top of the zeitgiest curve.

I was mezzo mezzo on Superman — didn’t care for the scenes with fat, white-haired Marlon Brando, hated the Jeff East casting as young Chris Reeve, loathed the North Pole ice palace, etc. But I loved Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty‘s interplay (“Otisburg?”).

I’m sorry but I had problems with every other Donner-directed film — The Omen (silly, stupid, annoying), Superman II, The Toy, The Goonies, Ladyhawke, Scrooged, Lethal Weapon 2, Radio Flyer, Lethal Weapon 3, Maverick (a friend called it “a $75 million dollar Elvis Presley film“), Assassins, Conspiracy Theory, Lethal Weapon 4, Tales from the Crypt: Ritual, Timeline, 16 Blocks.

Nobody cares about In The Heights any more, but if they did there’d be one more thing for wokesters to gripe about.

The last grenade thrown at Jon Chu and Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s musical (a mostly faithful adaptation of LMM’s 2005 stage musical) was the colorism thing — the film had ignored the presence of Afro-Latinos in Washington Heights and therefore was, after a fashion, guilty of a form of discrimination — i.e., colorism.

I never saw the stage play but a friend of Jordan Ruimy‘s did, and he reports that the film version “cut the plot line about Kevin Rosario, the Puerto Rican dad” — Jimmy Smits in the film — “not wanting his daughter Nina to date Benny” over an ethnic disparity issue. (In the film Nina and Benny are played by Leslie Grace and Corey Hawkins.)

A blunt way of explaining Kevin’s “ethnic disparity” problem is that he doesn’t want his daughter dating a guy who isn’t from their tribe and who doesn’t speak Spanish. A blunter way of putting it is that Kevin may have a problem with his daughter dating a black dude,.

Here’s a portion of the Act 2 play synopsis from Wikipedia’s In The Heights page:

“Nina and Benny spend the night together in Benny’s apartment as Kevin frantically searches for her all night; Benny worries about what Kevin will say about their relationship but is happy to finally be with her (‘Sunrise’). Nina eventually returns home to find her parents worried sick about her, and Kevin grows furious when he learns she was with Benny, disapproving of their relationship due to Benny not being Latino.”

A 6.10.21 Elle piece by Madison Feller discussed several differences between the stage and film versions. Feller didn’t mention Kevin’s problem with Benny in the stage version.

Quentin Tarantino‘s negative opinions about mainstream exhibition, posted earlier today by the Armchair Expert podcast, are, I feel, slightly misplaced.

“Some of these exhibitors who are going, they fucking deserve to go,” Tarantino said. “They have taken all the specialness out of movies anyway. Some of these chains [are] showing commercials all through it, [plus] they don’t turn the lights down [and] everything is stadium seating…plastic shit.”

Whoa, wait…what’s wrong with stadium seating? I hated those old-fashioned, slight-grade theatres in which you’d routinely have to cope with some guy’s big fat head blocking your view.

Tarantino presumably believes, as do I, that movie theatres, at their highest iteration, are churches and cathedrals — places of spiritual communion and emotional uplift. But of course, mainstream movies are no longer in the “touch your soul and persuade viewers to contemplate the deeper, finer or sometimes crazier things in life” business. That idea began to wither and die 10 or 15 years ago. (The death process really began in the ’90s and the rise of guys like Jan De Bont, but we’ll let that go for now.)

Over the last 10 or 15 years theatres have been catering more and more to your low-rent, T-shirt and flip-flop animals who’re mostly into gamer-type action fare — not to your cultivated, somewhat educated cineastes (an all but entombed culture) but to the lowest-common-denominator LexG crowd. Bottom-of-the-barrel types who love F9…bottom feeders, toads, pigs at the trough.

Paul Schrader in November 2018: “There are people who talk about the American cinema of the ‘70s as some halcyon period. It was to a degree but not because there were any more talented filmmakers. There’s probably, in fact, more talented filmmakers today than there was in the ‘70s. What there was in the ‘70s was better audiences.”

Exhibitors have simply tried to adapt to the downscale ball–scratch mongrelization of movie culture.

Tarantino: “They have been writing their own epitaph for a long time, but they assumed the business would take you along. It’s been crazy throughout my career to see how the film experience is lessened for the viewer like every five years. However, I do think boutique cinemas actually will thrive in this time. And I am not talking about the La-Z-Boy, order nachos and margaritas…I actually like the Alamo Drafthouse a lot. But I have a living room, [and sometimes] I want to go to the theater.”

Tarantino is right, however, about exhibitors who never turn the lights down all the way. I really hate that. Movies need to be absorbed in complete darkness.