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Variety‘s Justin Kroll is reporting that Robert Pattinson is in negotiations to play The Batman in Matt Reeves’ forthcoming superhero film, which will open on 6.25.21.

Kroll explains that the RPatz thing isn’t a done deal, but that the former Twilight star is “the top choice and [the deal] is expected to close shortly.” Reeves and Pattinson will start shooting this summer.

RPatz will presumably be visiting Cannes this weekend to take bows for his performance in Robert Eggers‘ The Lighthouse, which costars Willem Dafoe.

Is Pattinson brawny and muscular enough to play Batman? He’s tall with moderately wide shoulders, but isn’t he a bit on the wirey and willowy side?

It’s ironic that just as Pattinson has solidified his rep as the Intrepid Indie King (Cosmopolis, The Rover, Maps to the Stars, The Lost City of Z, Good Time), he’s been sucked right back into a big-studio franchise. He’s only in it for the money, of course, and who wouldn’t be?

Several top-tier critics attended Thursday night’s gala premiere of Dexter Fletcher‘s Rocketman, the Elton John musical biopic, and their reviews began to pop just before 2 am Cannes time. I’ve read four or five so far, and the general verdict seems to be that it’s less interested in rock biopic realism (i.e., who John actually was and how he found his voice) and more interested in selling the flamboyant glam aspects of John’s early career.

In short, Rocketman sounds (and please stop me if you think I’m overdoing it here) like an Elton John flick for simpletons — for superficial minds, the easily impressed and your none-too-hip iTunes purchasers of one of John’s greatest hits albums.

I’m alluding to people who associate Elton more with his having sung the Lady Diana version of “Candle in the Wind” or perhaps for his Ceasar’s Palace gigs in Las Vegas than, say, his first serious industry gig at West Hollywood’s Troubadour in August ’70, or for his legendary, self-named 1970 debut album or the equally great “Honky Chateau” (’72).

Before I post a couple of review excerpts, I want HE regular Bobby Peru to consider the following line from Peter Debruge’s Variety review, to wit: “It’s Taron Egerton’s voice doing most of the singing here. He’s solid, but he’s no match for Elton’s pipes.”

HE to Debruge: No shit?

Another Debruge line: “Rocketman isn’t really about Elton as a musician.”

TheWrap‘s Steve Pond: “Bohemian Rhapsody acted like a standard biopic with concert and recording scenes thrown in, [but] Rocketman takes a wilder, bolder approach: It’s a full-fledged musical, using dozens of Elton John songs to tell his life story in a way that freely mixes reality and fantasy.

“This is a jukebox musical for the big screen, Mamma Mia! forced into a vaguely biographical form or one of the Broadway shows that use an artist’s music to tell their story, among them Jersey Boys and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.”

“But it’s about Elton John, so that means it’s bigger, wilder, more extravagant and more excessive than those works. Sometimes that means it’s more fun, too, but it can also be a melodramatic slog when it’s not embracing the craziness of its musical numbers. And some of those numbers, to be honest, are far more diverting than others.

“As someone who hated Bohemian Rhapsody‘s factual errors, I can respect a biopic that announces from the start that it’s not to be taken seriously as an account of what actually happened. So while I struggled with a narrative that uses songs years before they were written, I know the rules of this particular game == and if what we see onscreen has a little crazy poetry in it, and it captures a bit of how things might have felt to Elton way back when, that’s all that matters.”

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A week before leaving for Cannes I streamed Kantemir Balagov‘s Closeness (’17), a dark kidnapping drama set in a sodden Russian backwater. The idea was to prepare for Balagov’s Beanpole, a psychological survival tale set in Leningrad just after the ravages of World War II. I saw it early this morning. It’s just as grim if not grimmer than Closeness, but it’s also more ambitious in an atmospheric, large-canvas sense. And a whole lot sadder.

Balagov is only 27, but he’s already delivering the studied chops and immaculate directorial control that are par for the course among accomplished directors twice his age. Beanpole is basically about two shell-shocked women, scarred by the horrific siege of Leningrad and trying to re-assemble their shattered lives and emotions and somehow move on.

I respected the hell out of Beanpole but I honestly couldn’t derive much levitation or transcendence. To me it felt slow and trying and dirge-like. As much as I adore the idea of a 27 year-old creating a film as jarringly realistic and well assembled as this, it still left me feeling drained and dispirited. Plus it runs 134 minutes, which struck me as needlessly prolonged.

Balagov is quite the portraitist (and, to go by a just-posted Variety interview, quite the cultured film scholar), but he’s too much of a gloom-head, at least from my perspective. For this haunting portrait of post-war devastation is counter-balanced by glacial pacing and a strange reluctance or aversion to dealing with the death of a young boy…my God.

I felt sorrow and pity for each and every character, of course, but it feels too sludgy and oppressive, even for a story like this one.

Viktoria Miroshnichenko‘s titular character, Iya, is an all-but-catatonic, seven-foot-tall giraffe from whom verbal expression does not easily emanate. Why must she take 30 to 45 seconds to collect her thoughts before answering the simplest questions? Because that’s Balagov’s intention — to convey her destroyed inner state with traumatized expressions, gut feelings and minimal dialogue. I quickly ran out of patience with Iya’s blank stares, which is a way of saying that Miroshnichenko is not, in my judgment, a riveting actress.

Vasilisa Perelygina‘s Masha, Iya’s best friend, is far more interesting — more expressive and generally more alluring. If Perelygina had played the lead (which is to say if Iya had been eliminated), I would feel very differently about Beanpole. In my estimation she’s a natural movie star. But not Viktoria. Iya is impenetrable and burdensome and, as far as the afore-mentioned death of the child is concerned, inexplicable and even hateful.

The ghastly murder of Masha’s young son is “addressed” but not really dealt with, and I was simply unable to get past this. Balagov’s idea, I gather, is that if a character is profoundly devastated by war trauma, it’s within her realm to accidentally smother an innocent. In basic emotional movie-watching terms that’s simply not acceptable.

Does Masha react with shock and rage? No, she barely raises an eyebrow. Her attitude seems to be “that was horrendous what you did, of course, but the German army’s siege of Leningrad was equally awful if not more so, so I understand.” All she does, really, is insist that Iya lives up to a quid pro quo arrangement — you killed my child so get pregnant so I can raise another one.

Would any mother in the history of civilization react this way?

The principal characters (excepting a 50-year-old doctor and the rich, chilly parents of Masha’s amorous suitor, a dorky kid who has a nose like Vladmir Putin) are all numb and haunted-looking, which of course is fitting and necessary. This is not a film about steady keels and bright futures. If nothing else Beanpole is quite the sweeping statement on post-war devastation.

A late-arriving lesbian attraction element kicks in and allows for a semi-hopeful ending, but it arrives too late. If the romantic attraction aspect had been a factor early on (at least starting in the second act), I would have bought into it.

The best scene is a dinner-table conversation between Masha and the mother of Putin-nose, and as mentioned the general aura of post-war devastation throughout is certainly throttling from a general mise-en-scene perspective (camera lighting, art direction, rusty atmosphere), one that I can’t help but admire and respect from a certain distance.

If the story had been all about Masha, Beanpole would have been a much more absorbing film. I was mesmerized by Perelygina’s performance. She’s really got it.

But Beanpole is finally a movie for film festival and arthouse dweebs and not for guys like myself.

The first truly exciting film of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival screened this afternoon — Ladj Ly‘s Les Miserables. Set in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, a poor but tightly knit Muslim community, it offers a jolting contemporary echo of the cruelty, harassment and oppression that ignited Victor Hugo’s classic 1862 novel, this time rooted in police brutality and racial animus.

Start to finish Les Miserables is rough, riveting, incendiary — written by Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti and brilliantly shot by Julien Poupard. It generally feels like a rough-and-tumble Antoine Fuqua film, using the basic dynamic of Training Day (but with three cops instead of two) plus a Little Do The Right Thing plus a dash of the anxious urban energy of William Freidkin‘s The French Connection.

But it’s about more than just urban action beats. It’s a racially charged tragedy, injected with sharp social detail and several strong (if somewhat sketchy) characters on both sides of the tale. It’s a bit splotchy and slapdash at times, but is quite the ride.

Part policier and part social-canvas suspenser, Les Miserables is basically about conflicted cops (including one bad apple) under pressure vs. a crew of scrappy, rambunctious, vaguely criminal kids in the ‘hood. It takes the side of Montfermeil natives (Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.

Closing motto: “There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

The story is about a mischievous Muslim kid named Issa (Issa Perica) who gets himself into hot water by stealing a lion cub from a small local circus. The circus guys angrily threaten some Montfermeil community leaders (not the suit-wearing kind), and soon after the film’s three plainclothes protagonists — the racist and brutish Chris (Alexis Manenti), a casually brusque but decent-hearted Montfermeil native named Gwada (Djibril Zonga) and Stephane (Damien Bonnard), a new transfer with a curtly liberal, mildly compassionate approach to police work — are on the hunt.

They eventually chase down and capture Issa, but then comes the triggering incident: an agitated Gwada fires a flashbang (a non-lethal stun grenade) into the kid’s face. Luckily Issa recovers, but Chris and Gwada go into panic mode when they quickly realize that the incident has been captured by a drone-mounted video camera. Despite Stephane’s objections, the priority becomes finding and destroying the visual evidence.

Things get increasingly hairy and desperate, ultimately leading to a climax…okay, I’ve said enough.

I won’t reveal the finish but it reminded me of the last two or three minutes of Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation. I for one found it satisfying.

The news about Focus Features having bought international rights to Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, which will screen in the Directors’ Fortnight section on Sunday, obviously ups interest levels. Which means that getting into either of the two Lighthouse screenings (8:45 am and 8:30 pm) will require extra determination and stamina.

Elite press badges cut no ice at Directors Fortnight screenings. Everyone is on an equal footing, so you just have to line up outside the J.W. Marriott and hope you’ve arrived early enough. Gaspar Noe‘s Climax was the hottest Directors Fortnight attraction last year, and it took me two tries before I got in.

The Lighthouse solution, I’ve decided, will require a 6 am Sunday wake-up and arriving at the Marriott by 7 or 7:15 am. I recently urged an industry friend, who’s intrigued by The Lighthouse having been shot on 35mm black-and-white celluloid, to join me at that hour. I explained that the 8:45 am offers the only realistic shot because access to the 8:30 pm screening will be a huge time-eater. Awaking at dawn is simply a matter of will.

Dry, droll and deadpan are what you always get with Jim Jarmusch (and that’s fine with me), but The Dead Don’t Die, a small-town zombie comedy, is too slow, passive, resigned, lethargic and self-referential. It kind of works during the first half, but gradually spaces itself out.

Die‘s central problem is that it’s about watching a zombie apocalypse rather than somehow dealing with it.

Strange as this sounds, none of the characters actually try to survive. Well, they do but half-heartedly. It’s a hipster goof-off riff, but if you want to get serious and divine a social-political message, the film is basically saying “we’re going so wrong now and are more or less fucked at this point so why even fight it?”

Jarmusch occasionally flirts with the thematic thrust of George Romero‘s Dawn of the Dead (passive, brain-dead consumers are real-life zombies) and takes shots at the spreading Trump cancer, but he doesn’t really engage. Well, he does but in the manner of an aging, despairing, heavy-lidded type.

The Dead Don’t Die is baroquely amusing here and there, but the mood of laid-back nihilism and a general “submission to the plague” mentality is too persistent. Around the two-thirds mark the lack of any semblance of narrative energy starts to work against itself.

Horror fans are going to stay away in droves, Joe Popcorn is going to say “where’s the movie?” and Jarmusch devotees are going to feel under-nourished.

Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny play cops in an upper New York State town called Centerville, and all they really do is watch and comment, watch and comment, watch and comment.

Tilda Swinton plays the only truly cool character — an eccentric small-town samurai mortician.

Tom Waits plays a kind of Greek chorus character named Hermit Bob — a woods-dwelling hobo who provides despairing commentary now and then, especially toward the end. Steve Buscemi, RZA, Danny Glover and Caleb Landry Jones are typical Jarmusch-styled eccentrics (a snarly Trump fanatic with a dog named Rumsfeld, a wisdom-dispensing UPS delivery man, a kindly townie, and a gas-station owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and comic books, respectively).

I’m sorry to be panning. I’m a huge fan of Only Lovers Left Alive (which I only saw once but has gotten better and better the more I’ve thought about it) and Paterson. I had the feeling during tonight’s screening that Jarmusch wrote the script too quickly and hadn’t really thought things through. But the main problem is that his story and direction are just as lethargic as his characters.

Daniel Craig pulled a Tom Cruise last week in Jamaica, injuring his ankle during a running scene and consequently throwing the shoot of Bond 25 (aka Shatterhand) out of whack.

What was your first thought after hearing of this? Right — you wondered how old Craig is (51) and if that might have been a slight factor. The answer is “it might well have been.” Craig is squarely middle-aged and not even within flirting distance of being “old”. But you do wither slightly at that age. Running, fighting and leaping-wise, the optimum window is between your late teens and mid to late 40s. After that an actor is probably better off playing “M” or “Q.”

Genes, luck and discipline are always key factors in shooting action scenes, but one or more of these probably failed Craig, who’s been injured three or four times before while Bonding. Biology, man. You can run but you can’t hide.

After the fall Craig “was in quite a lot of pain and was complaining about his ankle,” according to a source who spoke to The Independent‘s George Simpson. “As you’d expect he was also pretty angry that it had happened. He threw his suit jacket on the ground in sheer frustration.”

Craig: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! I’ve done this kind of action scene dozens of times before. What the hell happened?”

Sean Connery was 52 or so when he shot in last Bond film, Never Say Never Again (’83). Pierce Brosnan was the same age when he hung up his Bond spurs in ’05. Roger Moore was 57 or 58 when he did his final Bond, A View to a Kill (’85). They were all pushing it. They all tasted a bit of luck.

HE says the ideal Bond actor should be in his early 30s (the rugged-looking Connery was 32 when he made Dr. No) to late ’40s, depending on the breaks. After that it starts (I say “starts”) to become a game of roulette mixed with careful choreographic planning.

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The La Pizza guys honored HE’s reservation, but they somehow got the idea that 40 guests were expected. “That was a mistake, possibly on my part,” I explained, half expecting to get my knuckles rapped. “I’d like to predict but people do what they want…I mean, the guests could be as few as 20 or 25.”

The waiters were counting on a much bigger bill and tip, you see, so they were a teeny bit miffed. I must have said “I’m sorry” three or four times, but the La Pizza guys were giving me side-eyes left and right.

I explained that Toronto Star critic Peter Howell was on deadline, a plane carrying Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson was late, N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Kyle Buchanan was downstairs and not into the upstairs crowd and Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman had opted to join his colleagues (including editor Claudia Elller) three or four tables down from ours. And Variety‘s Steven Gaydos was inexplicably MIA. And no sign of Deadline‘s Pete Hammond.

Plus there’s a kind of Hatfields-vs.-McCoys separatism between wokester critics and the not-so-woke, I told the waiters. It’s not the one-for-all, all-for-one crowd it used to be. A lot of prickly pears out there.

But things eventually worked out. Our banquet-sized table filled up, everyone ate and drank and the mood turned joyful and even boisterous. Raucous applause broke out when Thompson arrived; more cheers when Indiewire‘s David Ehrlich dropped by.

The bill ended up at 359 euros. Film at Lincoln Center exec director Lesli Klainberg generously picked up half the tab…that’s the American spirit!

Top group photo (l. to r.): Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Claudia Eller, Asian bureau chief Patrick Frater, Brent Lang. Fourth pic from the top (l. to r.): World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy, Film at Lincoln Center’s Lesli Klainberg, Miami Film Festival’s Carl Spence, Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Apple guy Matt Dentler, John Von Thaden from Magnolia Pictures and director (Show Me What You Got) & dp Svetlana Cvetko.

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The grand unfurling happened yesterday morning. Around this time Hollywood Elsewhere was half-sleeping as a Norwegian Airlines 787 flew over the North Sea. Video posted last night by Reuters.

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HE’s Stockholm-to-Nice flight touched down at 9:30 pm, or a half-hour later than scheduled. Plus 25 minutes in front of the luggage carousel. I couldn’t locate the 15-euro bus, which usually takes 45 or 50 minutes. So I took Jordan Ruimy‘s advice and dragged my luggage down to the Gare de Nice-Saint-Augustin, which began operations in 1864. The hike took a little more than 15 minutes. Lots of twists and turns and fast-car-dodging, but I managed. The train ride was free — nary a conductor in sight.

My LAX-to-Stockholm flight was a typical 10-hour int’l flight, which is to say uncomfortable and interminable. A grim-up endurance test. Can you take it? Can you steel yourself and suffer through with grace and aplomb?

What made it especially bad was the absence of wi-fi. What airline doesn’t offer in-flight connectivity these days? Norwegian plans to join the club sometime next year, but for now Type-A passengers looking to file stories during a trans-oceanic flight are fucked.

It’s 4:52 pm, and I’m waiting to board the 6 pm Nice flight. And having gotten a grand total of 90 minutes of shut-eye, I’m starting to droop. I know this drill backwards and forwards. I’ll crash on the flight, and when I finally get to the Cannes apartment this evening I won’t be able to sleep.

I know this is nuts. I know it’s irrational. I know there’s no reason the rest of the world thinks like this. I know this is just me and my private weirdness. But I have to add another item to my list of pet peeves, quirks, caprices, obsessions, superstitions and animal dislikes**.

So here it is: I hate people who wear maroon or burgundy-colored clothing — especially sweaters, sport jackets and scarves. Okay, I don’t “hate” people who wear maroon or burgundy, but I can’t fathom why anyone would want to wear such a horrid color and so the instant I see someone strolling around in a burgundy T-shirt or wearing maroon socks, I’ll mutter to myself, “The fuck is wrong with that guy?”

I’ll never “say” anything, mind. I keep it to myself or write about it, but I’ll never go up to some maroon-wearer and actually make a crack or something. I always keep that shit holstered.

I’ve hated maroon sweaters ever since I first glanced at the cover of “The Beach Boys Today” and noticed that Brian Wilson (who was always kind of nerd when it came to apparel) was wearing one of these horrid things. I didn’t have to think about it. One look and I went “Jesus H. Christ.” From that moment I knew — I knew that maroon and burgundy were musts to avoid, and I didn’t know why or how or whatever. It was a gut call.

There are a lot of people with animal dislikes out there. Some people will just glance at you one time and say to themselves, “Okay, that’s it, I hate that guy.”

There are frothy-mouthed Twitter dogs who hate me today. They seethe and bark at the sound of my name. I don’t much like them either. But you know the difference between me and them? I keep it to myself, and I sure as hell don’t say “these guys should be hounded out of the business…don’t hire them or give them advertising!” I would never dream of tweeting something like that. No offense, but those who do this fall under the heading of “diseased scum.”

I can remember strolling into a mixed-company beer bar when I was in my early 20s, which is when I looked a bit feminine with my long hair and high cheekbones and slender features. And I just scanned the people sitting at the bar, and right away I spotted a guy who was giving me a look that said “oh, man, you’re fucking disgusting…I hate your ass….c’mon over and say something…I’ll punch your lights out,” etc.

This is how I feel about burgundy-maroon minus the physical threats.

I’m okay, however, with hand-crafted burgundy or cordovan lace-up shoes.

** People who take extra-long showers, people who shriek with laughter in bars and cafes, couples who obliviously block escalators or moving sidewalks, twenty- and thirtysomething Millennials who wear the same fucking outfit from coast to coast (baggy shorts, T-shirt, backward baseball caps, mandals or canvas slip-ons), the term “Portugese water dog,” people who can’t sing “Happy Birthday” on key, bar owners who won’t let me eat an innocent slice of pear cake as they’re stacking chairs and closing up shop, grandma types who would give my cowboy hat to the police, etc.