Cannes Memory Fragment #3

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“300 Euro Mistake“, filed on 5.17.17: I awoke Tuesday morning at 5 to catch a 7:20 am train to Cannes. Finished packing, tidied up, had a coffee, called for an Uber. Everything felt right and well-ordered. I left the apartment keys on the kitchen counter and dragged two bags — a 24-inch upright suitcase and a leather carrying bag — onto the third floor landing, and then for some drooling, jelly-brained reason closed the apartment door with my computer bag still sitting inside.

Did I just do that? My mind went into freeze-panic mode. I’ll be missing my train, but how and when can I get back into the pad? My goal was to somehow do this, snag the bag and catch a 10:19 am train to Cannes from Gare de Lyon. Four hours hence.

I texted Romain, my Airbnb contact guy, but he didn’t answer until 7:40 am. When he finally replied he said I couldn’t get back in until the cleaning person arrives, which would be about noon. I begged him to call this person and offer a 50-euro reward to show up by 9:30 am. A few minutes later I upped it to 75. Romain said he’d try — “It’s not an issue of money” — but that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. A few minutes later I said I’d gladly and happily pay the cleaning person 100 euros to show up early, no questions asked.

Two or three minutes later Romain revealed that he himself had a key to the apartment (new information!) but not the street door or foyer-door key. But he would figure something out. He offered to meet me at the place by 9 am. When I got there he was waiting across the street with my computer bag. I gave him the hundred euros and a pat on the shoulder, and tore off to Gare de Lyon.

When I got there the ticket lady said my 70-euro ticket on the 7:20 am train was worthless (no redeeming), and that I’d have to pay full price — 185 euros — for a first-class ticket on the 10:19 am. I hadn’t the will to protest or plead. I paid, found my seat, finally relaxed. The 10:19 train arrived in Cannes around 3:35 pm. An hour later I picked up my pink-with-yellow-dot pass.

If you count the two Uber rides I took between 7 am and 9 am (don’t worry about the other one), I forked over 300 euros for that one dumb-ass mistake.

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Cannes Memory Fragment #2

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Several years ago (i.e., before 3.20.12) my Cannes Film Festival nights sometimes ended with a visit to Le Petit Carlton and, more recently, Le Petit Majestic. Semi-rowdy street parties, I mean, that were fed by two smallish corner bars. I never stayed too late, but I’ve heard that these congregations would go until 2 am and beyond. I don’t know what I could’ve been thinking, knowing I had to get up around 6:30 am in order to attend the regular 8:30 am screening, but every so often I would drop by for a glass or two regardless.

I’m talking roughly ’05 to ’11, when I was a bit younger and a little more rough and ready.

The morning wake-ups weren’t too bad, and if I got up early enough I used to adore inhaling a double cappuccino at La Crillon (4 Rue Jean de Riouffe, 06400 Cannes) before the 8:30 am screening. During my pink pass days I had to be in line by 8 am, remember, so I had to hit La Crillon by 7:45 or thereabouts. That heavenly feeling of being caffeine-throttled as I walked up the red-carpet staircase and found my seat (right-front orchestra, near where Toronto Star critic Peter Howell always sat) and the purring voice of that British-accented hostess (“Ladies and gentlemen, the screening is about to begin…please turn off your mobile telephones”) and the lights going down…such an immaculate sooth.

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Choreographed Rage

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Every “open up” protestor in Commack, Long Island, had something precise and vicious to say to reporter Kevin Vesey. Too precise and too varied — as if they’d written and rehearsed their lines beforehand. Their sentiments reminded me of those well-prepared actors (Matthew Modine, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, Arliss Howard, etc.) in that news-camera scene in Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket (’87).

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La sobria vita a Roma

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In Abel Ferrara‘s Tommaso (Kino Lorber), Willem Dafoe plays the titular character, an American indie director living in Rome — obviously based on Ferrara himself. The film was shot in Ferrara’s own apartment there, and it costars his wife, Cristina Chiriac, and the couple’s three-year-old daughter, Anna Ferrara.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 5.22.19 review: “Given the semi-scandalous details of life on the edge that have made Ferrara, over the years, into something of a self-dramatizing legend, I was primed to see a movie that looked like it might turn out to be a cross between Bad Lieutenant and 8 1/2. [Except] Tommaso is about an aging bad boy who has cleaned up his act. Dafoe’s Tommaso was an addict (booze, heroin, crack), and the more accurate thing to say, of course, is that he still is one. But it appears he has found a hard-won life of entitled serenity. Right to the end, he stays clean and sober.

“Early on we see Tommaso going through his rituals: a lesson in how to speak Italian, a stop at the local market to see which vegetables are in season, grabbing a coffee, coming home to stir the orecchiette, settling in for quality time with his family and for a late-night snuggle-turned-shag on the couch with Nikki. It all looks like homespun paradise. And, of course, Tommaso attends 12-step meetings, where he details the sordid but now painful adventures of his past.

“Scene for scene, though, Tommaso feels alive. A movie that’s a loosely structured ramble can work, and about half of Tommaso feels more vital than anything Ferrara has made in a while. But the film should have been shapelier and 20 minutes shorter, with a more focused dramatic psychology. [Ferrara] has talent and urgency, but at 67 he’s still a poster boy for the bohemian shaggy-dog school of filmmaking without discipline.”

Anne Bancroft’s Embarassment

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Until a couple of hours ago I’d never seen the camp classic Gorilla At Large (’54). Originally shot and projected in 1.37:1 3D Technicolor. An HD streaming version is available on Amazon. The $400K production was filmed for roughly a week at Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, from midnight to dawn.

And what an impressive cast for a piece of shit — Anne Bancroft, Raymond Burr, Cameron Mitchell, Lee J. Cobb (who also shot On The Waterfont the same year), Lee Marvin. And a score by Lionel Newman. But what a lame ending — they distract the gorilla with fireworks and then the cops shoot him three or four times, and then he “falls” to the ground.

George Barrows (1914 – 1994) played the titular character. He wore gorilla suits in many films, but “Goliath the gorilla” was his most famous outing. Barrows played his first gorilla in Tarzan and His Mate (’34); his last was playing Monstro the Gorilla in AIP’s The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (’66). Barrows’ gorilla suit, which he built himself, is currently in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Best Tara Reade Reality Check

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Outside of your kneejerk #BelieveAllWomen types, is there anyone who still buys Tara Reade‘s bullshit? If you happen to know any of these post-WWII Japanese soldiers living in jungle caves, please send them Cathy Young‘s 5.14.20 Quillette piece, called “Tara Reade’s Dubious Claims and Shifting Stories Show the Limits of #BelieveWomen.”

Friday Again

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I’ve been getting more and more irritated by having to constantly wipe my glasses when I walk around with my flag mask. If I wear it correctly, I mean, with the steam engine-like nostril breath collecting and escaping and fogging the hell out of the lenses. As Ashley Judd said to Robert De Niro in Heat, “I’m sick of it, sick of it!”

It’s gotten so when I’m walking outside and a safe distance from other humans I just tug the mask below my nose…fuck it.

Don’t kid yourself — right now we’re living through the Second Great Depression. In late March I called it “a dystopian realm, almost a kind of On The Beach atmosphere…a low-security, self-policed concentration camp with wifi.” Except now things are a tad more liberal and semi-open. Toilet paper isn’t an exotic rarity any more. But we’re still “in it.”

Instead of bread lines we have masked citizens waiting in line outside supermarkets. Instead of Midwestern downmarket gangsters (Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger) holding up banks as a reaction to economic devastation, we have bumblefuck “open up!” protestors storming state houses and causing infections to spike. In many ways the same dynamic. The winter of our discontent.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that in the early ’30s FDR was in the White House, and today we have a sociopathic gangster-demagogue running things.

90-Minute Drive With Traffic

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I’d love to hit the local drive-in for a showing of Unhinged, Russell Crowe‘s road-rage drama, when it opens on 7.1. But the only half-operating drive-ins in Los Angeles are in the godforsaken burghs of Paramount and Industry. That’s called “a bridge too far.” There isn’t a single drive-in in the entire San Fernando Valley. How about showing Unhinged at the Hollywood Forever cemetery?

“Dancer” Blindness

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In yesterday’s “Cannes Memory Fragment #1,” which recalled the 5.17.00 debut of Lars von Trier‘s Dancer in the Dark, Steven Gaydos dismissed the pretensions while proudly linking to Derek Elley’s 5.22.00 pan.

Elley excerpt #1: “The legend of Lars Von Trier — part deserved, part self-constructed — comes crashing to the ground with Dancer in the Dark, a 2 1/2-hour demo of auteurist self-importance that’s artistically bankrupt on almost every level.” Elley excerpt #2: “An attempt to feed off the heritage of the traditional Hollywood musical while reinterpreting it for a young, modern audience through the prism of Von Trier’s romantic fatalism.”

HE reply: Besides being emotionally ravishing and technically innovative, Dancer in the Dark is one of the very few form-altering musicals of the last 90 years.

For decades the basic premise of stage & screen musicals was a given — at various moments the characters are so seized with urgent, slap-happy emotion that they break into song. Songs were spirit-lifters, time-out celebrations.

Then came Oklahoma! on the B’way stage in ‘43 — song lyrics and dance or ballet moves were now integrated parts of the narrative, expressions of what characters were going through internally.

Then along came the 1964 musical playbook of A Hard Day’s Night — songs happen among members of a certain British rock band when whimsy or fantasy strike, or when it’s simply time to perform.

And then Cabaret (‘72) — songs not so much about this or that character’s emotional state but which offer ironic or bitter commentary about what an entire culture is going through, and only expressed on-stage in the Kit Kat Club (except for “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”).

And then Dennis Potter‘s 1978 TV drama Pennies From Heaven (followed by Herbert Ross‘s 1981 feature remake), in which Depression-era characters lip-synched popular ’30s tunes as a means of fantasy-escaping from poverty and cruel fates.

Then came Dancer In The Dark (‘00) — a woman is so unable to handle the pain, cruelty and rough & tumble of life that she retreats into song and dance fantasies — without them she can’t continue, can’t cope. And of course this sad but inwardly joyous failing, this neurotic avoidance syndrome leads to tragedy.

How Derek Elley managed to not only miss but dismiss and deplore this simple transcendent concept (not to mention Von Trier’s revolutionary technique of capturing these musical sequences with several strategically mounted vidcams) was, for me, mind-blowing.

It was this review that reminded me all the more that effete, scholarly film dweebs are often (or at the very least sometimes) indifferent or hostile to strongly conveyed, take-it-or-leave-it emotion.

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Scorsese Association

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Martin Scorsese has used so many excerpts of girl group doo-wop songs in his gangster films that I’ve lost count. I’m not even sure if Darlene Love‘s “Wait Til’ My Bobby Gets Home” is heard in Goodfellas or Mean Streets or The Irishman or Who’s That Knocking On My Door?. But I know that when I look at that Philles Records label, it seems only right and fitting that the authorship credits should read (P. Spector-E. Greenwich-J. Barry-M. Scorsese).

I don’t even like this song all that much, but I can’t get it out of my head. It’s ear-bugging me.

“Wait ‘Til My Bobby Gets Home” was recorded at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles in May 1963. Vocals by Love and her sister Edna Wright. Arranged by Jack Nitzsche, engineered by Larry Levine. Spector’s Wall of Sound was played by The Wrecking Crew.

On 5.29.09 Spector was sentenced to 19 years to life for second degree murder. Now 80, he’s currently at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, California.