If you want a fast-and-hard assessment of Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which I attempted to convey two or three hours ago, it goes like this: Four-fifths of this half-century-old Hollywood fantasy is lightly amusing, in and out, yes and no, decent and diverting as far as it goes. But the final fifth is payoff time — a taut, time-clocky, here-we-go, edge-of-the-seat finale that is absolutely insane, exuberant, take-charge and fucking-ass nuts.

I could boil it all down and simply call the last half-hour a “happy” ending, except the craziness is so balls-out unhinged…I’m obviously having trouble describing it. I have my tastes and standards and you all have yours, but by the measuring stick of Hollywood Elsewhere the finale is really, really great. As in laugh-out-loud, hard-thigh-slap, whoo-whoo satisfying. Do I dare use the term good-vibey? And the very end (as in the last two minutes) is…naahh, that’ll do.

But most of the film (the aforementioned 80%) is what most of us would call an okay, good-enough, sometimes sluggish, oddly digressive, highly restrictive wallow in the world of B-level Hollywood at the dawn of the Nixon administration.

By which I mean OUATIH is pretty much tension-free and not all that juicy except for two brawny-fisticuff scenes involving Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth, a laid-back, muscle-bound, serenely cool stunt man. Take no notice of any critic who claims Pitt isn’t the star of this baby and then some. Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Rick Dalton, a late-30ish actor stuck in a career slide and freaking badly, is all nerves and anxiety, a smoker of too many cigarettes and a slurper of way too much alcohol.

Who are these guys? And how will Dalton, a fading TV actor with a backpack full of fear and trepidation, find a way out of the thicket? And what role, if any, will Booth, Rick’s sidekick, stunt man and best bruh, play in turning things around, if in fact that is in the cards?

And what about those motley, zombie-like hippie weirdos encamped at the dusty Spahn Movie Ranch out in Chatsworth, whom Cliff immediately recognizes as bad ones? And how, if at all, will Rick ever break into A-level movies and thereby rub shoulders with the likes of Roman Polanski, aka Mr. Rosemary’s Baby, and his dishy wife Sharon Tate?

I wasn’t irritated or put off by the first four-fifths but I was waiting, waiting, waiting. I was fine with it being a relatively decent, often wise-assed, sometimes hugely enjoyable attitude and atmosphere smorgasbord of period aroma, jokes, flip humor, character-building, asides and “those were the days.”

But with the exception of those two hugely enjoyable stand-up-and-kick-ass scenes (Cliff vs. Bruce Lee on a movie set, Cliff vs. the mostly-female Manson family at the Spahn ranch), all I was feeling was a kind of second-gear sensation…an “okay, okay, okay but where’s the tension, what’s with all the digressions and when the hell is this movie going to step up and kick into third if not fourth gear?”

It’s not really Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, of course, but Once Upon A Time in Quentin’s Non-Historical Hollywood Memory Kit Bag.

…to process Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, but I’ll whip something up soon. The bulk of it set in February 1969, and the half-hour finale on a single day — 8.8.69. The overall effect of the first two hours is “yes and no…chuckles and verve and dessert-like allure and half-century-old atmosphere…what?… 1969 aromas and attitudes, late ’60s genre and exploitation flicks…digressions, digressions…where is this going?…wait, great confrontational scene at the Spahn Movie Ranch between Brad “Cliff Booth” Pitt and the mostly female Manson family!”

And then comes the final half hour, which I’m not going to discuss per Q.T.’s request. But it’s good. Satisfying, I mean. With an exclamation point! I laughed, I cheered, I smiled. Hell, I almost I wolf-howled.

3.37 pm: Pink-with-yellow-dot crowd waiting for doors to open for the 4:30 pm Debussy screening of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood already.

Due respect to the Fox Searchlight team and their just-announced decision to pay $12 million for Terrence Malick‘s A Hidden Life, but the universal reaction among Cannes-attending journos (or at least the ones I spoke to yesterday) is that Malick’s pastoral, moralistic period drama is looking at an uphill struggle to land a Best Picture nomination, which is presumably Fox Searchlight’s strategy.

The headline of a 5.20 Indiewire story by Anne Thompson proclaimed that “with Fox Searchlight Behind It, A Hidden Life Could Go Far,” adding that “a robust Oscar campaign is forthcoming.”

Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy and Brent Lang reported yesterday that “the reviews have been strong,” but they’ve actually been mixed. What they seem to have meant is “Justin Chang and David Ehrlich adore it.”

A Hidden Life was in fact panned by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy, Time‘s Stephanie Zacharek (who called it “pious“) and A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd, among others.

Keslassy-Lang: “Malick movies have been box office duds in recent years. He hasn’t had a film that cracked $1 million at the domestic box office since 2011’s The Tree of Life, which Searchlight also released and pushed to a $13.3 million haul.

“Malick tone poems such as Knight of Cups ($566,006), Song to Song ($443,684), and To the Wonder ($587,615) collapsed on the shoals of audience indifference.”

Originally posted six years ago by antdavisonNZ. The only rendering of the Zapruder assassination footage that looks and feels relatively clean and fluid, partly due to motion-smoothing and partly to the Cinerama-like aspect ratio. This enhancement of the original 8mm, 18fps film, originally shot by the late Abraham Zapruder, was interpolated to play back at 30 frames per second; the slow-motion portion has four interpolated frames for each real frame. Optimum viewing in 1080p HD.

From “Push Comes To Shove,” originally posted on 5.15: “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 (director Ladj Ly was raised there) but also portrays the cops in reasonably fair and humanistic terms.”

I wouldn’t want my immersion in the Cannes Film Festival to allow for an ignoring of Olivia Wilde‘s Booksmart (Annapurna, 5.24). For what it is (i.e., within the bounds of an edgy teen odyssey), it’s really quite good — as fulfilling and well-honed as a 21st Century high-school farewell thing could reasonably be. Perhaps not quite in the same league as George Lucas‘s American Graffiti but it certainly deserves to be regarded in the same general realm. Two or three days ago a clip containing the first six minutes appeared on YouTube…voila.

Orignally posted on 4.25.19:

The concluding passage in Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review of Ira Sachs’ Frankie: “Isabelle Huppert, drawing on a wit that too many of her roles have buried, makes Frankie a celebrity who is all-seeing, and who regards the illness that’s taking her away too early with a tough-shelled irony that refuses all pity. Huppert, reveling in her aura, doesn’t make a wrong move, but I wish Sachs had allowed her to express a sadness that we didn’t just have to read between the lines.

“There are a few surprises in Frankie, and the movie, in its placid way, wants to deliver a tug of revelation of what life is about. The trouble is, life at the end of this day doesn’t look very much different than it did at the start of the day. Even Eric Rohmer himself might have watched this movie and said, ‘Nice! But is that all?'”

It’s straight-up noon on Tuesday, 5.21 — four hours away from the 4 pm Salle Debussy press screening of Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

Hollywood Elsewhere saw three films yesterday — one great, one a mitigated middle-ranger with a transformative ending, and one shortfaller.

The kickoff was Celine Sciamma‘s Portrait Of A Lady on Fire (Grand Lumiere, 8:30 am) — by my sights as close to perfect as a gently erotic, deeply passionate period drama could be.

The second was Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne‘s Young Ahmed (Grand Lumiere, 4 pm), an 84-minute waiting-game movie about a young Islamic psychopath and would-be Jihadist (Idir Ben Addi) planning to murder his female teacher out of blind adherence to Islamic derangement syndrome, but which actually ends rather profoundly. The last couple of minutes are so good, in fact, that I wound up forgiving the first 80 or so.

The final film was Ira Sachs‘ Frankie (Salle Debussy, 10:30 pm), a morose, ploddingly-written, Eric Rohmer-like thing about three middle-aged couples looking at dour futures involving death, separation and loneliness. All the actors (Isabelle Huppert, Marisa Tomei, Brendan Gleeson, Greg Kinnear, Vinette Robinson, Jéremie Renier, Ariyon Bakare, Carloto Cotta) wear out their welcome in record time, and behave as if they’d rather be somewhere else. To me if felt almost entirely unsatisfying — each and every scene struck me as underwhelming if not draining.

The only moment that sparked a strong reaction was a compassionate sex scene between the ailing Huppert, playing the titular lead and a film actress, and her bearded, walrus-like husband, played by Gleeson. On one hand it reminded me of a somewhat similar sex scene in Robert Altman‘s Three Women; on another level it almost made me convulse with discomfort.

Donald Trump‘s “tweets are…I don’t care! I get it. It’s mesmerizing. It’s hard for anyone to look away. Me too. It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.” — Pete Buttigieg to Fox News’ Chris Wallace during a 5.19 Fox News Town Hall. “I think if you look at the conduct of this administration and the conduct of this President, there’s no question that it is beyond the pale morally…to put it politely, it is legally questionable too…[Trump] may well have done things that deserve impeachment, but that’s for the Congress to decide.” Buttigieg got a standing ovation, by the way, from the Fox News-watching crowd.

God save us from the lazy, nostalgic plague of Joe Biden.

This Cannes Film Festival prelude has played before each and every film that has shown at this festival since…I don’t know when. I know it’s been playing since I became a Cannes regular 20-odd years ago. I can’t remember if it was playing during my very first visit in ’92.

I know that 85% or 90% of the time somebody will shout out “Raoul!!” when the prelude finishes. Ten years ago Roger Ebert wrote that the “Raoul!!” howl has “survived for 35 years that I know about.” Four years ago Evening Standard critic Derek Malcolm told BFI.org’s Charlie Lyne that it “dates back a good five or six years but not much more than that.”

The fact that Once Upon A Time in Hollywood director-writer Quentin Tarantino is asking Cannes journos and other first-lookers to refrain from spoiling the film after tomorrow’s big premiere tells you plenty. He’s essentially announcing that some “whoa!” plot element is threaded in.

“I love cinema, You love cinema,” Tarantino has posted on Instagram and Twitter. “It’s the journey of discovering a story for the first time. The cast and crew have worked so hard to create something original, and I only ask that everyone avoids revealing anything that would prevent later audiences from experiencing the film in the same way.”

Hollywood Elsewhere hereby pledges to not spoil whatever Tarantino is referring to, but c’mon…he gave half the game away four weeks ago.

In a 5.3 interview with USA Today‘s Brian Truitt, Tarantino described Brad Pitt‘s Cliff Booth character as “an indestructible World War II hero and one of the deadliest guys alive who could kill you with a spoon, a piece of paper, or a business card. Consequently, he is a rather Zen dude who is troubled by very little.”

HE conclusion: “Okay, but how and why would an indestructible killing machine figure into a film that’s allegedly focused on hippy-dippy, head-in-the-clouds, peace-and-love-beads Hollywood? Why bring up killing at all when the 1969 Hollywood milieu was all about getting high and flashing the peace sign and reading passages from the Bhagavad Gita? Exactly — at a crucial moment Cliff will somehow go up against some folks who need to be corrected or otherwise interfered with.”