As an ardent fan of Jennifer Kent‘s The Babadook (’14), I’ve been awaiting her follow-up film, The Nightingale, with bated breath. The violent period drama, about a young convict woman (Aisling Franciosi) seeking revenge for a crime committed against her family, will debut at the 75th Venice Film festival.

Today I happened upon an interview with Kent, posted today (7.26) by IF.com’s Don Groves:

“Jennifer Kent had a clear purpose when she started writing the screenplay of The Nightingale: To define the nature of violence and its impact on women, Aboriginal people and the land.

Aisling Franciosi, star of Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale.

“The story itself — a young female Irish convict chases a British officer through the wilderness of 1820s Tasmania after he commits a terrible act of violence against her family — just ‘dropped from the ether,’ she tells IF today.

“The production was financed on the first draft, a rapid process which she credits to the success of The Babadook. The thriller will have its world premiere in competition at the 75th Venice International Film Festival, which starts on August 29.

“’The point of the film is not to revel in violence but how to retain our humanity in dark times,” she says. She cast Aisling Franciosi as the protagonist, Clarem after the Irish/Italian actress nailed the audition without seeing any of her earlier work in Game of Thrones, The Fall or Legends.

“’Aisling was not an obvious choice for the financiers but there is no risk because she is absolutely right for the role,’ Kent says. At the outset she did not consider Sam Claflin for the part of the British officer after seeing him in romantic roles but quickly changed her mind after he auditioned. ‘He is a revelation,’ she says.

We’ve all heard the hoo-hah over Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born (Warner Bros., 10.5). Movie stars (Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro) love it. The reaction to a 7.18 exhibitor screening in Hollywood was “through the roof,” according to Deadline‘s Pete Hammond. Toronto Film Festival director Cameron Bailey has told Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson that it’s “an absolutely beautiful film…it’s really emotional and works on a gut level.”

And yet there’s a certain hesitation about how and where to screen it. A Star Is Born will debut at the forthcoming Venice Film Festival but out of competition. It’ll also screen at the Toronto Film Festival but not at Telluride, which seems odd for an alleged crowd-pleaser that everyone believes is a lock for a Best Picture nomination.

“This is a calculation,” Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson wrote a couple of days ago. “The studio that consistently avoids wearing its Oscar hopes on its sleeve is refusing to be judged in Venice Competition, and the Lady Gaga starrer is not going to Telluride to be judged by the Oscar pundits.

“Is this a sign of insecurity? More likely, the studio is confident of the film’s mainstream commercial bonafides, but is treading carefully where critics — and Oscars — are concerned.”

What this means, of course, is that films that work on a gut emotional level tend to work better with exhibitors and ticket buyers, but not necessarily so much with critics. Except when it comes to Hollywood Elsewhere. I’m different. Unlike your average dweeby critic, I’ve occasionally succumbed to effective emotional movies. Big-screen heart tugs don’t put me off. If a movie turns the emotional lock, I’m in.

“Movies critics can’t agree on much, but there’s one assumption most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it,” the late Richard Corliss wrote on 11.22.06. “It’s that a film that says life is crap is automatically deeper, better, richer, truer than one that says life can be beautiful.

“That’s a 180 from the prevailing notion in classic Hollywood, where optimism was the cardinal belief, at least on-screen. (It was in the front office that the knives came out.) Most movies, whatever their genre, were romances; they aimed for tears and ended with a kiss. But to serious critics then, and to the mass audience now, sentiment is suspect. Feeling is mushy, girly — for fools. To be soft-hearted is to be soft-headed.

“So critics will see a horror film with extreme violence, or (less frequently) an erotic film with extreme sex, and accept these as genre conventions, whether or not they’re grossed out or aroused. But a movie that tries to make them feel is somehow pandering to their basest or noblest emotions and, as they see it, deserves a spanking from any smart reviewer. These days, nothing is as easy to deride as dead-serious romance.”

Yesterday Last Jedi director Rian Johnson deleted 20,000 old tweets because he doesn’t want to take a chance on becoming the new James Gunn. His account now lists only 1200 tweets. How many others will follow in his path?

Mick Jagger is celebrating today. Bless his persistence and good health and general refusal to wear Bruce Dern-styled old man shoes. “Three-quarters of a century…makes a girl think.” — Marilyn Monroe‘s Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk in Some Like It Hot (’59).

I can remember people saying in the mid ’80s that it was time for the geriatric Rolling Stones to think about hanging it up for the sake of dignity, that being a post-40 rocker is embarassing. The last I saw Jagger live was at the El Rey on Wilshire Blvd. back in November ’01; the stand-out moment was when he performed “God Give Me Everything.” Favorites shift from year to year, but right now my favorite Jagger-Richard tune is “Back Street Girl,” largely because of the background accordion or Hammond organ or whatever it is.

Although it didn’t strike me as anything more than dryly amusing in a spotty, in-and-out sense (i.e., occasionally smirky but mostly doleful), I agreed after the fact that Phantom Thread could be processed as a kind of dry, cold comedy. I knew the hipper-than-thous were saying this in their salons and so I figured “sure, okay…I’ll bend over backwards and meet the Guy Lodge cabal halfway.”

But an “after the fact” accommodation invalidates any notion of actual comedy being the intent. It was received that way by smarty-pants types, but this is why people don’t trust critics as a rule. Because they tend to enjoy perverse, understated, “are you hip enough to get it?” humor more than any other kind, whereas Joe Popcorn tends to prefer films that are actually funny in a cards-face-up sense.

My preferred type of humor is the subtle, no-laugh-funny kind in Shampoo, Greenberg, The Informant! and Logan Lucky, the kind that no one is making a great effort to “sell” but has obviously been conceived and written with a certain humorous intent. Phantom Thread doesn’t park its car in this garage. The humor is in the performances (DDL and Manville’s) and less so the writing.

From “Paul Thomas Anderson’s Howl,” posted on 12.7.17: “I personally loved the give-and-take scenes between Reynolds and Alma and Reynolds and Cyril; all that repressed emotion behind witheringly cutting lines. The audience I saw it with laughed loud and hard at some of that stuff, as though it were a drawing-room comedy, which seemed strange. Oscar Wilde-ish Phantom Thread‘s dialogue is not; what dark humor there is lies in the acting, rather than the writing.

“It’s always fascinating to watch DDL work because he’s so good. But you feel the effort more when the material is as thin as this. In the end the film doesn’t pay off, emotionally or dramatically. But that’s never been what Anderson’s films are about. He seems to purposely avoid anything that would gratify any audience member in an obvious way.

“An audience film immediately announces what it’s about, tells a linear story with characters who are not only easy to understand and identify with but who make you eager to root for them. Audience films invite you in, show you around and make you comfortable so that you always know where you are. The Post is a good example of a well-made audience film.

“Critics’ films make you come to them. They challenge you to essentially jump aboard an already moving train and figure out where it’s going. The best critics’ films pay off that bet for audiences who believe the critic and take the challenge; the worst critics’ films (like The Master) have champions who make you believe there’s more than meets the eye here when, in fact, it’s all in their film-theory-addled imaginations.

An image as simple and penetrating as this one, gently augmented by the sound of cleansing fresh water, reminds that there’s a whole universe of absorption, contemplation and transportation beyond the corporate prison realms of Dwayne Johnson, Chris Pratt, Robert Downey, Jr., et. al. Oh, Lordy, bless the coming award season. Bless it now and forever.

The chilling effect of the James Gunn Disney assassination (early-Obama-era tweets can detonate your present-day career) and the ScarJo Rub & Tug thing (cisgender actors cannot play transgender characters) have been kicked around by Deadline‘s Mike Fleming and Peter Bart.

Fleming: “[Industry execs] fear this desire to please loud special interest groups, given a bullhorn by social media, will spread to the point where you couldn’t make Brokeback Mountain or Dallas Buyers Club by casting straight actors like Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger and Jared Leto, whose desire to stretch and win awards made these films possible.

“Stars always represented the underrepresented in the Dream Factory. Daniel-Day Lewis in My Left Foot? Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man? Al Pacino in Scent Of A Woman? Tom Hanks in Philadelphia? I would argue these award-winning performances and movies I mentioned opened eyes and organically helped create empathy and tolerance by finding common ground. Would those actors and studios make these movies now and risk the shaming campaigns?

“Financiers are already inclined to favor films with sequel/blockbuster potential. They’ve now been given one more reason to kick these projects to the curb. This all could have been handled better but like the James Gunn mushroom cloud, these decisions are being made in real time out of fear of the white-hot social media chorus, and the blaring headlines of media eager to fan provocative stories. Deadline had one of its highest traffic days ever when we broke Disney’s dismissal of Gunn last Friday and it hasn’t abated. So I’m not saying we’re immune to the appeal of provocative copy. But I don’t think anybody was helped by the outcome on Gunn and Rub & Tug.”

Bart: “The constraints of the moment would surely have created huge obstacles for many past films that proved ground breaking. Consider Being There: Its message was that the next President of the United States would inevitably be an idiot (Peter Sellers) who could neither read nor write and who did little but watch television. Whoops. Apart from its dicey theme, both Sellers and Hal Ashby, its director, were erratic in their personal pronouncements and would have been annihilated by the social media. As it was, Being There (funded in 1979 by Lorimar Films, of which I was then the President) was rejected by two distributors and suffered from clumsy half-hearted marketing.

In the ambitious but mediocre Blindspotting (Lionsgate, now playing), the sympathetic, Oakland-residing Colin (Daveed Diggs) is trying to stay out of trouble over the final three days of his parole status. Early on he’s sitting in a parked truck as he witnesses a beat cop (Officer Molina, played by Ethan Embry) shoot a fleeing dude in the back, apparently killing him. Colin is shocked, naturally, but his failure to mask his feelings told me that Blindspotting would be a second-tier film.

I stayed to the end and I was right — Blindspotting isn’t good enough.

Colin is only a few feet away from Officer Molina and slightly above. If you’ve ever witnessed a violent altercation the first thing you want to do is not throw any kind of shade or judgment upon the aggressor. Don’t look at the cop or, better yet, duck out of sight. What does Colin do? He eyeballs the cop with a look of complete terror. His wide-eyed expression says “my God, you just shot an innocent dude in the back! Soon as I’m outta here I’m gonna report your ass, physical description and all.” Colin is literally staring a hole in the cop’s forehead. Which is the dumbest thing he could possibly do. What if Officer Molina is a hair-trigger type and looking to shoot someone else?

Right then and there I said, “okay, fuck this movie…I can’t abide this level of stupidity.” Diggs (who also produced and cowrote the script) and director Carlos López Estrada decided it was more important to emotionally telegraph how scared and upset Colin is rather than trust the audience to assess the malice on their own. This is what not-good-enough filmmakers and dramatists do — underline, over-explain, assume the audience needs help.

A few minutes later I felt even more turned off by Colin’s longtime best friend Miles (Rafael Casal), a violent, hair-trigger, gun-wielding asshole who’s always threatening to start shit about the slightest personal offense or otherwise do something that might attract the attention of the bulls. Right away you’re wondering “is Colin as stupid as he seems for hanging with this asswipe, or is he just temporarily stupid?”

Casal, a 32 year-old playwright and performance poet, is pretty good at playing an asshole — I’ll give him that. He relies on a broad caricature of Oakland street blackitude — machismo shit talk, constant strut, a mouthful of gold fillings, flashing pistols, drop-of-a-hat hostility, etc.

In the view of Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy “the volcanically emotive Miles” is “a character so brainlessly compulsive and violent that he becomes pretty hard to take after a while.”

During the first half-hour of Mission: Impossible — Fallout (Paramount, 7.27), there’s a sequence in which Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill do a HALO jump (high altitude low open) over Paris. Before Monday night’s Lincoln Square screening director Chris McQuarrie explained that the sequence was shot for real — Cruise and a dp with a head-mounted camera did over 100 jumps at magic hour. The sequence is awesome in just about every respect.

Hollywood Elsewhere totally salutes this kind of commitment to realism, and especially Cruise’s moxie. The man is a machine. But let’s also be honest — this scene probably could have been faked with wires and green screen and nobody would have known the difference. Nobody trusts visual effects and stunts any more. Over the last quarter-century the trust factor has been totally blown. Everyone assumes they’re being deceived, at least to some extent. Especially in a big-studio adventure thriller.

In 2005, Werner Herzog said the following about conveying physical reality on-screen: “I tried to explain that I wanted to have the audience know that at the most fundamental level it was real. Today when you see mainstream movies, in many moments, even when it’s not really necessary, there are special effects. It’s a young audience, and at six and seven kids can identify them…they know it was a digital effect, and normally they even know how they were done. But I had the feeling I wanted to put the audience back in the position where they could trust their eyes.”

This is what McQuarrie and Cruise tried to do in the HALO scene — get us to trust the fact that the physical performing is 100% genuine, right there in the moment, three or four miles high. HE fully respects and salutes this effort, even if it doesn’t quite feel all-the-way honest.

Example: Cruise and Cavill’s plan is to parachute right onto the roof of the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysees. No high-pressure undertaking ever goes precisely according to plan, and yet they do exactly this. A more realistic scenario would have one of them missing the Palais and splashing into the Seine, or maybe landing in a nearby city park (Square Jean Perrin) and alarming a couple of pedestrians.

Except for Jennifer Kent‘s The Nightingale and Carlos Reygadas‘ Nuestro Tiempo, all 2018 Venice Film Festival picks had been guessed or spitballed by HE. 12 major competition films plus the two Orson Welles features plus Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born = 15 in all, not counting the mid-levels and peripherals:

Major Competition (12): Roma (d: Alfonso Cuaron), First Man, (d: Damien Chazelle); Doubles Vies (aka EBook) (d: Olivier Assayas); The Sisters Brothers (d: Jacques Audiard), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (d: Ethan and Joel Coen); 22 July (formerly Norway) (d: Paul Greengrass); Suspiria (d: Luca Guadagnino); Work without Author (d: Florian Henkel Von Donnersmark); The Nightingale (d: Jennifer Kent); The Favorite (d: Yorgos Lanthimos); Peterloo (d: Mike Leigh); Sunset (d: Laszlo Nemes).

Mid-Level Competition (8): Vox Lux (d: Brady Corbet); The Mountain (d: Rick Alverson); Capri-Revolution (d: Mario Martone); What You Gonna Do When The World’s On Fire? (d: Roberto Minervini); Freres Ennemis (d: David Oelhoffen); Neustro Tiempo (d: Carlos Reygadas); At Eternity’s Gate (d: Julian Schnabel); Killing (d: Shinya Tsukamoto).

Special Wellesian, Non-Competitive Events (2): The Other Side Of The Wind (d: Orson Welles); They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (d: Morgan Neville)

Non-Competitive (5): A Star Is Born (d: Bradley Cooper), Mi Obra Maestra (d: Gaston Duprat); A Tramway in Jerusalem (d: Amos Gitai), Dragged Across Concrete (d: Craig Zahler), Shadow (d: Zhang Yimou).