Ethan Hawke‘s performance in Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed is one of his all-timers. In part, I feel, because he really knows how to channel “tormented”. (I still think Hawke’s anguished-younger-brother performance in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead is his all-time peak.) Somewhere over Kansas last night it hit me that the Hawke of, say, 12 or 14 years ago would been a supremely right Yeshua of Nazareth in Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ. If, obviously, Martin Scorsese hadn’t made his classic 31 years ago and had waited until the early to mid aughts. As moving as Willem Dafoe was, Hawke might have been a notch or two more affecting.

Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54, one of HE’s favorite docs at the Sundance ’18 festival, has finally been acquired for distribution. Zeitgeist Films and Kino Lorber have picked up U.S. rights and will presumably open it later this year. Took long enough!

From “The Way It Was“, posted on 1.22.18: “The ironclad rule about gaining entrance to the original Studio 54 (i.e., Schrager-Rubell, April ’77 to the ’80 shutdown over tax evasion) was that you had to not only look good but dress well. That meant Giorgio Armani small-collared shirts if possible and certainly not being a bridge-and-tunnel guinea with polyester garb and Tony Manero hair stylings.

“As I watched Studio 54 I was waiting for someone to just say it, to just say that Saturday Night Fever borough types weren’t even considered because they just didn’t get it, mainly because of their dress sense but also because their plebian attitudes and mindsets were just as hopeless. It finally happens at the half-hour mark. One of the door guys (possibly Marc Benecke) says ‘no, the bridge-and-tunnel people never got in“…never.’ I can’t tell you how comforting it was to hear that again after so many years.”

Studio 54 also screened during last month’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Jimmy Stewart would have been 110 years old today if nature hadn’t intervened. There were some tweets celebrating this fact, and it left me with two questions: (a) Which Stewart films are known by Millenials and Gen Z types, if any? and (b) What was Stewart’s greatest or most popular signature role?

I’m inclined to say his finest might not have been George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life or Scotty Ferguson in Vertigo — the two defaults that everyone always mentions.

My top two are actually Senator Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, even though Stewart was obviously too old (53 or 54) to play a greenhorn in John Ford‘s 1962 western classic, and the dogged Chicago newspaper reporter in Call Northside 777.

I’m also a big fan of his Charles Lindbergh in The Spirit of St. Louis. And then comes his chilly-loner performance in Anthony Mann‘s Bend of the River.

My least favorite Stewart performances? Rupert Caddell, the snooty college professor in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. and Chip Hardesty in Mervyn LeRoy’s The FBI Story.

It took me four months to notice something interesting in a February 2018 Vanity Fair piece about 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s an excerpt from a draft of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke‘s script, a scene that was never shot. A conversation between Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and that Mission Control guy (“Sorry about this little snag, fellas”) about what turned HAL into a killer.

MISSION CONTROL: “We believe his truth programming and the instructions to lie, gradually resulted in an incompatible conflict, and faced with this dilemma, he developed, for want of a better description, neurotic symptoms. It’s not difficult to suppose that these symptoms would center on the communication link with Earth, for he may have blamed us for his incompatible programming. Following this line of thought, we suspect that the last straw for him was the possibility of disconnection. Since he became operational, he had never known unconsciousness. It must have seemed the equivalent of death. At that point, he, presumably, took whatever actions he thought appropriate to protect himself from what must have seemed to him to be his human tormentors.”

A fair number of HE regulars saw Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed this weekend, I’m sure. I’ve been doing handstands since I first saw it last August. “A spare, Bresson-like, thoroughly gripping piece about despair, environmental ruin, moral absolutism and sexual-emotional redemption,” I wrote. “Completely rational and meditative and yet half crazy in a good way.”

The Rotten Tomatoes score is 97%. It would probably be 100% were it not for Armond White’s National Review pan, which Schrader recently called a badge of honor or words to that effect.

So what’s the HE community verdict?

Early this morning I walked around a heavy-partying area of Dublin (south of Liffey river, west of Westmoreland). 20somethings, for the most part. The pubs close sometime around 2 or 2:30 am here, but you wouldn’t know it from all the rowdy pumping energy. In most cities 2 am means things are starting to wind down. Not in Dublin, they’re not.

I’ve long felt a spiritual kinship with Ireland and the Irish. During my initial visit in ’88 (accompanied by wife Maggie and infant son Jett) my first thought was “I could die here.” But I felt a slightly uneasy vibe last night. A somewhat loutish, hair-trigger feeling from some of the guys hanging out in groups in front of pubs and whatnot.

You can usually sense civility in people or a lack of, a current of deference and humility and a basic instinct to be nice or a willingness to take a poke if provoked or fucked with in the slightest way. I was feeling more of the latter last night. Everyone bombed and more than a few on the ornery, rambunctious side.

And then I came upon the strangest, angriest drunken Irishman I’ve ever gotten a whiff of. This guy, 25 or slightly younger, was so stinking and so consumed with rage that he was just standing in front of a Burger King, immobile, looking slightly downward but more or less statue-like, like he’d been carved out of wood or injected with a drug that turned his muscles into stone. “Don’t touch me or come close…fauhhck, man, don’t even look at me,” his body seemed to be saying.

It was eerie. Drunks generally stumble or flail around or lie down or lean against walls. This guy was beyond all that. It was like he was trying to decide who to hit or how to kill himself or what weapon to use.

“Trump has opened up the floodgates, and the poison is coursing through the body politic. Republicans have been cranking up the racist mob for 40, 50 years. The Southern strategy…dog whistle, dog whistle, dog whistle. And then along comes Trump, who throws the dog whistle over his shoulder and picks up a bullhorn. He’s a disinhibitor.”

Filed at 3:30 am Dublin time…later. I haven’t been here since the fall of ’88. The Aer Lingus flight back to NYC leaves tomorrow at 1 pm. Update: In the breakfast room of the Clifton Court hotel (11 Eden Quay), 8:10 am. Leaving for airport in a couple of hours.

Asia Argento remarks, delivered at Cannes Film festival award ceremony earlier this evening: “I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here in Cannes. I was 21 years old. The festival was his hunting ground. Even tonight there are those that need to be held responsible for their conduct. You know who you are. But most importantly we know who you are, and we will not allow you to get away with it any longer.”

Le puissant discours d’@AsiaArgento pendant la cérémonie de clôture de Cannes. « J’ai été violée ici en 1997 par Harvey Weinstein ». 👊💪 pic.twitter.com/Qn1uguRzP4

— Hugo Clément (@hugoclement) May 19, 2018

Palme d’Or: Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda. HE comment: Why did they give the top prize to a film I didn’t get around to seeing? I resent that. My sense was that Shoplifters had drawn a respectful response but nobody was doing cartwheels. Nobody grabbed me by the collar and said, “Oh my God…you absolutely must see Shoplifters! The cartwheel winners were Cold War, Capernaum and Happy As Lazzaro.

Grand Prix: BlacKkKlansman, d: Spike Lee. HE comment: The Grand Prix being equivalent to second prize, I find it odd that Lee’s film, an engaging ’70s undercover-cop caper film but far from great art, came away with a more prestigious trophy than the one Cold War earned (i.e., Best Director for Pawlilowski) or Nadine Labaki‘s Capermnaum, which took third prize or Jury Prize.

Jury Prize: Capernaum, d: Nadine Labaki. HE comment: At least it took one of the three top awards.

Best Actress: Samal Yeslyamova, Akya. HE comment: Didn’t see it. My money was on Cold War‘s Joanna Kulig.

Best Actor: Marcello Fonte, Dogman. HE comment: Fine performance, mostly unsatisfying film, not my cup of tea.

Best Director: Pawel Pawlikowski, Cold War. HE comment: Approved.

Best Screenplay (tie): Alice Rohrwacher, Happy as Lazzaro & Jafar Panahi and Nader Saeivar, Three Faces.

“In the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reporters in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington D.C. bureau were virtually alone in their questioning of the Bush Administration’s allegations of links between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism.

”The team of Knight Ridder reporters, led by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway, produced stories that now read like a prescient accounting of how the Bush Administration sought to sell the war to the American people.” — from “The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right,” a 5.25.11 Huffpost story by Max Follmer.

The main culprits who sold the U.S. Congress and the public on the necessity of invading Iraq were, of course, President George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Colin Powell and N.Y. Times reporter Judith Miller, who ran a series of exclusives about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, some of which were found to be untrue. Miller’s main source was Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi. In a film about uncovering the chorus of lies used to justify the invasion, wouldn’t you think that Miller would be an important character? In the IMDB cast list there’s no “Judith Miller” character. Chalabi appears in the trailer, but he’s not part of the IMDB cast list either.

For the sheer pleasure of it, I caught Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War this morning for the second time. I sat in the third row of the Salle Deubssy, swooning once again to that velvety, needle-sharp black-and-white cinematography and that boxy aspect ratio that’s been breaking my heart for decades. Every shot is so exquisitely framed and lighted that it brings tears to your eyes. You could blow up any frame from this film and hang it on the wall of any snooty Manhattan art gallery.

And I love how cinematographer Lukasz Zal frames many of his shots with acres and acres of head room above the natural center of attention.

Cold War is so perfectly composed, a masterwork on every level. Pawlikowski’s story-telling instincts couldn’t be more eloquent or understated. Every plot point is always conveyed in the most discreet and understated terms, but you never miss a trick. And the economy! A story that spans 15 years ** is handled within 84 minutes, and you never sense that you’re being rushed along.

If I were deciding tonight’s Cannes Film Festival awards, I’d definitely choose Cold War for the Palme d’Or and Joanna Kulig, the femme fatale songbird whose in-and-out, hot-and-cold emotions propel this tragic love story, for Best Actress.