When Joseph McBride replied at some length to my questions about Irma la Douce and his commentary on a forthcoming Kino Lorber Bluray, I replied at length also. Here’s what I said:

“So unlike most critics, you’re not of the opinion that Billy Wilder peaked with Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and One, Two, Three? And that as a director he enjoyed two peak periods — his initial nine-year run (1944’s Double Indemnity to 1953’s Stalag 17) and then his seven-year run at the very top of his game, or between ’59 and ’66 (Some Like It Hot to The Fortune Cookie)?

“You believe, in other words, that Wilder’s decline period (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes through Buddy Buddy) wasn’t about ‘decline’ as much as a commercially downspiraling artistic growth period, or something along those lines?

“Wilder’s first peak period began with his auteurist breakthrough via Double Indemnity (’44) and The Lost Weekend (’45). He greatly strengthened his hand with Sunset Boulevard, (’50) and then was dealt a stunning commercial setback with the release of Ace in the Hole. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve always believed that the commercial failure of Ace, not to mention a consensus that he’d succumbed to an overly hard-bitten, overly acidic tone, all but stopped Wilder in his tracks.

“I’m saying that Ace in the Hole either persuaded or forced Wilder to become a humorous, light-hearted, mainstream director-for-hire after Stalag 17, which ironically was quite the critical and commercial success, opened in mid ’53.

Background: “Wilder began working on Stalag 17 sometime after the original B’way play version began its run in March 1951. I don’t know the precise logline, but Wilder’s Paramount-supported involvement was probably concurrent with the opening of Ace in the Hole in July ’51. He began shooting Stalag in February of ’52 and presumably wrapped the usual eight or ten weeks later.

“According to Peter Graves ‘the film was held from release for over a year due to Paramount Pictures not believing anyone would be interested in seeing a film about prisoners of war…the 1953 release of American POWs from the Korean War led Paramount to release it on an exploitation angle.’

Back to letter: “For whatever reasons, perhaps best known by yourself and other Wilder scholars or perhaps just due to the bland mentality of the Eisenhower ’50s, Wilder’s first auteur phase ended with Stalag 17 or at least was put on hiatus for a five-year, five-film period from ’53 to ’58.

I saw on Twitter that in mid July Kino Lorber is bringing out a 4K remastered Bluray of Billy Wilder‘s Irma la Douce (’63). The disc will contain audio commentary by author and film historian Joseph McBride, with whom I maintain a correspondence.

So I wrote McBride the following: “What is there to say about the overlong, inauthentic Irma la Deuce? I like Andre Previn‘s musical score, but it moves so slowly and takes so long (147 minutes). Jack Lemmon‘s performance as Shirley MacLaine‘s policeman lover isn’t so much nervy or heart-touching as glumly dutiful. Lou Jacobi, as a local Pigalle bartender, is the only really good thing in it.”

McBride’s reply: “I’ve been working on a critical study of Wilder, following my critical study of his mentor Ernst Lubitsch, called “How Did Lubitsch Do It?” (Columbia University Press, 6.26). And so I was honored to be asked by Olive Films to talk about Wilder and Irma.

“Irma represented an important stage in my own sexual liberation. I had to see it three times while I was a horny but guilt-ridden Catholic high school student and kept walking out before I could make it all the way to the end. So I thank Billy Wilder for helping free me from my religious scruples about sexuality.

“Ironically in that light, Irma is one of Wilder’s most romantic films, while also dealing with the seamy side of life, a paradoxical combination he often explored in his films both in Europe and the U.S. Irma shows him taking advantage of the new frankness allowed Hollywood filmmakers in 1963 and, as he often did, helping lead the charge. It deals openly with prostitution and mocks sexual hypocrisy, themes that pervade his body of work.”

I’d forgotten that Irma was Wilder’s most popular film. It cost $5 million to make, and brought in $25,246,588 — quite the sum in 1963 dollars.

Before last night’s screening of Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows, Salle Debussy journalists were more or less obliged to sit through live video of the red-carpet arrivals as well as opening remarks and tributes inside the Grand Lumiere. I was half-watching and half-texting while scrolling through Twitter. But Kristen Stewart‘s appearance struck me as comment-worthy.

I asked a youngish British journalist sitting to my right what she thought of Stewart’s radically cut, blonde-streaked hair, and she said “Oh…uhhm.” In other words she found it striking but didn’t want to share any impressions. I said, “The shorn sides and odd streaks and the smoky eye makeup…it’s just not very attractive.” Certainly not in a conventional hetero sense of that term, I meant, which is what Hollywood Elsewhere more or less goes by.

The journalist said, “Well, I don’t think ‘attractive’ is the idea.” What would the idea be then, I wondered? I actually was telling myself that the idea was to project an edgy sapphic thing, or some kind of statement against what most of us would call conventional foxy norms. But I didn’t want to discuss in detail that so I just said, “She doesn’t want to project an attractive appearance?” No response so I added, “You mean as a gay thing?”

That stopped the conversation in its tracks. British journo woman stared silently at the screen and I went back to Twitter.

The biggest Cannes film today (Wednesday, 5.9) is Wanuri Kahiu‘s Rafiki, a Kenyan-made lesbian love story that’s been locally banned by Kenya’s conservative-minded government. It will screen at 1:45 pm and again at 10:15 pm at the Salle Debussy. I would normally be catching the earlier screening, but there’s a conflict and a complication with the great Martin Scorsese, who came to town yesterday.

Scorsese, currently in post with his $180 million Netflix gangster flick The Irishman, will sit for a discussion at the Theatre Croisette this afternoon (4:30 pm) following a Director’s Fortnight 2:30 pm screening of Mean Streets. I’d prefer to catch the 82-minute long Rafiki at 1:45 pm and then slip into the Scorsese q & a, but I’m afraid the security goons won’t let me in. I might have to attend Mean Streets in order to catch the Scorsese sitdown (which I regard as essential) without incident, and then catch Rafiki at 10:15 pm. Not the end of the world.

While Hollywood Elsewhere slept in Cannes, persuasive evidence about Russian financial influence upon Donald Trump attorney Michael Cohen and the Trump mob family in general came to light via Stormy Daniels‘ attorney Michael Avenatti, and it sounds and tastes fairly delicious. It was all over the news shows last night, but the summary and follow-through by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is my favorite so far.

From the 5.8.18 N.Y. Times story by Mike McIntire, Ben Protess and Jim Rutenberg:

“A shell company that Michael D. Cohen used to pay hush money to a pornographic film actress received payments totaling more than $1 million from an American company linked to a Russian oligarch and several corporations with business before the Trump administration, according to documents and interviews.

“Financial records reviewed by The New York Times show that Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, used the shell company, Essential Consultants L.L.C., for an array of business activities that went far beyond what was publicly known. Transactions adding up to at least $4.4 million flowed through Essential Consultants starting shortly before Mr. Trump was elected president and continuing to this January, the records show.

I’ve just come out of an opening-night Cannes Film Festival screening (not the big whoop-dee-doo one in the Grand Lumiere but a concurrent press screening in the Salle Debussy) of Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows. It’s not a bust but by Farhadi’s lofty standards it’s something of a shortfaller, particularly due to how the third act unfolds.

But it’s still a Farhadi film, and that always means a character-rich, complexly plotted, proceeding-at-its-own-pace family-community drama — smartly written, always well acted — in which deeper and deeper layers of the onion are gradually peeled until the truth comes out.

Set in rural Spain, it’s about the sudden disappearance of a character but it’s not an About Elly-level thing. At all. It’s actually about a kidnapping but that’s all I’m going to divulge. But Everybody Knows follows the Farhadi form by focusing on a large community of family members, friends, co-workers (i.e., a wine farm) and whatnot, and everyone, we soon realize, knows everyone else’s secrets. Well, most of them. And by the end, everything comes out in the wash.

But the story and especially the ending don’t echo all that much in a social-fabric or social-portraiture sense. All you get from it is “people are more selfish and prideful and less compassionate than they let on,” but you knew that going in. It tells a tale about some bad business, and it stays on that level to the end. It doesn’t expand or begin to play a bigger game.

When the closing credits began to roll only five or six people clapped, and half-heartedly at that.

Something is wrong when a portion of an audience laughs at a plot revelation, which happened tonight during the third act or around 100 minutes in. There’s nothing clumsy or attitudinally funny about the “new information”, so to speak, but several journalists inside the Salle Debussy guffawed rather loudly when Penelope Cruz said a particular line.

I almost turned around and sneered because the revelation is something that’s built into the buried-family-secrets plot — you can smell it coming a mile away. Why 10 or 15 journos chortled out loud is beyond me. It’s an awkward moment dramatically, I’ll admit, but it’s not a crazy thing to throw into a drama of this sort. It’s like a third-act “surprise” out of a gothic romance novel, but it fits right into the fabric and scheme of the story.

Having heard over the last couple of days that Everybody Knows underwhelms or is some kind of “meh” thing, I went in expecting a problem movie or even one that goes thud. But it’s not that bad and is actually pretty good all the way through until the last 15 or 20. I would even say first-rate for the most part, but it does get into trouble in the third act.

The finale is okay, but it doesn’t feel complete or fulfilling enough. All the loose ends are tied up for the most part, but it doesn’t quite get there.

The Cannes Film Festival jury — “madame president” Cate Blanchett, Kristen Stewart, Ava DuVernay, Lea Seydoux, director Denis Villenueve, Taiwanese martial-arts actor Chang Chen, Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, Burundian singer Khadja Nin and French social-realism director-writer Robert Guediguian — gathered for a press conference today.

The questions were “diplomatic”, which is a diplomatic term for vaguely dull and unchallenging. The answers followed suit.

If I’d been more strongly motivated, I would have raised my hand and asked, “Sundance ’18 was all but totally ‘woke’ in terms of selections and prizes given….it felt to me like a socialist summer camp in the snow. How woke-minded are you guys gonna be on the Cote d’Azur? Do you believe in ‘woke’ as an ongoing aesthetic and political mandate to bring about much needed change, or do you just, you know, want to watch good films?”

If I’d chickened out at the last minute, I would have asked, “Cannes director Thierry Fremaux recently said he’ll never select films for this festival based on a gender quota basis. But Indiewire, hands down the woke-iest major film site, took issue with this and appears to favor quota systems. If you were in Fremaux’s shoes, would you guys implement quota-system admissions to as to increase the number of female-directed films here?”

Blanchett said at one point that things are changing slowly, but at least they’re changing. “Would I like to see more women in competition?” Blanchett said. “Absolutely,” adding that that she “hoped” more would turn up in the future.

The only other quote that stuck out was also Blanchett’s. “Being attractive doesn’t preclude being intelligent,” she said. Hollywood Elsewhere agrees.

The Kilauea volcanic eruptions are obviously sad and devastating, but at the same time I understand why people on the Big Island of Hawaii, particularly those near Leilani estates on the eastern slope, might want to ogle the destruction. A fascinating, relatively rare phenomenon. On the other hand the lava seems to move about as fast as a turtle, if that, so it’s hard to relate in terms of disaster-movie similarities.

Almost all the volcano movies — Dante’s Peak, Volcano, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, Irwin Allen‘s When Time Ran Out, the 1935 version of The Last Days of Pompeii — have at least slightly exaggerated the speed at which lava flows. And few have dealt with the the threat of sulfur dioxide gas, or so I recall.

At the risk of sounding facile, which volcano movie has delivered the most realistic depiction of how lava actually looks and behaves, based on what we’ve seen over the past two or three days?

The Cannes jury press conference happens today (Tuesday, 5.8) at 2:30 pm, but there’s nothing to see until Asghar Farhadi‘s Everybody Knows screens this evening. It screened last week for Parisian press, and the loose talk during last night’s La Pizza gathering was that it might be on the “meh” side. One journo said he’d heard it was similar to Farhadi’s About Elly, another said something about it being Farhadi’s Personal Shopper or — I’m reaching here — possibly in the vein of Almodovar’s Volver. The general feeling is one of slight apprehension rather than excitement.

One of the above said he can’t be specific, but that he understands that a major American film is probably going to get booed. Which is not a difficult achievement here, and is sometimes not that meaningful in the long run. (The journalists who booed Personal Shopper a couple of years ago look like idiots now.)

If the “going to get booed” thing is correct, the likeliest candidates would be David Robert Mitchell‘s Under The Silver Lake, which runs 139 minutes, or Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman. They’ll debut roughly a week from now (Lee’s film on 5.14, the Mitchell the following day). The possible booing recipient could also be Ron Howard‘s Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The BlacKkKlansman rumor is that it’s a “buddy comedy,” but Lee did his best to shoot that notion down on Instagram [see above].

A friend who saw Under The Silver Lake some time ago: “Loved [Mitchell’s] Myth of the American Sleepover, and really like It Follows. I like some of Silver Lake” — presumed to be kind of an impressionistic cultural panorama of present-day hipster Los Angeles a la The Big Lebowski with a dash of Fellini Satyricon — “and I love Riley Keough, but Andrew Garfield is so flaccid and without any charisma or sexuality, and this movie really needs that. There are some great fun sequences and it certainly looks great, but all in all it just feels silly with a donut hole in the lead role.”

I’m making a point of catching Jim Cummings‘ Thunder Road, a father-daughter drama that was well received during South by Southwest 2018 and is screening on Saturday evening under the ACID Cannes program.

A fair amount of make-up sleep yesterday (two-plus hours on the Paris-to-Cannes train, close to three at the Cannes apartment) has resulted in another middle-of-the-night wakeup…yes! There’s nothing like the reassuring feeling of being loved and caressed by Almighty God as you lie stone-cold awake at 2:45 in the morning, contemplating your fate. I look outside at the pitch-black nothingness and feel the chill air sink into my bones. It’s too early even for the crying seagulls, but I can hear Ingmar Bergman‘s wee-hour wolves scampering around outside the building below, panting and whimpering as they lick arterial blood off the cobblestones.

Honest-to-God snap from living room window of the Cannes blackness — Tuesday, 5.8, 3:15 am.

In Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (’75), there’s a scene in which the four brute fascists (Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti) are dressed in drag with particularly ornate women’s hats. Pasolini clearly meant this charade to seem grotesque and perverse. Flash forward 43 years to former Olympic figure skater, sports commentator and LGBT activist Johnny Weir dressed in similar fashion at the 2018 Kentucky Derby. Times change, context is everything.

At 5:45 Cannes time an email arrived from High10 Media’s Jimmy Harney:

“Matt Belloni, Editorial Director at The Hollywood Reporter, will be at Cannes Tuesday 5/8 — Saturday 5/12, and is available and willing for any expert interview needs to talk about the festival.”

That’s ungrammatical, isn’t it? Correction: Belloni will be attending the Cannes Film Festival (“in” might work but “at” alludes to Belloni attending a single event). And he can’t be “willing for any expert interview,” etc. The idea, to clear things up, is that Belloni, a seasoned trade journalist who may know a bit more about the festival than, say, myself or Toronto Star critic Peter Howell or Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman or HE’s own Jordan Ruimy…Monsieur Belloni is hereby willing to comment, expound and generally ruminate about this, possibly the most underwhelming Cannes Film Festival in history.

And so, in Harney’s words, “please feel free to reach out for any opportunities you might need Matt’s expertise for.”

Tonight at La Pizza between 7:30 and 9 pm, Hollywood Elsewhere along with Howell, Gleiberman, Ruimy and several other critics will be available for comments, projections and sage thoughts about the 71st Cannes Film Festival.

We may not be able to shed quite as much light or share as much in the way of perception and perspective as Belloni, but we are nonetheless available and “willing for any expert interview needs,” etc.