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
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.
There’s no better gelato joint in any city or country. It’s so good that I was scared I was hurting myself by visiting so often. Time and again I’d tell myself “no, don’t go in…show some discipline.” I think I had a mid-sized cup every other day. I actually avoided it for a couple of two-day stretches, in fact. (4 Rue Felix Faure, 06400 Cannes.)
There’s a chance that Lee Chang-dong‘s Burning will wind up with a major prize by the end of tonight’s Cannes Film Festival award ceremony. I was told by two or three colleagues that I really need to see it, but I couldn’t make it happen and do the thing that I feel I need to do in my own way. I should apologize for missing it, but every year I always manage to miss a significant Cannes film so why not just own that? I’ll get to Burning sometime in the fall.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthycalledBurning “a beautifully crafted film loaded with glancing insights and observations into an understated triangular relationship, one rife with subtle perceptions about class privilege, reverberating family legacies, creative confidence, self-invention, sexual jealousy, justice and revenge.”
Oh Jung-mi and Lee Chang-dong’s screenplay is based on “Barn Burning“, a 1992 New Yorker short story by Haruki Murakami (with acknowledgments to William Faulkner).
Bill Maher on the royal wedding between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, which is happening as we speak: “Enjoy the hell out of it tomorrow. Will you watch? Of course you will. A B-list actress marries a man who will never be king” — Harry is sixth in the line of succession to the British throne — “in a country that doesn’t even matter.”
“The wedding will be a celebration of an exceptionally lame fantasy that tens of millions of under-educated, Sex and the City-worshipping, Star magazine-reading women the world over hold extremely dear, which is that they might one day luck into marrying an exceptionally rich guy from a rich and powerful family and live a life of fabulous wealth and, yes, workhorse duty for the rest of their lives. And have kids who will enjoy the same luxuries and get to to do the same thing as adults-with-their-own-kids when they come of age.”
I’ve known a meth-head or two in my time. Their churning brains and emotional extremes…truly one of the worst realms ever imagined or created. Run in the opposite direction. Obviously a showy role for Timothee Chalamet, but he’s such a gifted actor so it all balances out. Directed by Felix Van Groeningen, re-written by Luke Davies. Steve Carell, Amy Ryan, Maura Tierney, Timothy Hutton, Amy Forsyth, Ricky Low, Kaitlyn Dever. Produced by Brad Pitt‘s Plan B Entertainment. Amazon will release Beautiful Boy on 10.12.
A half-hour ago I slipped out of a still-running Salle Debussy screening of Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s The Wild Pear Tree. It runs 188 minutes, and I made it to the two-hour mark. I’ve been a Ceylan fan (Climates, Three Monkeys, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep) for years, but this time he lost me. As in “forget it, life is short, this isn’t happening,” etc.
I’ll get around to seeing the final hour later this year, but I knew The Wild Pear Tree was a no-go within the first half-hour.
Set in a mid-size Turkish city (Yenice), it’s a John Osbourne-ish, angry-young-man thing about despair, bitterness, insecurity and festering resentments. The protagonist is Sinan, a would-be writer (Aydın Doğu Demirkol) with an attitude problem. Pissed at his father, dismissive of his friends and the community, a bit arrogant, undisciplined. You can sense early on that he’s his own worst enemy.
I’ve just shared the following with a journalist friend: “The main character, the unshaven and hunched-over Sinan, was just insufferable. In denial, judgmental, dismissive of community locals, a guy with an attitude, indecisive, sullen. Two hours with that guy was more than enough.
“Nothing really happened in the first two hours. No inciting incident, nothing sought or feared except a life of tedium, nothing at stake, no story tension at all, no bad decision or any decisions of any kind…it was just idling in neutral.
“When I saw the body lying near the tree, I thought ‘aah, a suicide or a murder or a death from old age….but at least it’s something!’ It turned out to be none of these.
“If Sinan had only tried to re-ignite things with the pretty ex-girlfriend (the one who bummed a cigarette and was bit him on the lip when they kissed). She was cool, different, contrarian. But of course he didn’t pursue her. Why would he? That would be too interesting.
Earlier this week Emilia Clarke came to Cannes to promote her auto-pilot role (Qi’ra, adventurous love interest of Alden Ehrenreich) in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Anyone would have done the same thing in her shoes. Smart move, paycheck payoff, franchise fame, blah blah.
But it still feels ironic that Clarke went to so much promotional effort over a role and a performance that is overwhelmingly flat and lacking in intrigue when she gave a much, much better performance and in support of a far richer and better-written character in Phillip Noyce‘s Above Suspicion, a brilliant drug-dealing drama that I saw and praised last summer.
Suspicion is a fact-based, late-’80s drama about Susan Smith (Clarke), a drug-addicted Eastern Kentucky mom who lunged at an affair with a married FBI guy named Mark Putnam (Jack Huston) as a possible means of escape from her dead-end existence, but she played her hand too hard and wound up dead in the woods.
“Clarke did good,” I wrote. “Her emotionally poignant performance as Smith proves that she can operate above and beyond the realm of Tits and Dragons, and with scrappy conviction to spare. Tart, pushy, believably pugnacious.
“Clarke is English-born and raised but you’d never know it. Her Susan is the Real McCoy in a trailer-trash way, but she brings heart to the game. In other words she’s affecting, which is to say believably scared about how her life has turned out. What Clarke delivers, trust me, is a lot more than just the usual collection of redneck mannerisms.”
Earlier today I finally saw Gaspar Noe‘s Climax. It’s basically two movies, both running about 45 minutes, both scored to relentlessly pounding EDM and both about dancing bodies going to extremes — agile, mad, writhing, flailing around in dark places. And neither, I have to say, amounts to much.
The first half is “wheee!…lovin’ it!” and the second half is about “waagghhh, I’m gonna die!” But they’re both kind of shallow. Energetic, orgiastic, dullish. No dimensionality.
The first half, once it gets going after a 10- or 12-minute long video interview sequence, is far better. Climax is suddenly a wild, breathless, crazy-pump tribal dance flick — three (or four?) longish Steadicam shots of 20something dancers (Sofia Boutella is the only one I recognized), auditioning for a tour of some kind inside a modest-sized dance hall painted strawberry red (which half reminds you of the reddish gym-sized dance hall in Robert Wise‘s West Side Story), going gloriously nuts, letting loose and kicking out.
You could almost describe it as the first-act audition sequence from All That Jazz minus the grace and the dance-school training but set to EDM and with all kinds of push-push improv dancing, sweaty and hot and bursting with crazy legs and arms whirling with helicopter blades. None of it guided by a specific dance style, much less a theme or a structure of any kind, but it’s pleasing to just sink into the tribal throb and just, you know, go with it. Shallow but cool in a frenzied sort of way.
And then comes the second half, which is about the dancers reacting badly and in some cases horrifically to some LSD-spiked sangria.
The problem with this portion is that LSD is presented as some kind of evil-trigger drug, as a loosener of civilized behavior and a portal to hostility. It’s predatory, of course, to slip LSD into anyone’s drink without them knowing, and yes, it’s likely that most people, young or not, would react fearfully and perhaps even with panic. I get it.
But deep down LSD is not some kind of vicious-agitator substance. It’s a Godhead drug, and it struck me as unbelievable that each and every dancer goes a little bit nuts here. Nobody — not a single soul — connects with any form of inner divinity and blisses out. Nobody just stops with the crazy and walks outside barefoot and marvels at the night sky.
In the first half Noe is showing us that these kids are full of ecstasy when they dance, but in the second half he’s saying they haven’t the faintest notion what gentle spirituality is all about when they’re not dancing, and that they have absolutely nothing going on inside that would allow at least two or three of them to cope with the LSD experience in an Aldous Huxley sense.
