During this afternoon’s Money Monster press conference I asked director Jodie Foster if her film is advancing a Bernie Sanders narrative, which is definitely my opinion as well as that of two journalist pals. She didn’t deny it, but she answered along the lines of “you guys figure it out.” There’s nothing to figure. Money Monster is even more of a Bernie advertisement than was Michael Moore‘s Where To Invade Next?, and that doc had Bernie’s DNA all over it.

Having seen it this morning, I can add that while it’s not a great film, it’s a fairly successful attempt to blend a situation suspense thriller with a leftie high-concept drama, the concept being the usual-usual (i.e., we live in a elite-favoring rigged economy, your average finagling Wall Street sociopath is no better scruples-wise than Tony Montana or Al Capone). 

It’s well cut, well organized, well acted as far as the screenplay allows, etc. As long as you go into it with the knowledge that it’s not an earth-shaking melodrama, you’ll be fine with it. Or, you know, it won’t piss you off.

Before this morning’s Money Monster screening my attitude was “please don’t suck,” and to my slight surprise it turned out not to. I was once again reminded that there’s room in the world for films like this — films that point fingers and cut through the b.s. and try to say something more than just “buy more popcorn.”

I’ve sensed from the get-go that Money Monster is more or less Costa-Gavras‘ Mad City (’97), another hostage drama with a despondent sad sack protagonist (John Travolta) whose path ends in tragedy. It more or less is that. I’m now thinking about streaming Mad City just to see how it plays.

Regarding the press conference video: You know the talent is only seconds away when you see those blue-white strobe flashes reflected on the wall of the entranceway.

Attended 11 am screening of Jodie Foster‘s Money Monster (no time for a review it’s reasonably decent for what it is) and then ran over to the 12:30 pm press luncheon for Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society at Nikki Beach — a gloriously pleasant and relaxing affair attended by Woody, Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, Vittorio Storaro, Blake Lively, Corey Stoll. Ran back for 2pm Money Monster press conference, which lasted about 50 minutes. There’s just enough time to load some Woody luncheon photos before 4:30 Salle Debussy screening of Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake. Don’t even have time to insert captions…sorry.

Elite Cannes press (i.e., those with white or pink-with-yellow-pastille passes) always huddle tightly in the center position prior to a Salle Debussy screening. I don’t know why there’s an urgency to push in but there always is. It gets worse when the Cannes guards start letting this group in. For whatever reason I always go along with it and maintain a close position to the guy in front of me as I gently nudge my way forward. I don’t believe in pushing but once I’m in this thing I don’t exactly believe in letting others go first either. I believe in being calm and polite and cool, but also in getting past the guards sooner rather than later. It’s a very delicate balance. Yesterday I was behind a guy who was erring slightly on the side of not being aggressive enough. I didn’t say anything, of course, but if my thought bubble could be seen it would read “it’s not my idea but we’re in a Darwinian situation here…just steel yourself and nudge your way forward, dude…let’s get this over with.”

I’m not making even a moderate-sized deal out of this, but as I sat in the front row during yesterday’s Cafe Society press conference I was noticing that Kristin Stewart, who exudes something truly luscious in the film, has a noticably smaller head than Woody Allen or costar Blake Lively. The general myth is that most big stars tend to have big heads, but there are always exceptions. Stewart, who’s been in a good career groove since her Cesar-winning performance in Clouds of Sils Maria, is simply more modestly proportioned.

Posted on 4.26.07: “The late Dan Cracchiolo, the hot shot who worked as Joel Silver‘s top guy in the mid to late ’90s and a little beyond, once told me about a conversation he and Silver had about movie-star craniums. He said that Silver told him, “Dan, all big stars have really big heads.” Physically, he meant.

Today’s slate includes an 11 am Money Monster screening (roughly 100 minutes from now) followed by a Cafe Society luncheon (sitdown chats with Woody Allen and cast) at Nikki Beach from 12:30 to 2 pm, or more precisely from 1 to 2 pm as Money Monster ends at 12:40 pm and then I’ll have to hike it all the way down. A little filing time will follow, and then a 4:30 pm screening of Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake.

George Clooney in Jodie Foster’s Money Monster, screening today at 11 am.

Nikki Beach, a restaurant/club on the beach in front of the Carlton Hotel.

Later tonight there’s a private screening of Mean Dreams, a Director’s Fortnight attraction, that I’d like to attend.

A few days ago I mentioned that a friend who saw Money Monster back in Los Angeles “really” liked it, and that it feeds into both the Bernie and Trump narratives. (I wasn’t aware their narratives were synonymous but whatever.) Well, I’ve spoken to another friend who’s seen it, and his view is that it rates a solid two stars out of four. Not bad, he says, but not as good as he wanted it to be.

I respect the scheme and intent of Christi Puiu‘s Sieranevada, which I saw last night at the Salle Debussy, but I felt constantly under-nourished throughout the 173-minute length, and I’m afraid that translates into a no-go. And I’m saying that as a genuine admirer of the Romanian cinema aesthetic — austere, raw behavior as opposed to “acting”, long takes. I wasn’t miserable as I sat there, but there’s no way I’ll sit through it again. No. Fucking. Way.

Sieranevada is about a truckload of sullen, pissed-off behavior and enough indoor cigarette smoking to send an Olympic athlete into intensive care, but there’s too little beef. I heard someone mutter “frustrating” as everyone was shuffling out; the words I had in mind were “opaque” and “somewhat draining.”

Sieranevada is a smart film with a bold approach, but it’s not going to satisfy your boilerplate American arthouse audience, I can tell you. It’s no Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days and it’s no Tuesday, Before Christmas either.

What did I actually get from it? I was reminded how great it can be to not have to deal with a large family. And I learned what a difficult thing it can be to find a parking spot in Bucharest without blocking someone or parking in someone else’s space and getting into a heated, nearly violent argument with the owner.

Basic Sieranevada message (apart from the basic one about families accelerating or intensifying the aging process and draining your soul): Don’t own a car, take public transportation.

Mostly occuring in a too-small, over-stuffed apartment in Budapest, Sieranevada is a real-time capturing of a family’s memorial gathering for a recently deceased uncle. The main character is a burly, graybeard doctor named Lary (Mimi Branescu) and Laura, his shrewish, high-strung wife (Catalina Moga) who doesn’t attend in order to hit the post office before 4 pm and then buy groceries at the local Carrefour.

Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society is an attractively composed period dramedy (a few laughs but hardly a torrent) that plays it mild and steady and familiar. But it’s a fine Woody hit-list thing with a compelling if familiar moral undertow. There’s no way anyone who’s even half-acquainted with the Allen realm is going to be disappointed. Is it a bust-out in the vein of Midnight in Paris? No, but it’ll do until the next one comes along. It’s fine, it’s good — just don’t expect any big surprises.

Set in Los Angeles and New York over a two-year period in the mid ’30s, Cafe Society is a romantic triangle piece mixed with a hard-knocks, get-tough saga. It’s witty more than funny, but it’s really great when the laughs land. How many good laughs does it have? Not more than 20 or 25. I laughed maybe 10 or 12 times but I didn’t mind because it’s not about hah-hah but about fuck-me.

It’s a romance-gone-wrong thing that deals with sadness, moral ambiguity, disappointment. It’s too mired in hurt to be called a light-touch thing, but it does kind of glide along in a way that lets you know nothing awful or grotesque will occur.

It’s the story of Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), a young Jewish guy who comes out to Hollywood in 1936 to ask his hotshot agent uncle (Steve Carell) for a job, and who soon falls in love with Carell’s romantically entangled secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), only to gradually discover that her admitted-to relationship is not with a “journalist”, as she tells Bobby, but with fucking Uncle Phil.

“In short, Luca Guadagnino has made something rare and disconcerting: a genuinely pagan film. It rejoices not just in nudity, male and female, but in the classical notion of figures in a landscape, and of the earth itself demanding frenzied worship. That is why Harry (Ralph Fiennes), having put on a Rolling Stones LP, begins to dance to ‘Emotional Rescue’ and then, clearly fettered by interior space, bursts out onto the rooftop and continues his display under a scorching haze. Who would have thought that an Englishman, of all people, would prove to be such a natural Dionysian?

“A Bigger Splash is fiercely unrelaxing, and impossible to ignore. You emerge from it restive and itchy, as though a movie screen could give you sunburn, and the story defies resolution. Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the youngest of the group, remains the hardest to fathom, and provides a final twist. None of the four could be described as affable. Yet they all seem dangerously alive, in their indolence as in their rutting, and even the speechless Marianne (Tilda Swinton) is able to enunciate, through gasps and gestures, the storm of her body’s needs and her heart’s complaint. The isle is full of noises, and they won’t die down.” — from Anthony Lane‘s recently-posted review of A Bigger Splash.

“To my mind, this embracing of what were unambiguously children’s characters at their mid-20th century inception seems to indicate a retreat from the admittedly overwhelming complexities of modern existence. It looks to me very much like a significant section of the public, having given up on attempting to understand the reality they are actually living in, have instead reasoned that they might at least be able to comprehend the sprawling, meaningless, but at-least-still-finite ‘universes’ presented by DC or Marvel Comics. I would also observe that it is, potentially, culturally catastrophic to have the ephemera of a previous century squatting possessively on the cultural stage and refusing to allow this surely unprecedented era to develop a culture of its own, relevant and sufficient to its times.” — Watchmen author Alan Moore speaking to Slovoboooks’ Pdraig O Méaloid in January 2014 interview.

My first thought was, “This doesn’t seem noisy or urgent or hooky enough.” (I’m sorry but I trust my trailer instincts.) My second thought was that I’ll always be wary of movies titles composed of two cutesy nicknames (Tango and Cash, Minnie and Moskovitz). My third thought was, “Michel Gondry is a respected, brand-name director so why didn’t this film, which opened in France 10 months ago, at least play the festival circuit”? Answer: Certain festivals blew it off. So there you go.

From Peter Debruge’s Variety 7.9.15 review: “If Michel Gondry’s movies were books, they’d come with hand-stitched covers, fold-out pop-ups and a progression of flipbook-style doodles in the bottom corner of every page. With Microbe and Gasoline, the French writer-director has wisely restrained his usual flourishes, allowing the two teenage leads in his relatively calm summer-vacation coming-of-age comedy to assume centerstage, imbuing them with creative agency rather than forcing them to compete with the film’s own style. What emerges is an admittedly small but wonderfully sincere portrait of two adolescent outsiders determined to pave their own way in the world.”

… for tomorrow it all begins. At precisely 10 am, that is, with Woody Allen‘s Cafe Society. La Pizza was loud and packed. The mood leaned toward euphoric. Formidable gathering of journalistic reach and power sitting at just two makeshift banquet tables. Hail fellows well met. The total tab was 670 euros, or roughly $32 euros per person. “Who didn’t throw in?” It began to rain starting around 9:15 pm or so. Weather projections are shifting by the hour, but precipitation-wise things are expected to be moody or spotty over the next four or five days.

(clockwise) National Post‘s Chris Knight, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Village Voice critic Amy Nicholson, Time‘s Stephanie Zacaharek, Talk Cinema‘s Harlan Jacobson (all but obscured by shadows, not my fault), Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Eugene Hernandez, MacLean‘s Brian Johnson (red sweater).

Indiewire film editor Eric Kohn, senior Indiewire editor/columnist Anne Thompson.

Snapped by Svetlana Cvetko.

(clockwise) The Guardian‘s Nigel M. Smith, Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, New York‘s Jada Yuan, Voxdotcom’s Gregory Ellwood (green T-shirt), unknown (apologies), Cinetic’s Ryan Werner.

(l. to r.) Editor/producer David Scott Smith, dp Svetlana Cvetko (Red Army, Inside Job), friendly but unnamed p.r. associate of Ryan Werner, amiable guy known not to me by sight but quite possibly via Twitter or byline.

(l to. r.) Cvetko, Werner p.r. associate, L.A. Times critic Justin Chang, amiable guy.