“Blood Father is trash, but it does capture what an accomplished and winning actor Mel Gibson can be. Just because he lost his bearings, and his career, doesn’t mean that he lost his talent. Going forward, if all he gets to do is angry-crazy Mel Gibson shtick in boilerplate thrillers like this one, it would be a shame. Blood Father looks like a throwaway, and it is, but the best way to think of it might be as an audition: a way to remind people that Gibson, if given the chance, could juice up a serious movie. At some point, he deserves to be let out of the Hollywood doghouse.” — from Owen Gleiberman’s 5.21 Cannes review.

Response: Even if the 60 year-old Gibson hadn’t torpedoed himself twice, first with those 2006 anti-Semitic rants and then with those screaming racist epithets, he’d still be past his prime today. It’s natural for big-name actors to experience a little mojo loss at this stage. The difference is that Gibson went off a cliff. Twice. Tell me how he can alter the crazy-loon thing. I don’t see how.

Even if some forgiving producer or director was determined to resuscitate his acting career, what could Gibson be cast as? He can’t play romantic smoothies or refined cultivated types, not with those ’06 and ’10 imprints. He can’t be Richard Gere or Tom Hanks or Tommy Lee Jones. I could accept him as Jeff Bridges‘ old Texas Ranger in David Mackenzie‘s Hell or High Water, but he’s still got those negatives to contend with. I suppose Quentin Tarantino could cast him as an ornery grizzled sort (the kind of fellow Kurt Russell played in The Hateful Eight), but Gibson can never again sell the idea that he’s a man of trust, moderation and common sense. That pooch has been screwed and his prime potency period is over anyway.

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A segue is a transitional shift from one thing to another, handled with skill and finesse. But here in Prague’s Old Town (Stare Mesto) the term is spelled Segway, and every Tom, Dick and Doofus is roaming around on these things. I try to ignore the corruption metaphor (which I’ve complained about previously) but every so often I’ll give the Segway kids a dirty look. I love it when they notice this.

Yeah, Segways are “fun” but Stare Mesto (which used to feel like a medieval village with fine restaurants, pizza parlors and bars — now it’s more or less a Disneyland theme park) is a relatively small region so why not enjoy the walk? Good for your heart, your leg muscles, your soul. Typical Croc-wearing stooge: “Because walking on all those cobblestoned streets is a bit of a strain on our feet, plus we’re here to eat and drink and party.” There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between today’s sloth tourists and corpulent Romans groping wenches in an episode of I, Claudius.

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Is it fair to presume that with Justin Lin directing I’m going to hate Star Trek Beyond (Paramount, 7.22)? I think that’s a reasonable expectation. The Fast and Furious aesthetic applied to whooshing around in space and the adventures of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Chekhov and the gang? Uhm…no, thanks. Even with Idris “paycheck” Elba playing the baddie-waddie.

I flew out of Nice this morning around 11:25 am, and arrived at Prague’s Vaclav Havel airport 85 or 90 minutes later. The Prague pad (U Obecniho dvora 793/2) is great but the wifi was completely non-existent. It took two or three hours of texting the Airbnb rental managers to convince them that the fault wasn’t with me but with a bad password. It took another two or three hours to find some kind of solution –a dinky little mobile wifi device that a tech guy bought around dinner hour.  The signal it’s currently generating is laughable. Around 4 pm I went down to a bar next door to use their wifi, but is it was filled with soccer fans watching a game — couldn’t concentrate. It’s just been a shitty day, and for all the trouble I managed to post exactly one piece (i.e., the Salesman review).

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Emad, a 30something Tehran school teacher (Shahab Hosseini), is playing Willy Loman in a stage production of Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman, and his wife Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) is playing Linda, Willy’s wife. An intriguing endeavor but the play, we soon learn, isn’t central to their story. Forced by structural problems to vacate their apartment building, the couple has moved into another place, a bit raggedy but reasonably spacious, that a friend has referred them to. The wrinkle is that it was recently vacated by a prostitute or, as locals describe her, “a woman with many male companions.” But things are otherwise okay. Emad and Rana are happy (they’re thinking about having a child), Emad enjoys his teaching job, the play is selling tickets, etc.

One day while Emad is out and Rana is about to take a shower, the front-door alarm sounds and Rana, presuming it’s Emad, pushes the buzzer. But it’s someone else — a client of the prostitute. We’re not shown what happens next, but Emad returns to signs of a struggle and blood stains on the floor. Rana has been taken to a hospital, he’s told. She’s okay but has suffered a head wound that requires stitches. She’s been assaulted but not raped.

The attack is bad enough, but from Eman’s perspective there’s another problem. Rana, traumatized and emotionally numb, is reluctant to share details about what precisely happened. At first she says she didn’t see her attacker’s face, but later she indicates that she did catch a glimpse. And then Emad finds someone’s cell phone and a set of keys in the apartment, and also a wad of cash. On top of which a pickup truck, apparently belonging to the attacker, is parked outside, and the keys Eman has found fit the door lock and the ignition.

Bit by bit, Eman becomes more and more anxious about Rana’s reluctance to tell the full tale, and he soon develops a notion that she might be harboring a secret of some kind. He doesn’t suspect her of infidelity but something about the attack doesn’t smell right, and he starts scowling and wondering what the fuck. He and Rana decide not to tell the police because there’s a slight stigma of shame that has rubbed off on Rana (Iran’s patriarchal notions about women make Donald Trump sound like Gloria Steinem), but Eman decides he’s going to find the culprit and give him what for.

And yet it’s all bottled up on both sides. Eman and Rana don’t really talk, but they bicker and give each other looks. And Eman continues to seethe. It all finally leads to a confrontation that doesn’t go well. I’m being deliberately vague.

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It’s not the VFX (which are only decent) as much as the fleet, elegant editing that sells this puppy. I would have preferred a roadside conversation between Cary Grant and C3PO before the attack begins. (“Good Lord, that’s odd…that TIE starfighter is buzzing droids where no droids exist!”) Hats off to Vimeo wizard Fabrice Mathieu.

A little more than three years after Steven Spielberg announced an intention to produce a version of Stanley Kubrick‘s Napoleon, HBO has announced it will pool forces with Spielberg to make the historical biopic as a miniseries. Beasts of No Nation and True Detective helmer Cary Fukunaga is in talks to direct the sprawling tale, which I’m guessing will be a four- or six-parter.

Spielberg announced announced his support of the project on or about 3.3.13. Here‘s what I wrote that day:

Kubrick’s Napoleon history is common knowledge. He began work on Napoleon in 1968 just after 2001: A Space Odysssey was finished, and had completed a screenplay draft by July 1969. But MGM, which had agreed to finance, got scared about the film’s earning potential and pulled out.

I’ve read Kubrick’s Napoleon screenplay (the one dated 9.29.69), which I think is the same version contained in “Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made,” which Tashen published in 2011.

A German Kubrick site (which has English translation) concurs about the intensive ’68 to ’69 Napoleon period. Kubrick’s Napoleon history is also summarized in an 11.19.12 Andrew Biswell piece in the Telegraph.

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I stayed at the Hotel Moliere during my first visit to the Cannes Film Festival in ’92. Thanks to Henri Behar for the $100-a-night sublet.

If I was a Cannes jury member I would strongly urge giving a major prize to Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper if only to convey a “fuck you” to the Philistines who booed it at the press screening. To those who’ve disputed my claim that they were booing the ending and not the film itself (which is my personal favorite so far), I can only say that I was there and could feel the current in the room (it was definitely slamming it) and that the crowd was simply protesting Assayas’s decision to not wrap things with a neat bow at the finale.

A smile from the proud owners of what appears to be a 1969 Citroen.

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I spoke this afternoon with renowned Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, whose ethical drama Graduation (a.k.a. Bacalaureat) was universally praised after screening yesterday morning. I called it “a fascinating slow-build drama about ethics, parental love, compromised values and what most of us would call soft corruption.”

I would be surprised if Graduation isn’t awarded by the Cannes jury in some major category, but expectations are often thwarted along these lines.

Graduation director Cristian Mungiu — Friday, 5.20, 2:30 pm.

We discussed the film’s view of things, which is basically how capitulating to soft corruption can seem at first like nothing but that it can slightly weaken your fibre and make you susceptible to harder forms down the road. I mentioned a story I passed along yesterday about my father having persuaded a Rutgers professor to give him a passing grade despite having failed a final exam, which was definitely a soft ethical lapse. Mungiu smiled and said “life is complicated.”

We talked about his two kids, ages 6 and 11, and the mostly older films he’s been showing them. Mungiu feels it’s better to expose them to classic silents at an early age before they become accustomed to today’s noisier, faster fare and lose the patience to absorb the artistry of Buster Keaton.

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I’m crestfallen about Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog — a lurid, blood-splattered genre satire. It’s not that I don’t get the fuck-all, porno-violent attitude. I just don’t understand how or why a good fellow like Schrader would succumb to this kind of gaudy nihilism with such mystifying gusto. He’s taken a 1997 Eddie Bunker crime novel, which I haven’t read but is reputedly grounded in brutal reality, and made a dark, sloppy comedy of excess that only the animals will like and which only Cannes critics will praise with a semi-straight face.

Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe in Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw has called Dog Eat Dog Schrader’s “best work in years…lairy, nasty, chaotic…Willem Dafoe is great.”

Dafoe’s performance as an imbecilic loose cannon named Mad Dog is in fact awful. Awful. Over-acting, desperate, flailing around. As a longtime Dafoe admirer I was embarassed for the guy. C’mon, man!

I’ll admit that Dog Eat Dog hits the amusement button maybe three or four times (Schrader’s dry performance as a crime lord is one of the few elements that satisfy) but mainly it’s a clumsy, splattery, tonally-chaotic wallow. I know it sounds unkind but the words “diarrhea dump” came to mind as I sat in the balcony this morning.

It doesn’t even feel professional half the time, and then at other times it feels relatively sane and well-measured and reflective of how some people process reality and how they actually behave, and then it goes off the rails again. If it hadn’t been directed by Schrader and hadn’t costarred Dafoe and Nicolas Cage it would be a bottom-of-the-barrel market film that nobody would even blink at.

It’s as if the finance guys said to Schrader, “Okay, we know you were enraged about what happened with Dying of the Light so you can have final cut, no problem, but we want a movie that the ‘international audience’ will enjoy. And by that we man the dumbest guys in New Delhi and Beijing and Seoul. We want chaotic fuck-all cynicism times ten. None of that subdued art-house Schrader stuff. We want depravity-plus…your characters blowing heads off, snorting coke, stabbing fat women in the back. And we also want you to totally torpedo what’s left of your exalted reputation. If you’re willing to do this, we’re prepared to sign the check right now.”

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I’m happily surprised about the recently-announced title of Warren Beatty‘s Howard Hughes film — Rules Don’t Apply. I like that it’s vague and anything but on-the-nose, especially given Beatty’s description of the film as a lighthearted dramedy. Rules Don’t Apply is a situational assessment title like Wrong Is Right, Hell Is For Heroes, No Down Payment or Life Stinks. It presumably alludes to a romantic or ethical scenario involving the three main characters (Beatty’s Hughes, Lily Collins‘ Marla Mabrey, Alden Ehrenreich‘s Frank Forbes). The 20th Century Fox release opens on 11.11. If Beatty is smart he’ll take it to Telluride where the odds of a friendly, supportive reception would be high.

It’s easy to get lost in writing, researching and surfing. That’s what I’ve been doing since around 8 pm or thereabouts, to the extent that about 25 minutes ago I looked at my watch and realized I’d missed the 10 pm Salle Bazin screening of Nicholas Winding Refn‘s The Neon Demon. Brilliant. And to think I blew off the 7 pm screening for Laura Poitras‘s respectable but underwhelming Risk. I’m blaming Ryan Werner for this…kidding. It’s my own damn fault.

Favorite Steve Pond review quotes: (a) “Refn’s film brought out the boo birds on Thursday, along with some viewers who couldn’t limit themselves to booing and actually shouted abuse at the screen”; (b) “I’ve seen Cannes films get hostile receptions in the past, but I can’t remember ever hearing a loud ‘fuck it!’ resounding through the Salle Debussy at the end of a film“; (c) “Refn composes every shot for maximum drama, then lingers on them as long as humanly possible. His characters speak so slowly that you could fit entire speeches from Xavier Dolan‘s talky It’s Only the End of the World in the pregnant pauses”; (e) “The whole mess reaches almost sublime levels of utter silliness and questionable taste.”

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