I realized a few minutes ago that I’m either losing or have altogether lost the ability to process life on its own terms, or at the least that a tendency to absorb things from my compulsive columnist perspective is gaining the upper hand. From my bedroom window I was checking out a view of Cannes’ Old Town (i.e., “Le Suquet“) and the radiant blue sky and the rooftops with their century-old clay tiles, bathed in the bright afternoon light. As good as it gets. And then I tapped the windowsill with my left thumb. Yes, I’d just tried to zoom in on the view by tapping my Apple trackpad. Had to laugh.

To me Joachim Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs, an ennui-laden, Euro-style Ordinary People stuffed with the usual suburban, middle-class downer intrigues and featuring one of the most reprehensible teenaged characters in the history of motion pictures, felt contrived and gently infuriating. Too many aspects felt wrong and miscalculated or even hateful, and once the tally reached critical levels I began to sink into my usual exasperation (faint moaning, leaning forward, checking my watch).

“Uh-oh, this isn’t working,” I began saying to myself at around the ten-minute mark. Later on I was saying, “Wow, this really isn’t working.” Later on I was muttering worse things.

Bombs is basically about a father and two sons grappling with the death of their wife/mother, and the dysfunctional behavior that emerges in her absence. Dad, a Long Island-based high-school teacher, is played by aging, overly sensitive, watery-eyed Gabriel Byrne. Son #1, a mild-mannered college prof and mystifyingly irresponsible young dad, is played by Jesse Eisenberg, wearing a bizarre straight-hair wig instead of his usual curlies. Son #2, the above-mentioned demon from Hades, is played by Devin Druid. Isabelle Huppert plays the dead wife/mom — a renowned, N.Y. Times-endorsed war photographer who died some months ago in a local highway accident.

I found the various choices, behaviors and mannerisms of the three males so irritating that my mantra quickly became “I don’t want to know about your dysfunctional response to the death of your wife/mother, get over it…I don’t want to know about your dysfunctional response to the death of your wife/mother, get over it,” etc.

I’m re-reading that hacked Sony email written by Sony marketing exec Michael Pavlic about Aaron Sorkin‘s Steve Jobs script: “It’s brilliant. It’s perfect. There are marketing liabilities. It’s long, it’s claustrophobic, it’s talky, it could be a play, it risks being all one medium close-up, it’s periody…a mediation on Jobs himself. It’s insistent upon itself, it’s relentless. I kept begging for someone to walk outside, for some daylight, for an opening.

“But Sorkin is so brilliant with the structure. Of course, at the film’s end he gives you that break into the parking lot. A convenient door to a different world. Just when Jobs lets up, the script finally breathes for the first time. It’s really spectacular. All obvious stuff but I’m a sucker for layered, thoughtful filmmaking. I believe it will be brilliant. This is the kind of film that makes me thankful for movies, and they’re few and far between these days.”

It’s 9:20 am in Cannes, and I don’t see the final Mad Men episode on my iTunes feed. (It’ll show up sometime today.) I’m therefore in no position to talk, but so far the general reaction seems to be one of mild dismay. Nothing close to Sopranos-level befuddlement but something along the lines of “uhm…that’s it?” Yes, I’ve been watching the series all the way through and I know that Matt Weiner has never been one to whip up a story lather. It’s not in him. But most of us wanted, in the words of Eddie Felson, some kind of “nice clean pocket drop.” Was “Person to Person” that?

From Justin Chang‘s Variety review: “In his Pixar triumphs The Incredibles and Ratatouille, writer-director Brad Bird proved himself not just a wizardly storyteller but also an ardent champion of excellence — of intelligence, creativity and nonconformity — in every arena of human (and rodent) accomplishment. All the more disappointing, then, that the forces of mediocrity have largely prevailed over Tomorrowland, a kid-skewing adventure saga that, for all its initial narrative intrigue and visual splendor, winds up feeling like a hollow, hucksterish Trojan horse of a movie — the shiny product of some smiling yet sinister dimension where save-the-world impulses and Disney mass-branding strategies collide. A sort of Interstellar Jr. in which the fate of humanity hinges on our ability to nurture young hearts and minds, the picture runs heavier on canned inspirationalism than on actual inspiration.”

From Todd McCarthy‘s Hollywood Reporter review: “How many sci-fi/fantasy films of recent years have climaxed with anything other than massive conflict and conflagration? Whatever the number, Tomorrowland is one of the few to place far more emphasis on talk than action, which is what will probably contribute to what, for some, will make for a softer experience than the genre norm. The film’s general coolness and vision of a potentially serene future reminds more of Spike Jonze’s Her than of anything in the Marvel, George Lucas or James Cameron-derived worlds, not to mention other far more violent ones. As thoughtful and sympathetic as the intentions are here, perhaps it all goes back to the point often made about Dante; what do people read and remember, Paradiso, Purgatorio or Inferno?”

In terms of definite default must-sees, the Cannes Film Festival has suddenly turned into a one-movie-per-day event. On Monday, 5.18 (or technically today as it’s now 1:20 am) the essential is Pete Docter‘s Inside Out, screening at 11 am with a 9 pm party. Tuesday, 5.19 is the big day for Denis Villeneuve‘s Sicario, also hosting an evening party. The biggie on Wednesday, 5.20 is Paolo Sorrentino‘s Youth, but I’ll also need to see Brad Bird‘s Tomorrowland as it opens commercially in France that day. The hottie on Thursday, 5.21 is Gaspar Noe‘s Love with Valley of Love, the Guillame Nicoloux film, running a close second. Mark Osborne‘s The Little Prince is the centerpiece film on Friday, 5.22, but I’ve already mentioned my reluctance to come within 100 yards, much less sit down with it. I’ll catch others besides these, of course, but after four intense days (Thursday, 5.14 to Sunday, 5.15) the festival is in downshift mode.

Carol screenwriter Phyllis Nagy has earned a placemark as a strong if not likely candidate for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. The film doesn’t open until December and that’s a long way off, but if spareness and subtlety mean anything…just saying. Nagy (rhymes with “Taj” as in Taj Mahal) is bright, exacting and clear of focus. She also has superb taste in evening wear, as the exquisite non-lapelled, specially-designed suit she was wearing at the Carol after-party proved.

Yesterday afternoon I caught Gabriel Clarke & John McKenna‘s Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans — in part a fascinating time trip but mostly a sad, bittersweet mood piece about failure and a movie star swallowing his own tail. Which I found affecting as hell. Clarke and McKenna have certainly made something that’s heads and shoulders above what you usually get from this kind of inside-Hollywood documentary. Heretofore unshared insight, a lamenting tone, an emotional arc. Plus loads of never-seen-before footage (behind-the-camera stuff, unused outtakes) plus first-hand recollections and audio recordings. A trove.

Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans may seem at first glance like a standard nostalgia piece about the making of McQueen’s 1971 race-car pic, which flopped critically and commercially. (I own the Bluray but I’ve barely watched it — the racing footage is authentic but the movie underwhelms.) Yes, in some ways the doc feels like one of those DVD/Bluray “making of” supplements, but it soon becomes evident that Clarke and McKenna are up to something more ambitious.

What their film is about, in fact, is the deflating of McQueen the ’60s superstar — about the spiritual drainage caused by the argumentative, chaotic shoot during the summer and early fall of ’70, and by McQueen’s stubborn determination to make a classic race-car movie that didn’t resort to the usual Hollywood tropes, and how this creative tunnel-vision led to the rupturing of relationships both personal (his wife Neile) and professional (McQueen’s producing partner Robert Relyea, director John Sturges), and how McQueen was never quite the same zeitgeist-defining hotshot in its wake.

After I posted my Twitter reactions to Carol I did the town a bit. I stopped by the Sea of Trees party at Baoli Beach and spoke to Megan Ellison, Pete Hammond, Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, a couple of others. Walked way down to the eastern tip of the beach and back, maybe a couple of miles. Three films, a press conference and a party tomorrow — Maiwenn‘s Mon Roi at 8:30 am, the Carol salle de presser at 12:30 pm, a 5:30 pm buyer’s screening of Pablo Larrain‘s The Club at the Star Cinemas, Joachium Trier‘s Louder Than Bombs at 7:15, and finally the big Carol soiree at 10 pm, also at Baoli Beach.

A last minute instinct guided me to an 11 am Salle Debussy screening of Ida Panahandeh‘s Nahid, a compelling if slow-moving Iranian family drama, instead of Asif Kapadia‘s two-hour Amy, which screened at the same hour at the Salle Bunuel. I don’t know if I made the “right” decision or not, but I figured I’d either catch Amy tonight at 11:30 pm or on a movie-streaming channel before long while the Iranian film might not be available for some time, Asghar Farhadi‘s long-delayed About Elly being one example.

Sareh Bayat, Pejman Bazeghi in Ida Panahandeh’s Nahid.

I was certainly reminded by Nahid of a frustrating reality in both a real-world and dramatic sense, which is that the cards are heavily stacked against divorced Iranian women looking to win permanent custody of their children due to strict nuptial laws that favor fathers, even if the dad in this case is an off-and-on junkie with a gambling problem. The burden is still on the mother to prove she is morally worthy of raising a child.

This plus a decision by Panahandeh and screenwriting partner Arsalan Amir to more or less snail-pace the story and make their titular lead character, movingly portrayed by Sareh Bayat, a prideful if overly secretive and too-stubborn woman, and you have a film that feels right and rooted but at the same time one that taxes your patience. Mine, at least.

I don’t like it when people ask “are you okay?” or “are you all right?” I always say “I’m fine, thanks” but what I really mean inside is “you’re bothering me.” They’re showing concern, of course, but deep down they’re offering a comment about themselves, i.e., “You look like you’ve been through something unsettling, resulting in a somewhat weakened or inebriated or dishevelled appearance that we find vaguely disturbing so…uhm, how’s your equilibirum?” My silent response: “I’m fine, thanks, or I was until you asked.” I prefer to hear, if anything, “So you’re good?” Those three words translate as “you seem well enough and even though you may be a teeny bit off-balance right now you’re strong enough to deal with it, I’m sure, so….you’re cool, right?”

I especially hate hearing “are you all right?,” partly because this is what the characters in those awful middle-class Irwin Allen disaster movies (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Swarm) always asked each other at regular intervals, and so that’s an unwelcome association. But “are you okay?” rankles equally.

I could go crazy today and jam in four films, but I’m not going to. Well, I might. The wild card is Alice Winocour‘s Maryland, which I might catch tonight at 9:30 if my blood is up. Locked in for sure are Asif Kapadia‘s Amy (as in Winehouse), which screens at 11 am and has a somewhat longer length than usual for a portait-of-a-celebrity doc (127 minutes). A 90-minute break for writing and then, at 4 pm, comes Gabriel Clarke‘s Steve McQueen: The Man and The Mans, which is being hoo-hahed as possibly something more than just the sum of its parts.  It concerns the ordeal of making of Le Mans (’71) and how it didn’t quite work at the end (partly due to director John Sturges quitting early on) and which seemed to break McQueen’s spirit to some extent. And then at 7pm the curtain rises on the big one — Todd Haynes‘ Carol, which may emerge as the festival’s latest power-hitter…or not. And then I’ll go somewhere and write a review. More than enough for a Saturday.