I’ve decided to blow off John Travolta‘s Propeller One-Way Night Coach, which will screen in Cannes later this week. Pic was directed, written and narrated by Travolta, and features a kid protagonist named Jeff, and is seemingly bland in a brightly colored way. Pic only runs 61 minutes, which isn’t quite feature-length (a commercial film has to run at least 70 minutes) but too long for a short.

Based on Travolta’s same-titled children’s book and based on his own eye-opening experience in the late ’50s or early ’60s. (Travolta was born in ’54.) I’ll catch it down the road…no offense.

“Revolucian” created this mix 17 years ago…Terminator Salvation opened on 5.29.09…Barbra Streisand delivers the coup de grace.

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I slept last night on a couch inside my one-night Airbnb (20 rue de Mimont, just behind the Cannes gare). I’m moving into a semi-permanent abode around 3 pm today. The hilltop Le Suquet pad (12 days, 3000 euros, rue des Freres) is right next to a high-speed highway (Voie Rapide) with cars going “waahhh!” 24/7. A short downhill walk from the hellishly noisy apartment exterior is a quiet 19th Century area with charming, old-world restaurants (a Vietnamese place looks especially inviting) with outdoor seating areas.

And yes, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania speaks like a sane, reasonable regular guy, and listening to a U.S Senator who tries to avoid default political cliche phraseology is very refreshing.

Fetterman is not a reflexive Trump hater, but — this is where I stand adamantly alone, if need be — his failure to condemn the proposed White House ballroom as a vulgar, Mussolini-like monstrosity isn’t just uncool — it’s blind. The ballroom reeks of philistine sensibilities…a coarse, tasteless, disproportionate projection of Mar a Lago
boorishness…zero class, culturally coarse.

I love a line from Catherine Slessor’s 10.23.25 Guardian essay, to wit: “Trump’s engoldening of the Oval Office, described by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as a ‘golden office for the golden age’, has been unflatteringly compared to a professional wrestler’s dressing room.”

>p>

I met and chatted with Ghislaine Maxwell roughly 20 years ago (via Celine Rattray), and knew nothing about her save for the fact that her dad was Robert Maxwell. I’d totally forgotten about this photo.

Every single Cannes screening of Kantemir Balagov’s Adventures of a Weird New Jersey Guy With Warlock Eyes and a Bee–Stung Nose (not the actual title…I just made this up in order to sound irreverent) is “FULL.” Except one, that is, so we’ll see what happens.

Hotshot producer-buyer friendo weighs in:

Originally posted on 2.18.11:

15 years ago I posted an idea for a kind of ’80s Brian DePalma flick that wouldn’t necessarily require DePalma’s guidance. I called it The Sex Detective.

We all know voyeurism is “wrong,” but that it’s also a guilty pleasure. Alfred Hitchcock knew that when he made Rear Window. But TSD isn’t about peering into windows. It would be a little more like The Conversation.

It’s about a matchmaker-slash-shamus whom people go to in order to investigate someone that they’ve spotted in some public place and are enormously attracted to, but with whom they haven’t yet had a conversation, or a chance to strike one up even.

80% of the time someone you think you might want to know or possibly date based on looks or mutual interests or associations (or because he/she might be rich) turns out to be crazy or dull or even repulsive beyond measure, but we only find this out, of course, through the step-by-step dating process, which can eat up weeks or months and lead to all kinds of trouble.

The Samuel Spade-like protagonist of Sex Detective has made a niche business out of investigating prospective romantic partners by looking into more than just their career and family backgrounds but also, as much as possible, their emotional and sexual histories.

At the end of the search he/she provides a decent-sized dossier on the prospective “mark” (i.e., whether they’re known to be especially good in bed or not, or whether they’ve revealed themselves to be persons of character and are not just fair-weather friends when push comes to shove), and then the client can decide to pursue the matter or not.

Do friends not pass along precisely this kind of information to each other when they know (or have heard) something about a person their friend is interested in? So what’s wrong with paying for this info?

If and when the client is still interested after reading up on the prospective partner, the Sex Detective then offers Phase 2 of his/her service. He/she helps the interested party participate in some kind of “chance” meeting in which they can chat with the mark in some relaxed and unthreatening atmosphere, and perhaps, if things go well, really talk to the mark and (who knows?) possibly make the next move.

Everyone has experienced odd moments in which they’ve felt suddenly attracted to some super-hot stranger at a supermarket or a Starbucks or a Nordstrom, but they’ve never struck up a conversation because you can’t just go up to somebody and say “excuse me but I’m feeling this profound chemical attraction to you and blah blah blah.” That never works, and it’s always hard to think up the right clever line that might break the ice and lead to a possibly engaging conversation.

So most people just let it go and they never see that person again and that’s that.

So the Sex Detective, entrepeneur that he/she is, helps facilitate this. Anyone can be approached and engaged. You just have to do it in the right way.

The Sex Detective service may sound a little pervy to hair-trigger femmebot wokeys, yes, but it does save time. Ultimately the client and the mark are left to their own devices. Either they click or they don’t. But by looking into prospective partners through our detective in advance, a client can at least eliminate the wackos and the losers plus save mess and stress, and the “mark” is never the wiser.

The story, of course, is about a male client who hires the Sex Detective to investigate a woman he says he doesn’t know. The client, of course, is interested in finding out about her personal background for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to explore a relationship. And then the Sex Detective, of course, develops a thing for the female stranger himself and steps in and takes her side when the male client makes his dastardly move.

There are all kinds of ways to animate this side of the story, but the film would mainly be about exploring what people are really like and/or really want, and how they behave in order to hide themselves or attain their goals or whatever.

Tell me that’s not at least a Sundance movie, or perhaps an HBO series.

Monday. 6.11, 6:55 am: Have you heard the news? Oslo at 6:30 am does not believe in warm (or even warmish) May air. It’s effing cold outside, as it was last year when I stayed in Oslo overnight. Scarves, layers, unexpected shivers. But the cappuccino is excellent here, inside Oslo’s Gardermoen Lufthavn. The place is called Parken.

It’s very calming and comforting to be in a country that’s basically white, white, whiter-than-Wonderbread. Just as Richard Pryor felt ecstatic upon visiting developed African countries in the ‘70s, I’m feeling a similar kind of kinship and fraternity. I am among my own here. I like the atmosphere of mellow restraint…those laid-back Norwegian vibes. No shrieking or loud obnoxious laughter. No dumpy, coarsely-dressed women waddling around like they do at JFK and Newark airports. So many classy-looking, soft-spoken women with ultra-fair skin and white-blonde hair.

Last year’s Cannes Film Festival saw at least three attempts to limit or flat-out block press-ticket access to high-profile screenings — Spike Lee’s Highest to Lowest, Scarlett Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water.

The idea was to attract the usual Cannes hoopla while restricting possibly mixed or negative press reviews. Online attempts by this accredited pass-holder to reserve press seating were blocked from the get-go.

Kantemir Balagov’s Butterfly Jam, a 2026 Directors Fortnight selection, is the first major film to pull this horseshit since Cannes press reservations began to happen a couple of days ago. I tried reserving a press ticket mere seconds after the window of eligibility flew open on Friday morning (5.8 at 9 am Paris time), only to be told the screening was full or blocked…sorry, homey!

Back and forth between HE and Cannes–attending friendo:

HE message to hotshot Russian producer:

I’ll admit that any film starring Barry “bee-stung nose” Keoghan would give me pause, but I certainly wouldn’t watch the film in question with a pissy attitude. I would give it a fair shot.

Catching The Sheep Detectives yesterday afternoon wasn’t my idea — it was a West Orange Sutton detour. It was the first time I’d watched a theatrical film with her. To what extent did this formulaic, family-friendly Agatha Christie thing win Sutton over? She seemed vaguely distracted but not bored or irritated; ditto myself.

Set in a small, bucolic, storybook English village surrounded by hundreds of acres of hilly grass fields, pic focuses on two communities — the provincial, plodding humans and the timid but secretly English-speaking sheep/rams, one of whom is a regular Miss Marple when it comes to suspecting who’s who and what’s what.

Hugh Jackman is advertised as the lead, but his English shepherd character is basically a red herring. He’s dead (poisoned) before you know it, and the rest of the film is about Succession‘s Nicholas Braun, playing a flatfoot constable, trying to deductively identify the murderer, Hercule Poirot-style.

The sharp-eyed, English-speaking woolies, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart and the loathsome Bella Ramsey, are…well, more soulful and vulnerably human than the humans.

The four-leggers believe that when you die you transform into a big white cloud….a nice idea that isn’t much different than the human notion about growing a pair of white angel wings after your heart ceases to beat. (Will Donald Trump grow a pair when his time comes? Or will a team of brown, growling gremlins surround his ass and take him straight to the molten caverns of hell?)

I personally related to a small “winter lamb”, shunned by the herd because he/she was born during the cold months and not during the politically correct spring season. Before I got going as a movie journalist in the ’80s I was the very essence of a winter lamb. and even today my basic attitude about the spring herd is “you can all go fug yahselves.” I don’t mean every last ewe and ram — I’m cool with the ones who are extra-perceptive or are otherwise possessed by decency and/or compassion.

Barnaby Thompson‘s Maverick: The Epic Adventures of David Lean, a 105-minute doc about the mythical British auteur. will have a special Cannes Classic screening sometime next weekend.

Honestly? I feel a tad more excited over the Lean doc than catching the restored, full-length The Devils, which is the other Cannes Classics headliner. The Lean will deliver pure comfort vibes. I’ve seen Ken Russell‘s 1971 classic too many times, plus I can catch the 114-minute version in theatres next October.

Lean is one of HE’s pantheon directors — certainly topping anyone’s list of the finest British directors of the 20th century, side by side with Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson.

Lean burst into prominence with a distinctive, well-honed stamp from the early to mid ’40s (Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist) to his gloriously and untouchably peak from the mid ’50s to early ’60s (Summertime, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia).

Lean’s artistic instincts softened somewhat with the popular, visually rapturous Dr. Zhivago (’65). He suffered a crisis of confidence in the wake of critical pans aimed at Ryan’s Daughter (’70), attempted this and that, returned to form with A Passage to India (’84) and then spent several years developing an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s “Nostromo” before passing from cancer in 1991.

The more I think about it, the more I’m persuaded that Summertime, altogether, is Lean’s finest, most lyrical film. It was his personal favorite.

To what extent, if any, will Thompson delve into Lean’s somewhat unruly personal life? Creative collaborator Norman Spencer, who passed in ’24, claimed that Lean was a major, Warren Beatty-level hound.

Sight unseen I have a slight beef with Thompson’s doc, and that’s his unfortunate decision to feature director Brady Corbet as an observational talking head. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that the oddball, over-praised Corbet can tell me about Lean…nothing at all.

The copy doesn’t quite have my “true voice”, but it’s a close enough facsimile. Half HE, half grammar by way of a formalist aesthetic. But it’s fine. The piece (roughly 1500 words) has atmosphere, aroma, vague authority…whatever.

A few excerpts…

It’s par for the course for a submitted article to get stepped on and rewritten…no biggie. But this is my favorite paragraph in the whole thang, and it was cut entirely: