I can’t understand how anyone who attended yesterday morning’s Cannes Film Festival screening of Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth could emerge singing its praises. You could call it a tolerable adaptation of William Shakespeare‘s classic tragedy if you want. I didn’t hate it and might have half-liked it if I could hear it…but I couldn’t. Partly because of the mix but mainly due to the Grand Lumiere’s indisputably atrocious sound system (way too much bass and echo, not enough middle). I couldn’t hear a good 80% to 90% of the dialogue, and anyone who was there and claims to have heard all or most of it is a flat-out liar. For me it was basically about reading the French subtitles plus catching an occasional verb or noun. If you can’t hear the Shakespeare then why watch it? To savor the smoke and the chill and the dampness, the treeless typography, the ash-smeared faces and gooey blood drippings and Michael Fassbender‘s dirty fingernails?

The emphasis, no question, is on blood, venality, gray skies, gunk, grime, authentic Scottish locations and general grimness — the basic Game of Thrones-meets-300 elements that, for me, always result in two reactions: (a) “This again?” and (b) “Let me outta here.”

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I have this sense that the two Sharknado films ignited what I’m calling the third phase of destructo-porn — disaster as distantly-contemplated deadpan humor. Urban wreckage has become ubiquitous in big-budget FX films over the last decade. Pretty much every superhero film has left major areas of great American cities in rubble. So straight-ahead destructo porn had to come up with a new approach or theme, and ironic laughter might be it. Yes, hipper audiences have been chuckling since the original ’70s cycle of disaster films (a decade’s worth from 1970’s Airport to ’80’s When Time Ran Out) but the films nonetheless pushed a sober-minded apocalypse metaphor about…you tell me, civilization falling from grace? Then came the Roland Emmerich destructo-porn cycle (1996’s Independence Day, Mimi Leder‘s Deep Impact, ’04’s The Day After Tomorrow and ’09’s 2012) that was basically about improved FX blended with scary climate-change scenarios (“This is what’s coming, people, if we don’t do something!”). The post-Sharknado cycle assumes a general fuck-it attitude out there, fueled by general cynicism about the willingness of governments to do anything to stem trends that will hasten the planet’s actual destruction. Above and beyond the cynicism that would kick in anyway, I mean, with Dwayne Johnson in a starring role.

I’m not saying it matters a great deal, but I can’t catch a Tomorrowland break to save my life. I left the country too early to catch domestic press screenings, and then no English-language versions were playing in Cannes when it opened four days ago, and only Czech-dubbed versions are currently playing in Prague. The other night a critic friend told me not to worry, that it wasn’t worth my concern. The Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes ratings are at 60% and 50%, respectively. And the Sunday consensus among HE regulars, if one exists, is…?

Barbara Stanwyck‘s pre-code roles are interesting in a socially nervy context (she often played sexually brazen tough cookies who didn’t let guys push her around) but her flush period was between ’37 and ’44 — an era that began with Stella Dallas (’37) and ended with Double Indemnity (’44) but peaked, really, in ’41 when she was her crisp and feisty best in The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe and Ball of Fire. Stanny lost me when she cut her hair shorter (somewhere around 1948’s Sorry, Wrong Number) and began to play tough butch-boss types, especially in westerns like Alan Dwan‘s Cattle Queen of Montana and Samuel Fuller‘s Forty Guns (which pops on Bluray on 6.22.15 via Masters of Cinema). With a Brooklyn accent! On top of which Stanwyck was a right-winger who admired Ayn Rand and supported HUAC witch-hunting.

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I’ve never been all that nuts about Jules Dassin‘s Night and the City (’50), although it’s certainly a sturdy, highly respectable noir with a great Richard Widmark performance as the born-to-lose Harry Fabian. But Owen Smith‘s jacket cover for the forthcoming Criterion Bluray/DVD (8.4) has totally won me over. Smith’s painting style looks like something from a pulp ’40s novel about boxing, or is perhaps meant to recall George Bellows‘ “Stag at Sharkey’s,” a legendary 1909 painting of boxers slamming it hard. (Smith and Bellows’ painting styles aren’t “alike” but are similar enough.) I seem to recall Bellows’ painting being used in some way to promote Mark Robson‘s The Harder They Fall (’56), but I can’t find any online evidence of that.

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Good on Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach for urging everyone to contribute to the Indiegogo campaign to finish the editing of Orson Welles‘ The Other Side of the Wind. I mentioned a couple of days ago that the campaign isn’t doing too well as we speak, and one reason, I suspect, is that people who ought to be throwing in some money haven’t done so. Not just directors and producers but journos on my level. While alive Welles never had any trouble taking meetings or eliciting lip service, but he always had trouble raising money for film projects — and the exact same pattern persists today. I was surprised when a film critic friend told me the other night that he has doubts as to whether the film that Welles had in mind can be reconstituted. There are also private concerns that the $2 million that producer Filip Jan Rymsza is looking to raise may be somewhat inflated, or, put more positively, that estimated editing costs could be significantly reduced with certain belt-tightening measures.

In my 5.21 post about the just-concluded 68th Cannes Film Festival being one of the weakest in recent memory, I forgot to menton or more precisely re-mention my immense satisfaction with (a) Kent Jones‘ Hitchcock/Truffaut, which press-screened twice during the festival but which I’d seen in Paris on Monday, 5.11, and reviewed the next day; (b) Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans, which I was very pleasantly surprised by when I caught a Salle Bunuel showing about halfway through the festival; and (c) Pablo Larrain‘s The Club, which I respected thematically and admired from a craft perspective but didn’t much care for otherwise — too grim and gray and claustrophobic. The big awards ceremony happens tomorrow night — Sunday, 5.24. Like I’ve been saying all along, it’s gotta be Son of Saul and Carol in this or that respect (probably Cate Blanchett‘s performance, or better yet hers and Rooney Mara‘s together) and I don’t know who or what else.

Saturday morning began with an 8:30 am screening of Justin Kurzel‘s passable but mostly underwhelming Macbeth, a gritty, gunky, Game of Thrones-like adaptation of William Shakespeare‘s classic tragedy with Michael Fassbender as the Thane of Cawdor and Marion Cotillard as the original scheming, ambitious, high-maintenance wife who causes all the grief. (Review in an hour or two.) I tapped out some thoughts but had to catch a 12:30 pm Nice Airport bus, and then the wifi sucked at the airport and the flight left at 3:15 pm. Touched down, arrived at Prague Airb&b pad just before 6 pm. Got some groceries, unloaded, shot a video tour, made the mistake of lying down, woke up three hours later.

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We get it, we get it. Johnny Depp has reanimated the life form known as Whitey Bulger in a way that seriously challenges Jack Nicholson‘s version.  He’s really gone to the well (or so these performance excerpts seem to “say”) and will almost certainly result in a Best Actor nomination. Maybe. Mostly because of the transformational thing — the voice, the accent, the hair, the Alaskan husky eyes. And because the film seems amusing as well as melodramatic in the same way The Departed was. Maybe again. Good trailer cutting in any event. Scott Cooper‘s Black Mass opens a little less than four months hence — 9.18.15. First long-lead screenings in …July?

Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul was discussed with no small amount of passion during a Film Comment roundtable discussion (posted on 5.22) about the 68th Cannes Film Festival. The speakers in this excerpt are Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy, Film Comment contributor Jonathan Romney, Profil critic Stefan Grissemann and Spietati‘s Marco Grosoli. The discussion was moderated by Film Comment editor Gavin Smith.

Geza Röhrig (l.) in Laszlo Nemes’s Son of Saul.

McCarthy: “The one film that I would speak for that just knocked me out way more than any other was Son of Saul.”

Romney: “Yeah, absolutely.”

McCarthy: “I think it’s an extraordinary film, one of the most amazing opening shots I’ve ever seen that completely establishes the perspective from which you’re going to experience these events, which, in a way, I think is the most appropriate and convincing way of showing Holocaust-related material I’ve ever seen in any fiction film. In other words, the perspective—you know what’s going on outside the frame or out of focus in the back of the frame, the character doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want to think about it, you don’t actually see everything that’s happening but you know what’s happening. And I think that was sustained in an extraordinary way all through the film. It’s the one film that just stays in my mind in a way that I could say it was worth coming here to see. I felt like everything else that I’ve liked — Mad Max, Carol and Inside Out — you know, they’ve already opened or they’re going to open very soon, and somehow the sense of discovery at Cannes hasn’t been there for me this year, the one exception being Saul.”

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I’m flying out of Nice Airport tomorrow afternoon after catching (and later filing about) Justin Kurzel‘s Macbeth, which screens at 8:30 am. I’m thinking it can’t hurt to repost a 2013 nostalgia piece about one of my most glorious Cannes Film Festival experiences, which happened 15 years ago: “I once had a glorious two-wheeled Steve McQueen adventure during the Cannes Film Festival. On a scooter, I mean. Which some would say automatically disqualifies it as a McQueen-type deal. This is how Elvis Mitchell (at the time the chief N.Y. Times critic) responded when I told him about it later that night. ‘No, no…you don’t get it,’ I replied. “I’m not saying I did the Steve McQueen motorcycle thing by classic Great Escape standards. I was buzzing around winding curves and taking in the scenic grandeur and kinda feeling like McQueen…okay? Because I was playing Elmer Bernstein‘s score in my head. It was rapture.”

“I rented a decent-sized scooter around 10 am that morning. (It was a Sunday.) I drove into the hills above St. Paul de Vence and headed east, tooling along serpentine roads in the high craggy hills above Cannes, Juan les Pins, Antibes and Nice. I went from village to village, stopping for photos or just to stop and stare. I had lunch in St. Paul and ordered a steaming lobster bisque with a submerged folded white tortilla filled with lobster meat. I visited a tiny little village that I forget the name of but which you can see for a few seconds in in To Catch A Thief. Then I made my way down to the coast west of Nice and headed back to Cannes, tooling along the beach roads, stopping now and then to check out the babes. I returned the bike around 6 or 7 pm.

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Yesterday the Grantland channel posted a spirited discussion between Grantland’s Bill Simmons, Wesley Morris and Chris Connelly about which summer movies will be the box-office champs on their respective weekends. But the video must have been shot at least a week earlier because they debate whether Pitch Perfect 2 or Mad Max: Fury Road (i.e., last weekend’s face-off) will come out on top. The talk is pleasant enough until the very end when Connelly sticks his fat foot in his mouth by joking about whether audiences will have any interest in “John Cusack as Brian Wilson” — i.e., a reference to Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy (Roadside, 6.5), which is one of the best rock-music biopics ever made (82% Rotten Tomatoes so far, 83% Metacritic) and the source of one of Hollywood Elsewhere’s biggest praise spewings in recent months.

Connelly then asks Morris for a reaction to “Cusack as Wilson” and Morris offers one of those blank expressions that aren’t really blank as much as “uhhm, are you serious…you’re asking me this?…nope.”

I wrote the following to Morris just now: “I was watching your recently-posted box-office predictions video with Simmons and Connelly (dated 5.21) and then near the very end Connelly takes a BIG THOUGHTLESS DUMP on one of the most engaging and sensitive movies of the year, Love & Mercy, which he refers to as “John Cusack as Brian Wilson.” And then you chime in with your dismissive bullshit two-cent expression. Nice going, guys. Cusack and Paul Dano both play Wilson, as you know, and the movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, is really moving and quite exceptional in the annals of rock-star biopics. BBC.com’s Owen Gleiberman called it “miraculous” in his Toronto Film Festival review. Your bizarrely dismissive TIFF review notwithstanding, Dano and Cusack nail their respective Wilsons (young and mid 40ish) with wide-open emotionality and extraordinary finesse.

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