“Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first [Lord of the Rings] movie, yes, there’s Rivendell and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes — it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like [all] that to the power of 10.” — Viggo Mortensen on Rings/Hobbit maestro Peter Jackson in recently-published Telegraph interview.

I was too freaked about my destroyed iPhone to concentrate on Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York, which screened last night at 9 pm, but Variety‘s Scott Foundas had this reaction: “The career-imploding misadventures of former IMF chief (and presumptive French presidential candidate) Dominique Strauss-Kahn get filtered through the uniquely lurid prism of director Abel Ferrara in Welcome to New York, a bluntly powerful provocation that begins as a kind of tabloid melodrama and gradually evolves into a fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege.

Every critic I’ve read so far loves Damian Szifron‘s Wild Tales — easily the biggest breakout hit thus far of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. I knew it was a home run less than five minutes after it began. It’s safe to say that if you don’t love this film there’s almost certainly something wrong with you. Raves have been posted by Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn, Hitfix.com‘s Drew McWeeny, The Hollywood Reporter‘s David Rooney, Variety‘s Jay Weissberg, etc.

I was waiting in my Salle Debussy seat for the 7 pm screening of Alice Rohrbacker‘s Le Meravaglie when my iPhone slipped off my lap and through the crack at the the rear of the seat. I realized it was missing a minute or two later and started searching around. I got down and reached around on the floor…nothing. Then I sat down again. I noticed my seat wasn’t collapsing all the way to a sitting position, and — genius engineer that I am — it didn’t occur to me that the missing phone, which was lying inside the seat-hinge mechanism, might be the cause. So like an idiot I flopped down on the seat and in so doing crushed my iPhone to death. I reached into the seat crack and pulled out the damaged remains. Lights off, inoperable, glass cracked, ruined Mophie charger — totally destroyed.

Now the same process that I went through in Germany last year begins again — buy a new iPhone for the maximum price in New York, have my son send it over via Fed Ex for God knows how much money…an instant death-hit of $1200 or more.

Until the new phone arrives I’ll just have to make calls on Skype. A pain but not that much of a problem — just expensive. It would be a howling nightmare if all this had happened, say, five or ten years ago. Synching issues are not the problem they used to be. It’s not that bad. Tonight so far this problem has eaten Le Meravaglie and the 9 pm screening of Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York.

As I hear it, Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys — a largely sympathetic, warm-hearted documentary about former Cannon honchos Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus — was made to counterbalance the impact of a forthcoming, less-compassionate doc about the Israeli-born moguls from Mark Hartley called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films. I was therefore expecting an overly fawning portrait from Medalia’s doc, which I saw last night, and it does constitute a charitable view. It looks the other way at loads of lively material that could have been used. (Having worked for Cannon as a press kit writer during ’86 and ’87, I know whereof I speak.) But as obliging portrayals go, The Go-Go Boys is a reasonably accurate and fair-minded one. It feels as if it was made by an intelligent member of Golan or Globus’s inner family — intimate, admiring and even faintly critical from time to time.

The problem is that The Go-Go Boys won’t acknowledge the elephant in the Cannon room. The reason Menahem and Yoram made almost nothing but crap is that they loved the action and the chutzpah in their veins (winning awards, making money, signing big names, the crackling excitement of “being there”), but they never really got it. Their affection for movies was enthusiastic but primitive. An under-educated rug-merchant mentality could never really fit into a business that is also, at heart, a kind of religion. The best filmmakers have always operated on a devotional Catholic principle. I believe that Menahem and Yoram were never devoted enough to the faith and traditions of great, soul-stirring cinema. They never really respected the idea of wearing cinematic monk robes.

I’ve decided to once again blow off Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep, which screens today at the Salle du Soixantieme at 2:30 pm. I’ll get to it one of these days or weeks, but the dispiriting reviews (reactions from Hitfix‘s Guy Lodge and Indiewire‘s Jessica Kiang) that came out of yesterday’s debut showing are enough to persuade me to wait and see it down the road. I will always respect and admire Ceylan, but currently other obligations are opportunities are elbowing his latest aside.

My plan for today is to see the much-buzzed-about Wild Tales at 11:45 am, followed by the 2 pm Salle Debussy screening of Ned Benson‘s The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, the 6:30 pm showing of the 150-minute-long Saint Laurent (perhaps only an hour or 90 minutes’ worth…we’ll see) and then, finally, Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York at 9 pm, which will be followed at 11 pm by some kind of press schmoozer with Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset.

“Ever wonder about Terrence Malick‘s 30-years-in-the-making Voyage of Time? Well, it seems the film will now emerge at the [2014] Cannes market. Wild Bunch and Berlin-based Sophisticated Films are set to present first images from the feature to festival buyers. They’re saying [the film] will hit theaters in a feature-length version in 2016, with a 40-minute version in the IMAX format.” — 5.13.14 post by Indiewire‘s Beth Hanna.

Early last evening Harvey Weinstein & Co. hosted a Majestic Hotel preview of the Weinstein Co.’s 2014 and ’15 slate. St. Vincent costar Naomi Watts and Woman in Gold star Ryan Reynolds said a few words before the product reel was shown. The films included Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (which looks really good), Suite Francaise, The Giver, Macbeth, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them (which screens twice on Saturday), Begin Again and the afore-mentioned St. Vincent (a relationship comedy with Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Naomi Watts and Chris O’Dowd, formerly titled St. Vincent de Van Nuys). Also previewed were The Imitation Game, a cuddly CG bear comedy called Paddington and a forthcoming Antoine Fuqua-directs-Jake Gyllenhaal boxing movie called Southpaw.

I was struck by the absence of any florid Shakespearean verse in the footage for the Michael Fassbender-and-Marion Cotillard Macbeth (due in ’15) so I asked Harvey if the film contains any of that. “It’s cut down,” Harvey said. “[The film is] very conducive to mainstream audiences.” So this new Macbeth doesn’t resemble the 1971 Polanski version? “No, no…it’s somewhere in the middle but it’s very understandable,” Harvey replied. So instead of Fassbender saying “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he’ll just say “tomorrow”? Here’s the mp3 of our brief discussion.

Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army is a soulful humanistic doc about Russian hockey, struggle, destiny, love of country, recent Russian history and the things that matter deep down, which is to say the things that last. In a marginal or tangential sense you could also call Red Army the flip side of Gavin O’Connor‘s Miracle, the 2004 sleeper about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Russians at Lake Placid in 1980. In that film Russia’s Olympic hockey team was depicted as a gang of formidable ogres — here they’re revealed as men struggling with loves and longings like anyone else. The central figure is Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Russian hockey superstar who reigned from the mid ’60s to late ’90s, initially as a Russian player and then with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings. His story is the story of Russia from the bad old Soviet days of the ’70s to the present. The film is crisply shot and tightly cut — it moves right along with efficiency and pizazz, and is augmented by Polsky’s dry sense of humor and a general undercurrent of feeling. Cheers to Polsky, Fetisov, producers Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub and the two dps — Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko.