It’s now 11:45 am. I have to leave for JFK at 3 pm or thereabouts. The Delta flight to Paris leaves at 6:02 pm, arrives at 6:46 am Saturday morning.
Today’s distinctive openers are Jon Favreau‘s Chef, Nicholas Stoller‘s Neighbors and Gia Coppola‘s Palo Alto. Favreau’s film is a feel-good concoction, but it’s far and away the most engaging of the three — the liveliest, best-written and most personable. On top of which the food is constantly sensual if not erotic. Yes, the under-subject (leaving aside the road-to-redemption arc of Favreau’s lead character) is social-media humiliation and promotion — an aspect that works as far as it goes (even if it the ease and speed of the film’s up-and-down cyber scenarios seem a little too facile). But it never delivers an uncomfortable moment. In a left-field sort of way Chef reminded me of Fred Zinneman‘s The Sundowners (’60) in that it charmingly ambles along without a lot of difficulty — nothing all that traumatic or devastating happens to anyone, and after a while you start to enjoy this sense of comfort.
Vertice Cine has issued an all-region Bluray of John Huston‘s Moulin Rouge (’52). Which is necessary viewing, I feel, for the subdued, somewhat hazy, rosey-toned color scheme created by Huston and dp Oswald Morris, who passed a few weeks ago. From the Wiki page: “Huston asked Morris to render the color scheme of the film to look ‘as if Toulouse-Lautrec had directed it’…Moulin Rouge was shot in three-strip Technicolor, [but] Huston asked Technicolor for a subdued palette, rather than the sometimes gaudy colors that ‘glorious Technicolor’ was famous for. Technicolor was reportedly reluctant to do this.” Moulin Rouge received seven Academy Award nominations and won two (art direction, costume design), and yet Morris’ cinematography was bypassed.
The Hitfix Cannes guys (Gregory Ellwood, Guy Lodge, Drew McWeeny…wait, Ellwood is attending this year?) have listed and summarized 12 films that are on almost every high-priority list of every Cannes-attending journo-schmourno: Bennett Miller‘s Foxcatcher (the top of my list), Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep (a close second), Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner, Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Homesman, David Cronenberg‘s Maps to the Stars, David Michod‘s The Rover, Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army (co-lensed by HE pally Svetlana Cvetko), Olivier Assayas‘ Clouds of Sils Maria (mopey movie-industry women hanging out in a small Swiss town), Jean-Luc Godard‘s Adieu Au Langage (who outside of Godard-ophiles would be even half-interested in this if not for the 3D photography?), Ryan Gosling‘s “experimental” (read: probably somewhat dicey) Lost River, Asia Argento Incompresa (not on my list, pally) and Atom Egoyan‘s The Captive (nope). And yet they’ve left off Michel Hazanavicius‘s The Search, which could turn out to be one of the more distinctive and penetrating dramas of the lot. (Lodge ran a separate piece about it, but including Incompresa or The Captive at the expense of The Search seems…well, perverse.) And they totally overlooked Abel Ferrara‘s Welcome to New York. The festival (which kicks off five days hence, or four days if you count the annual La Pizza gathering as the kickoff event) still seems to me like the most underwhelming, Cote d’Azur-centric, self-regarding, not-necessarily-trailblazing-in-a-commercial-or-awards-context roster in a long, long time.
Earlier today entertainment reporter, stand-up comedian and advertising exec Bill McCuddy persuaded me to visit Bergdorf Goodman and buy a nice tube of Supersmile toothpaste ($25), which is supposed to be a good whitener. I also popped for a Supersmile toothbrush ($15). I then walked over to the Bergdorf Goodman men’s store just to mosey around. I saw an attractive scarf and asked a salesman for the price. In a normal store a really cool scarf would cost $75 so I figured the BG price would be $225. The salesman looked at the tag, looked me in the eye and told me the price: $725.
In Robert Schenkkan’s stirring but somewhat limiting All The Way, which I saw last night, Bryan Cranston captures the cagey manipulation and animal spirit of Lyndon Baines Johnson without really sounding like him or even adopting the drawly laid-back accent that the 36th President used. But he’s a locomotive, all right — a ball of spit, piss, gravel and fire. All my life I’ve thought of Johnson’s five-year presidency as tragic — the big man who had it all and then lost it all. The play ignores all that in order to focus on LBJ’s more-or-less triumphant phase from November ’63 to November ’64 when he calmed the nation in the wake of JFK’s murder, managed to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and then was elected President by a landslide. Honestly? I felt engaged but not enthralled. Respect and interest start to finish, and delight and amusement from time to time. But I wasn’t emotionally engulfed. And yet it’s an expertly written ensemble piece and a crackling political drama. Good enough, money well spent, not worth going after.
Quentin Tarantino‘s Hateful Eight copyright infringement script-leak lawsuit against Gawker has always seemed primarily emotional in nature. By that I mean entitled and tantrum-y. Now, a week after amending his original complaint, he’s done another spoiled-child mood swing and more or less dropped the lawsuit altogether. What a fucking child, what a wuss…a big, pot-bellied, ego-strutting enfant terrible who’s bored and wants to move on to something else.
In the wake of a new U.S. government climate change study, a 5.6 N.Y. Times article by former Utah governor Jon Huntsman quoted a Pew poll that said 41 percent of Tea Party Republicans believe “that global warming was not happening” and that “another 28 percent said not enough was known.” A related Times article by Megan Thee-Brenan reported that Americans are generally the most denial-prone among all the industrialized nations regarding climate change. At what point should climate-change deniers and disputers stop getting a pass? 10 or 15 years hence if not sooner they’ll be gone from news-channel discussion panels. Their views will be deemed so absurd as to not even merit passing consideration.
The more pernicious and threatening this situation gets, the less radical my green reeducation camps idea will seem. If you don’t want any kind of future for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, fine…let’s just cruise along and do nothing. But there’s really no way to argue against the notion that rural yokels and their Congressional reps are, no exaggeration, the most malicious villains of our time. Public enemies in every conceivable sense of that term. I explained it all in an 8.5.09 piece called “Argument Over Beers.”
It’s close to 20 years ago, man, when Mr. Othello Complex nearly sliced his wife’s head clean off. The DNA and blood trail evidence was pretty close to irrefutable, but the “downtown” jury (including the infamous “Brenda Moron“) found the accused innocent because they wanted to push back at (i.e., balance out) the railroading of African-American perpetrators and defendants for decades and decades by the LAPD. The jury basically said to us and themselves, “We’re horrified at the murder of two innocent people (Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman), but the glove not fitting gives us a way of dodging the truth in the service of addressing something bigger…an issue that matters more to us personally and culturally.”
And the reactions are…?
I’ve forgotten if it’s been previously rumored or half-assedly reported or whatever that Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York, a drama about the financial, political and sexual intrigues of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, will screen during the Cannes Film Festival. In any event it was announced today that a Cote d’Azur screening will happen at a private-level venue (i.e., outside the festival) on Saturday, 5.17. Costars Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset will hobknob with selected press. Wild Bunch is orchestrating the event, handling sales, etc.
