“The world has to be reminded that watching a film at home, while scrolling through your phone and checking emails and half-paying attention, is just not the way, although some tech companies would like us to think so.

“Watching a film with others in a movie theater is one of the great communal experiences. We share laughter, sorrow, anger, fear and hopefully have a catharsis with our friends and strangers.

“So I say the future of cinema is where it started: in a movie theater.” — from Sean Baker‘s 5.25 acceptance speech after winning the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or for Anora.

It’s always a little heartbreaking when a special film connects big-time in Cannes, as Payal Kapadia‘s All We Imagine As Light did last week, and then opens in the U.S. to a certain lack of enthusiasm if not shrugs.

Please don’t let this happen to Kapadia’s film. She’s more than just a confident, first-rate filmmaker, but a master of uncanny simplicity, possessed of an Antonioni-like focus — in my view she’s part of that stellar crew that includes Agnes Varda, Jane Campion, Jennifer Kent, Celine Sciamma, etc.

Accomplished Indian social realism is such a rare thing, plus All We Imagine As Light isn’t the least bit anger- or revenge-driven — it couldn’t be farther from the girlboss mindset. Janus Films and Sideshow have the North American rights…here’s hoping it all works out.

I woke up this morning around 3 am…naturally, having operated by a European clock for the last two weeks. Come daybreak I couldn’t do much except sit around and chat with Jett, Cait and Sutton and, you know, do grandfather stuff. And then I crashed for a couple of hours. All to say this is more of a recovery than a filing day.

But I’ll have at least three topics to wade into when I return to Connecticut — watching the original King Kong with 2 and 1/2 year-old Sutton, re-watching the original Ant Man and a rehash of the whole Bernardo Bertolucci-Maria Schneider Last Tango in Paris thing, thanks to Jessica Palud‘s Being Maria, an out-of-competition Cannes film that I didn’t get to but have read about. From what I’ve gathered and have personally been told, it distorts big-time.

NYC transit system to weary traveller upon his return from France:

Welcome back, Chuck, and now the ordeal begins.

Nine and a half hours from Nice Airport take-off at 2 pm (or 8 am by a Manhattan clock) to your JFK 5:30 pm touchdown, you say?

Followed by 170 drag-ass minutes (customs, luggage retrieval, endless walking, Air Train, missing the Howard Beach A train by seconds), topped off by your A train’s sluggish arrival at Penn Station at 8:20 pm, thereby causing you to miss your 8:11 pm Jersey Transit train to West Orange.

I had awoken on Saturday morning at the NYC equivalent of 12:30 am.

London and Nice-area mass transit systems are faster, smoother, more comfortable and less arduous, you say? They actually have escalators everywhere, unlike NYC?

I began my Cannes-to-Nice bus voyage (free voucher supplied by Cannes Film Festival staff) at the NYC time zone equivalent of 4:30 am and finally walked through Jett’s door in West Orange last night at roughly 9:15 pm or 3:15 am Cannes time, or nearly 23 hours later.

What do you do, whine for a living? Are you a baby, some kind of chronic complainer? Are you a man or a mouse? Nine and a half hours of flying plus 14 hours of ground transport and waiting on both ends…par for the course.

…that comes over you or creeps in…after flying nine hours from Nice and then you finally touch down at JFK…I shall be released! Actually not so fast because there’s no available gate so your Delta 767 sits on the tarmac for 35, 40 minutes…waiting, waiting…trying to suppress anger. Really nice.

…that a super-famous person was portrayed by an actor who resembled him/her this closely?

Nobody knows how good Waltzing With Brando will be, but even if it’s only so-so Billy Zane will have landed his catchiest, most attention-getting role ever. Zane hasn’t been on a hot streak since his mid ‘90s one-two punch — The Phantom (‘96) and Titanic (‘97). Everyone loves a good comeback.

…are actually making sense or at least aren’t striking me as wildly off the mark.

Except, that is, for Jesse Plemons being handed the Best Actor trophy for playing three muted, hung-up, blank-eyed zombies in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. This, to me, is a huge WHAT??

I’m especially pleased that one of my biggest faves, Halfdan Ullmann Tondel‘s Armand, has won the Camera d’Or.

I’d much rather listen to Deirdre’s vocal-free Beatles tracks than think about the dreaded Paul Mescal playing one of the lads in Sam Mendes’ planned quartet of Beatles films. I’m sorry but Jordan Ruimy’s 5.24 post sent me into a black pit.

Okay, I’ve popped for Delta’s onboard wifi…we’re now over the Atlantic (southwest of Keflavik) and the signal is surprisingly strong.

I’m only just starting to monitor ticket-buyer reactions to George Miller’s Furiosa (5.24) and the negatives seem higher than I expected. Many agree with my viewpoint. I called it a visually handsome but unimpressive revenge saga — shallow, overlong — in my 5.16 review.

…are going to upset me, at least to some extent. They always do. I’ll be among the last to read about the winners, as my Nice-to-JFK flight (departing 35 minutes hence) doesn’t land until 5something Manhattan time or 11sonething in Cannes

From “The Power of the Kennedy Look,” a 5.21.24 N.Y. Times piece by Vanessa Friedman:

“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most attention-getting independent candidate for president since Ross Perot, may not have the poll numbers to end up on the debate stage next month. But he increasingly has something else: a reputation as the electoral ‘X factor.’

“In an election fought partly through the images that inundate social media and pit archetype against archetype — Donald J. Trump, the 1980s red-tie-wearing sultan of reality TV, versus President Biden, the aviator-clad deal maker of D.C. — Mr. Kennedy offers a Rorschach test of a different kind. At least stylistically speaking.

“His look — skinny rep ties, button-downs, shrugged-on suits, shock of gray hair and weather-beaten tan — not only sets him apart. It also speaks directly to associations with the early 1960s, a golden age of promise that represents ‘vigor, wit, charisma, change, said Sean Wilentz, a professor of American history at Princeton University, and that are buried deep in the American hive mind.”