Sean Baker‘s Anora certainly deserves the highest Cannes Screen Jury rating (3.3), but the aggregate critical scores for Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice (1.7) and Paul Schrader‘s Oh, Canada (1.8) are deranged. Neither of these films has anything to apologize for, and they both pay off. Meanwhile the 12 participating critics are telling us, in effect, that David Cronenberg‘s underwhelming The Shrouds (2.2) and Francis Coppola‘s nutso Megalopolis (2.1) are better? Take the needle out of your arms.
Paolo Sorrentino makes eye-bath films. His lustrous visual swooning began to intensify, I feel, with 2013’s The Great Beauty, and was fully maintained in Youth, Loro and The Hand of God.
But there’s a limit to this kind of spell-weaving, and Sorrentino’s Parthenope, which I saw late last night, is exhibit #1.
Two actresses portray the title role, young Celeste Dalla Porta and the considerably older Stefania Sandrelli. But it’s mainly Della Porta’s show as the film is mostly about a series of guys (Italians of all ages plus Gary Oldman‘s John Cheever) staring longingly and hungrily at her.
I was feeling profoundly bored within 30 minutes, and had decided to bail by the one-hour mark if things didn’t improve. I wound up lasting 90 minutes.
If you’ve ever felt humbled or blown away by a woman’s beauty (we’ve all been there), the way to play it is to not stare at her like she’s a bright red apple and you haven’t eaten in three days. The way to play it is the young Warren Beatty way — one, express more interest in her personality and especially her mind than her looks, and two, behave as if you’re the beautiful one.
In the wake of David Fincher‘s Mank, why did Sorrentino want Oldman to play another soused writer whose literary prowess is quite formidable? After watching Mank I resolved to never again watch Oldman playing a chronic drunk, and now I’ve been through the same damn experience. In my mind there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Oldman’s Cheever and his Herman J. Mankiewicz.
While watching I was thinking of two older films that were about the same kind of thing (i.e., a series of guys worshipping a young irresistible woman and wanting desperately to “lay lady lay” her) — John Schlesinger‘s Darling (’65) and Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Stealing Beauty (’96). Both had underlying currents that were at least moderately interesting, Darling in particular. If there’s any kind of subtextual intrigue in Parthenope, I missed it.
It also struck me that Dalla Porta, who’s around 26, resembles the young Mia Sara (Legend, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).
I bought this yesterday…approved.
From Keith Olbermann’s 5.22 Countdown: “Democratic and Republican pollsters are finding a shocking number of undecideds or Republicans who will not vote for Trump because of his talk of trying to make himself eligible for a third term, or eliminating term limits entirely, or elections entirely.
“The fundamental lesson of January 6th — that he will never leave office voluntarily — has sunk in. And which ever way the cult is trying to position it, these voters are taking it seriously.”
This heartening news comes from a 5.22 Bloomberg story by Joshua Green.
This morning I finally saw Sean Baker’s Anora, which everyone seems to believe is destined to win the Palme d’Or. I’m onboard with this prediction, and it’ll be doubly satisfying (for me at least) if Baker’s film prevents Jacques Audiard’s audacious but flawed (as in totally unbelievable) trans musical Emilia Perez from snatching the big prize.
I’ve been searching high and low for a Cannes film that would take the strut out of Perez, and now…glory hallelujah!
On top of which Anora isn’t the least bit wokey — no militant trans or gay stuff, no #MeToo currents, no POC or progressive castings, no 2024 Academy mandate inclusions for their own sake and in fact blissfully free of that whole pain-in-the-ass checklist mindset.
Baker’s loud, coarse and emotionally forceful film, mostly set in southern Brooklyn (an area close to Coney Island and Little Odessa) with two side journeys to Las Vegas, is entirely about straight white trash, and yet a certain amount of soul, grace and dignity are allowed to emerge at the very end.
It’s basically a social-conflict, family-values story (written as well as directed by Baker) about money, sex, arrogance, rage, outsider sturm und drang and a truly bountiful blend of incredible bullshit, screaming hostility and straight talk.
The first act is exasperating (mostly vulgar behavior by profligate 20something party animals) but once a certain family gets involved…look out.
The Anora battle is between the cynical, sex-working, Russian-descended titular character (Mikey Madison, who played the hysterical, screechy-voiced Susan Atkins in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) who prefers the colloquial “Ani” vs. a demimonde of vulgar, grotesquely wealthy Russians, principally Mark Eydelshteyn’s Ivan, the wasteful-idiot son of a Russian oligarch, and one or two none-too-bright Armenians.
And yet it ends on a note of honest emotional admission and revelation even. There’s actually a decent dude in this film, played by Yuriy Borisov…a Russian fellow who isn’t a ferociously propulsive wolverine…imagine.
Madison is a revelation — she deserves to win the Best Actress prize. Out of the blue, her career has been high-octaned and then some.
Neon is distributing Anora — easily the strongest film they’ve ever gotten their mitts on.
Friendo on “okay” Emilia Perez: “It feels like AI Almodóvar. It checks 17 boxes, but it’s not moving — you don’t swoon. It’s actually rather conservative when it comes to the trans thing. Ten years from now, it’ll play like a trans minstrel show.”
David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds is a brainy, silky, sophisticated, deliberately paced, high-toned “horror” film for smart, well-educated people. I loved hanging with it…hanging in it.
Vincent Cassel, in great physical shape and adorned with a great silver be-bop pompadour haircut, is Karsh, a widower who’s devastated by the passing of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger). As a way of managing his grief he’s invented GraveTech, a cutting-edge technology that enables survivors to keep visual tabs on their loved ones as they rot in their tombs. I’m serious — that’s really what it’s about. Watching a loved one’s body slowly rot and decay. I was sitting there going “uhm…okay” and then it was “wait…really?”
I didn’t love the complex, slow-moving story but I adored the Cronenberg-ness…the handsome stylings, the discreet nudity, the sex, the flush vibe, the upscale Canadian atmosphere, the shadowy mood, the smart dialogue. Cassel, Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders…everyone brings their A-level game. That was enough for me.
I couldn’t get into the 3 pm Grand Lumiere showing of Sean Baker’s film, Anora, on a last-minute basis. I’ll be catching a Costa–Gavras doc in 45 minutes, and then trying again for the Baker at a 7:30 pm Bazin pool press screening. If I can’t get in for the second time I’ll just wait for the 10:30 pm showing of Paolo Sorrentino’s Parthenope at the Debussy.
This is the eighth day and I’m sorry but festival energy is dropping all over. I’m looking at three mostly dead days before I fly back on Saturday. I wish they would screen more competition repeats.
Hollywood Elsewhere to Apprentice screenwriter Gabe Sherman and director Ali Abassi [12:10 mark] :
“Uhm, I just wanted to ask, particularly Gabe and Ali, about the amazing, for me, emotional moment when, having known about Roy Cohn a good part, part of my life…and believing and understanding that he was one of the most reprehensible human beings of the 20th Century, arguably…I just thought the movie does an amazing thing by actually making you feel sorry for him…empathy…when Trump basically screws him over, and I was just wondering if you had sort of tried to build to that emotional moment…whether that was a key strategy on your part.”
From this morning’s review of The Apprentice:
Who reunites with an old girlfriend, falls in love again, gets married, parades around and then two years into the renewed relationship decides that it was all an ill-considered impulse thing? Whoops!
We’ve all made the occasional mistake or acted intemperately with romantic partners, but who decides to get married twice (Las Vegas, Savannah) on a half-assed romantic whim…a whim that doesn’t hold up after a year or two? Who does this?
The cliche about love with a certain person being better “the second time around” is apparently untethered to the reality of human experience.
AMC’s decision to post a trigger warning about Goodfellas was reported last weekend. We all know that the people who push for trigger warnings (“uh-oh, you might be upset or traumatized by something in this film, especially if you’re an ultra-sensitive Zoomer #MeToo-er!”) are unstable fanatics and Stalinists at heart — a blight upon our culture.
Quite often the point of shocking or upsetting moments in certain films, especially those of a higher calibre, is to deliberately shock or alarm the viewer. That’s the (sometimes artistic) intention. It was certainly the intention in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic.
I presume that trigger warnings will be (or have been) attached to showings of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, both of which have scenes in which ugly racial comments are spoken.
Never settle, never surrender. Attack, attack and counter-attack. And no matter how evil or slimey your situation may be, always claim victory and never admit defeat.
These were cherished, deeply-held principles that the late Roy Cohn, one of the most satanic figures of the 20th Century, adhered to during his early ’50s-to-mid ’80s heyday, and they were passed along with interest and relish to the young Donald J. Trump in the ’70s and early ’80s. God help us but Cohn’s lessons of avarice still live in Trump today, right now…fundamental poisons, the devil’s handbook, operational tricks of the trade.
Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice is the well-told story of Cohn and Trump’s master-mentor relationship, and God, it’s so much fun…so alive and entertaining and popping with the wicked pleasures of an evil life or attitude.
The Apprentice, which I saw late yesterday afternoon. saved me from my post-Horizon depression…a terrible black-dog, pit-of-my-stomach feeling that had taken me down, down, down. And then I saw Abassi’s fast, fleet and grainy tabloid dramedy and I was suddenly pulled out of the pit. I was chuckling and even laughing out loud, which I rarely do, and just fucking tickled to death. Thank you, God.
All hail Jeremy Strong‘s magnificent supporting performance as Cohn — he should definitely win the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor prize, the size of the role be damned — as well as Sebastian Stan‘s Trump, a note-perfect capturing of this amiable, malevolent psychopath, who apparently exuded a certain naivete and behaved in a semi-understandable fashion and may have been half-human when he was working in a senior capacity for his father’s real-estate company in the ’70s.
But that didn’t last.
Roy Cohn molded young Trump into the fiend he remains today…Cohn was the father, godfather and inspirational older brother Trump had never known while growing up. Fred Trump, Donald’s real-estate-tycoon dad, goaded him to succeed or at the very least bullshit his way through a tough racket but imparted a flinty, ruthless mentality in the process. Thanks, dad…fuck off.
Abassi’s direction is brash and brilliant, and Gabriel Sherman‘s screenplay (which was apparently cowritten by Jennifer Stahl, according to Wikipedia) is a model of no-bullshit economy — it gets right to the nub of things and never loses focus during the film’s 120-minute running time.
We’ve all been suffering through the plague of two-hour-plus films — the art of crafting an effective 100-to-110-minute narrative is apparently dead. But I would have been happy if The Apprentice had been Lawrence of Arabia. Okay, not that long but a 140- or 150-minute version would have felt like a neck massage, like a quaalude high. Keep it coming, feels so good.
The Apprentice has no distributor as we speak but please, please get this film into theatres as quickly as possible, and don’t wait for the fall — open it in July or certainly no later than August. Because it’s a huge pleasure pill that needs to be seen by as wide of an audience as possible. Very few adult films are this much fun. And if it gets seen quickly and widely enough, it might just save this country from four more years of hell. Maybe. Possibly.
There’s a bizarre passage in Tatiana Siegel‘s 5.20 Variety story about the already-infamous rape scene…the one that the late Ivana Trump shared and then denied in 2015 (obviously under pressure from Donald)…the one in which Donald throws Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova) to the ground during an argument and rapes her like a Cossack. As he’s ravaging her from behind, Trump hisses into Ivana’s ear, “Is that your G-spot…did I find it?”
Remember that Peter Coyote line from Jagged Edge when he describes Jeff Bridges‘ Jack Forrester character as “an ice man”? Well, Forrester had nothing on Trump, particularly when the latter began treating the heavily-closeted Cohn like shit when he began to succumb to AIDS symptoms.
Siegel quotes an “insider” saying that “audiences may find The Apprentice to be an oddly humanizing portrait” of Trump. Excuse me? Young Trump seems like a semi-tolerable fellow at first, but he gradually morphs into a toxic fuckhead…a killer. The truth is that Abassi’s film is an oddly humanizing portrait of Cohn as it invites the audience to share Cohn’s sense of betrayal…you actually feel sorry for this icon of evil when Trump gives him the cold shoulder.
Cohn to Trump at film’s halfway point: “You’ve got a fat ass. You should do something about that.” Strong is wonderful!
And by the way, Siegel reported yesterday that Dan Snyder, a billionaire Trump supporter who’s an investor in The Apprentice, is enraged at the damning portrait of Trump.
Variety excerpt: “Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1 million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious.” Hard to believe anyone could be that clueless, but there it is.
Here’s a nice taste of yesterday’s Apprentice screening.
I’ll be hitting the Apprentice press conference at 11 am, and I may even catch Abassi’s film a second time this evening, just for fun. I also plan to catch Sean Baker‘s Anora at 3 pm today.
