Yesterday morning I blew off the 8:30 am screening of Mike Leigh‘s Another Year in order to catch Shit Year — bad call as it turned out. So I’ll be catching it today at a Salles des Soixantieme make-up screening, although I know not precisely when. The Cannes website does a superb job of keeping the schedule hidden from those who lack the skills of a master web detective.
36 hours ago Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, who’s doing Cannes for the first time, wrote the following: “Cannes smells like coffee, cigarettes and the sea. On days where it’s bright and warm, you are caught with brief glimpses of the white caps in the waves and the reflection of the sun on their surface. Those are the moments you wish you were sipping good rose on someone’s yacht, dressed in flowing white linen and watching the peons mill around on shore.
Wall Street 2 star Shia Lebeouf a couple of days ago.
“What I see mostly are tired, hard-working journalists hunched over their laptops tapping out reviews or stories, and photographers resting their gigantic chunks of lens and plastic near their computer as they upload the many shots they got of the talent — it doesn’t matter to them that much whether it was a movie star or [not].
“The photographers wait wherever the talent will be coming through the door or walking down a corridor — but it is never so frenzied as it is surrounding a high profile movie like Robin Hood or, even more so, Wall Street 2. I suspect the Woody movie will be even more intense. And not just because the Woodman will bring with him a spectacular looking cast but because he’s Woody — a mythic figure.
“You will not find a nicer group of folks than those who work as the staff here.
They are so pleasant and helpful. If they have to tell you something more than that, they just chatter at you in French without asking whether or not you speak the language. And then you stand there, confused until the message is made clear with a pantomime or a drawing. They have not lost patience with any of us yet.
“Last night, I spent a few hours chatting with In Contention‘s Guy Lodge — a charmer, to be sure. After a few drinks with Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells we found our way down to the beach where the public screenings (open to anyone) debuted with From Here to Eternity. It was uncharacteristically cold, however, so we could only stand there for a bit — even with the rose and beer warming our blood it was too much. Montgomery Clift, though. Montgomery Clift.”
Wait, let me guess…Confucious wasn’t just a philosopher but a secret martial-arts master.
Friday, 5.14, 11:05 pm.
Friday, 5.14, 8:10 pm.
The Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips and the L.A. Times‘ Steven Zeitchik “offer their breakdown on the opening of the Cannes Film Festival and the drama that lies ahead, in the first of a series of videos from the south of France,” etc. They were asking me about upload problems late yesterday afternoon at the American Pavillion. I guess they sorted ’em out.
Looking out from the Carlton pier 8:45 pm.– Friday, 5.14, 8:50 pm.
25 year-old Melbourne filmmaker Edward Housden, whom I ran into last night on the Croisette following the Abu Dhabi party. He’s the director of Muscles, a short which has been nominated for the short film Palme d’Or.
What kind of person would want to cruise the seven seas on one of these ghastly behemoths?
Abu Dhabi Film Commission publicist Jonathan Bing (formerly of Variety), taken yesterday afternoon at the Abu Dhabi pavillion.
Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job, which screened early this afternoon, is a highly absorbing, meticulously composed hammer doc about the causes of the ’08 financial meltdown. Most of us have some kind of understanding of the whys and wherefores, but Ferguson lays it all out like a first-class table setting and makes this titanic crime seem extra vivid.
The American public was robbed blind and is still being made to suffer by an arrogant den of thieves, and the enormity of their power-corridor hustle is almost too vast and labrynthian to comprehend. But Ferguson’s doc makes it more comprehensible than in any presentation I’ve seen thus far. And yet as sharp and hard-bullet as it is, Inside Job doesn’t provide any release or crescendo. How could it? The bad guys are still running the show, etc. It mainly made me grind my teeth.
Every Average Joe and tea-bagger needs to see this film at least twice and take notes each time. (Or at least read the press notes.) Will they? Of course not. Inside Job will only play to the educated liberal urbans — the only social class that’s even half-inclined to spend ticket money on documentaries.
Inside Job is brilliant, perceptive, very well organized, necessarily angry or at least confrontational, and narrated by Matt Damon. And great looking — the gleaming, superbly lighted, crystal-clear lensing by Kalyanee Mann and HE pally Svetlana Cvetko is easily the most handsome and lustrous I’ve seen at the festival so far.
The problem is that none of Inside Job feels especially jolting. It is basically content to “get it right” and “tell it better,” which is more than enough for me. But will that be enough for at the attention deficit disorder crowd?
It delivers, in any event, a clear, razor-sharp portrait of a gang of blue-chip ogres and world-class motherfuckers (Summers, Paulson, Greenspan, Geitner, etc.), starting with their initial unleashing during the Reagan-era deregulating and moving through a litany of Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 sign-offs, conflict-of-interest corruptions, revolving-door deals and mutually beneficial handjobs.
Too many billions were available, they all got greedy and created games and schemes in order to line their pockets, and here we are. And Barack Obama hasn’t done jack about restraining this culture since taking office.
But unlike No End in Sight‘s bracing explanations of American cockups in Iraq, there’s not much in Inside job that feels especially new or surprising. It’s really quite wonderful how it explains the most destructive mass robbery in history in such a clean and concise fashion. But I fear that it’s arrived too late. If it had been shown at last year’s Cannes festival, or even at last September’s Toronto festival, it obviously would have felt more vital or timely. And yet it’s very, very good for what it is.
Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger is powered by dark whimsy. Set in London, it’s a mildly amusing, somewhat chilly film with no piercing performances or dramatic highlights even, as if everything and everyone is on a regulator of some kind. And yet the undertone has a steady and persistent misanthropic flavor. And it leaves you with a kind of “uh-huh, okay” feeling at the end.
Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, which screened at 11:30 this morning in Cannes.
It’s not a bust — there’s food for thought and reflection — but it’s not my idea of enlivening material.
The film is about people making terrible or lamentable choices and missing opportunities and hoping for something more or better and struggling with inevitable limitations. In short, it’s about what a sad bunch of clueless, desperate and delusional schmucks we all are.
It therefore has a certain integrity. But it feels middling or, truth be told, minor. It has irony, obviously, but not the delicious Match Point kind. There’s a solemn God’s-eye perspective at work here, but there’s no kick to it. We’re driven by longing and dreams but things don’t always work out. We want what we want but we get what fate doles out. Plop.
I don’t want to go out on a limb, but You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger doesn’t deliver my idea of what most moviegoers are looking for, or are likely to enjoy. I’d have to be goaded into seeing it again. It’s grade-C Woody….sorry.
That means it’s a bit less than Cassandra’s Dream, slightly better than Scoop or Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Anything Else, and in roughly the same realm as Another Woman, September, Shadows and Fog and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Then again (and I say this almost every time I review one of his films) a grade-C Woody is like a B-minus or even a B along the general curve.
For me, Cam Archer‘s Shit Year is a stew of pretentious monochrome murk. It’s one of those narrative-defying, interior landscape art-wanks that younger directors sometimes make in order to get the attention of the art-wank crowd — producers, other directors, art-gallery owners and journalists who delight in embracing difficult fare.
Luke Grimes, Ellen Barkin in Cam Archer’s Shit Year.
It seems to be an attempt to live in the misty, disoriented head of an older retired actress (Ellen Barkin) as she…well, as she does very little. Is having an affair with a good-looking 20something actor (Luke Grimes) of any interest or consequence? Is submitting to some form of new-age bullshit therapy of any interest or consequence? And what about the dead rat she finds outside her cabin? (“I’m not picking that up!”) And what’s with that constant whine of a nearby wood-chipper?
I don’t know. I’m not sure that I care. I’m feeling a bit misty and murky-minded. I guess it’s catching.
The first couple of walk-outs happened about 15 minutes in. People weren’t soon walking out in droves, but they did continue body by body. Some, I noticed, decided to take naps. Myself among them, to be perfectly frank. When I woke up I noticed that Roger Friedman, who’d been sitting across the aisle, had left. So had several others. So I stuck it out for another 15 or 20 minutes, and then I slipped out myself.
This movie needs a friend. It needs a mother. It needs a psychotherapist. It needs a job, or at least (like Barkin’s listless character) a sense of purpose. It needs to rob a bank or maybe get into a foot race through a construction site, or…whatever, take some kind of mood-elevating medication. All I know for sure is that Shit Year is a fizzle and a drizzle.
I’m now sitting in the Grand Lumiere and waiting for Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger to begin. I can’t wait for the new juice.
Cannes journalists have been talking about how jammed Saturday is. The worry obviously isn’t about seeing at least four if not five films today, but finding time to file. Most are going to Mike Leigh‘s Another Year this morning at 8:30 am (45 minutes hence) but I’ll be catching the 9 am Directors Fortnight showing of Cam Archer‘s Shit Year. Then comes Woody Allen‘s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger at 11:30 am, and then Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job at 1:30 pm. I then have a 4pm choice between Gregg Araki‘s Kaboom or a market screening of Taylor Hackford‘s Love Ranch. And then finally Rubber, the crazy killer-tire movie, which screens sometime tonight around 8 or 9 pm.
A guy who spoke to Sean Penn (and vice versa) mentioned to another who told me tonight at the lavish Abu Dhabi party that Penn has seen Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s Biutiful, which screens early Monday morning at the Cannes Film Festival, and that he was melted and creamola-ed and shattered. And that this Spanish-spoken, Barcelona-shot drama is…you know, the absolute total shit. (What do I know? Less than nothing.) And that star Javier Bardem‘s performance is so good it’s on a level of “forget it, hombre!” Are you going to question the reliability of third-hand party chatter?
Well, I guess things don’t look so hot right now for the “let it go because Roman Polanski is an art god” argument, do they? Yes, I’ll admit it — the indications are damning. But why did Charlotte Lewis, an actress who hasn’t worked since the ’90s, wait 28 years to make her statement about RoPo? And is anyone going to claim with a straight face that this wasn’t some kind of slick sleaze maneuver orchestrated by the L.A. district attorney’s office?
Restoration guru Robert Harris, who orchestrated the immaculate and much-respected 1991 restoration of Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus, has sharply criticized Universal Home Video’s soon-to-be-released Bluray of this 1960 epic. Actually, “sharply criticized” doesn’t quite describe it. “Torn it a new one” is closer.
The film that Harris painstakingly restored has been turned “into a sideshow pipsqueak, an ugly and unfortunate bit of home video fodder, which would be far better suited to VHS,” he writes in a 5.12 Home Theatre Forum posting. “I would suggest a recall. Spartacus on Blu-ray could have been as Mr. Kubrick wished it to be — a heroic and majestic piece of epic entertainment. With a simple new image harvest, Spartacus could be a piece of brilliant Blu-ray software.
“As it is, Spartacus receives an absolute and undeniable fail.
“After doing a comparison of the HD vs. the new Blu-ray, here’s what I’m seeing:
“The video noise, inherent in the HD master, is gone. That’s a good thing, but keep in mind that it should never have been there to begin with. In removing the noise, all grain is also gone, replaced by what appears to be a pleasant sheen of artificial film grain.
“All of the detail captured by Academy Award winning cinematographer Russell Metty‘s meticulous large format Technirama camera, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Color Cinematography, is unfortunately also gone.
“All high frequency information has been lost, and with it all of the detail in the image.
“In its place the newly softened image has been electronically sharpened. We now have a halo. Contrast has been boosted to make the image appear sharper than it is, but this is perceived as opposed to actual sharpness. Fortunately, possibly based upon the new software, we have not gone plastic.
“During the restoration of Spartacus, we went through numerous tests to find the optics that could reproduce the immense amount of detail found in the original elements. I recall one test that we screened in the Hitchcock Theater at Universal. The image quality wasn’t quite there. It was slightly soft. When I mentioned that detail was missing in the wood that surrounded the gladiator’s arena, one of the gentlemen from the post house responded ‘But you can see the wood grain.’
“I distinctly remember getting an elbow in the ribs at that moment from our tech assistant, Mike Hyatt. He knew where this was going. What we needed to properly represent Mr. Kubrick’s film was not the ability to see the wood grain, but rather to see the insects eating their way through the wood grain. Within two weeks an optical system was put in place that enabled us to reproduce the information as exposed to the original elements.
“In Universal’s new Blu-ray release of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, you can almost see the wood grain, but now that grain is covered in electronic enhancement, halos and unnecessary contrast.
“The pity is that Spartacus, like Out of Africa and Elizabeth, makes Blu-ray appear to be something that it is not — a flawed technological system for viewing motion pictures in home theaters. I was hopeful that the lessons learned with the Blu-ray releases of Patton, The Longest Day and Gangs of New York might have been taken to heart.
“They have not.”
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