I’ve only just gotten around to reserving press ticket access to Cannes screenings, and of course some of the films I was hoping to see on Wednesday (including Pedro Almodovar‘s Strange Way of Life, Wim Wenders‘ Anselm, Steve McQueen‘s Occupied City) are already closed off — i.e., COMPLETE.

It’s my own damn fault. of course, but Wednesday and Thursday are pretty much destroyed as almost everything (except for Hirokazu Kore-Eda‘s Monster and Maïwenn‘s Jeanne du Barry) is already reserved.

You need to make your online reservations four days in advance of a given screening, and at 7 am sharp, but even if you follow the protocol to the exact letter you still might not get a ticket. Press screenings for Friday, 5.19 will be theoretically reservable tomorrow morning (Monday, 5.15 at 7 am), etc.

Online reservations for the one and only press screening of Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon (Salle Debussy, 6 pm — available on Tuesday morning at 7 am) will presumably be absolute raging hell.

Everyone in the press community will be desperately lunging for tickets and a fair number of applicants will certainly lose out. Given this certainty, the obvious decent thing to do would be to slate a second screening at the Salle Agnes Varda on the following day (Sunday, 5.21). Have they done this? Of course not.

So after flying thousands of miles and spending lots of money, largely (be honest) in hopes of being among the first to see Flower Moon, there’s a half-decent chance I might get cockblocked and unable to see this film at all.

Friendo: “Don’t fret about the Cannes ticketing system. It’s always like this. There’s a huge ticket drop that happens the day of screenings. It’s been like this since 2021.”

HE: “Thanks for the comforting words, but the system is absolutely DESPICABLE. The McQueen is already blocked off…naturally.”

Friendo: “I would line up for the McQueen. You’ll get in. People who couldn’t get tickets can line up at the screening…if there’s room you can make it. The Flower Moon problem is that people have been doing the 7am wake-ups to get tickets, only to see the system crash — “ERROR — Reservation failed.”

Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, a 1969 doc about the Vichy government’s collaboration with Nazi occupiers during World War II, runs 251 minutes. The two-part, Oscar-nominated film was immortalized by two significant mentions in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (‘77).

Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, a soon-to-be-screened Cannes doc about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II, whips Ophuls’ film in terms of running time — 262 minutes. A24 will be releasing it stateside.

Occupied City is based on a 2019 illustrated book “Atlas of An Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” written by author and filmmaker Bianca Stigter, who’s been marred to McQueen since…I’m not sure but they’ve been partnered for a good 20 years, give or take. (I think.)

SPOILER IF YOU CLICK THROUGH: Two days ago (Friday 5.12) Jeff Sneider tweeted the following about a minor, “who cares?”, barely-worth-raising-your-eyebrows-about FAST X spoiler:

Let me explain something. TheWrap‘s Umberto Gonzalez spoiling anything in any Fast franchise film is an excellent thing, a wonderful thing, a thing to sing and shout about.

Anyone who derides, dismisses or flips off, even in a small or insignificant way, this wretched franchise is, in my eyes, doing God’s work.

I’ve been saying for years that the Fast movies are utterly evil. And yet they still have an ardent following. So let me expand my definition. Aside from Rob Coen‘s respectable The Fast and the Furious (’01) which I recognized as a winningly unpretentious Samuel Arkoff-style exploitation film, the Fast franchise has been ghastly.

Anyone who’s sincerely loved the Fast films all along and eagerly looks forward to catching the next one has poison in his/her veins.

Posted on 4.14.21: “The idiots who pay to see Fast & Furious movies aren’t going to turn in their idiot cards and develop a sense of taste any time soon.”

Former Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez, on the other hand, was man enough to lay it on the line: “In Furious 7, the unstoppable franchise sputters and stalls, edging from spectacular, tongue-in-cheek B-movie fun to soulless, insulting inanity. Here is a film in which nothing is at stake: Cars crash into each other head-on at high speeds, vehicles sail off cliffs and tumble down rocky mountainsides, people jump out of buildings and fall six stories to the ground, then characters just dust themselves off and continue as if nothing had happened. [The film] plunges free-fall into absurd, cartoonish nonsense.”

The last one I saw was Furious 7, and I hate myself for doing so.

Stanley Kubrick was famous for encouraging lively, eccentric and even over-the-top performances. Steven Spielberg’s 1999 recollection abut a 1980 dinner with Kubrick at Childwickbury Manor, during which Kubrick explained that Jack Nicholson‘s over-the-top performance in The Shining was a kind of tribute to the acting style of James Cagney, is a case in point.

It is therefore strange if not bizarre that during the making of Barry Lyndon, Kubrick directed Marisa Berenson to give such an opaque non-performance. In each and every scene, her Lady Lyndon conveys utter vacuity…absolutely nothing behind the eyes.

Did Kubrick realize too late in the process that he’d made a mistake, that Berenson was profoundly ungifted and had next to nothing inside, and that the best course would be to emphasize (rather than try to obscure) this fact?

Berenson is the primary cause, in fact, of Barry Lyndon‘s “dead zone” problem.

My first and only submission to Michael Rsadford‘s 1984 (20th Century Fox) happened in the late summer or early fall of ’84. A private viewing at the Samuel Goldwyn Co., where I was freelancing as a press kit writer. Myself and the whole crew at the time (including Samuel Goldwyn Jr. himself, Larry Jackson, Jeff Lipsky, Laurette Hayden).

The screening-room mood was funereal, to put it mildly. Radford’s film certainly delivered the chilly Orwellian dread, but it also made you feel narcotized. A discussion session followed. They all conveyed the same cautious, qualified opinions: “Somber…okay, downish but very well made…excellent John Hurt…good reviews assured…Richard Burton on his last legs…a possible awards contender,” etc.

I can’t recall if I expressed my own view during that meeting or later in an inter-office memo, but I’m pretty sure I the only one to share how this gloomy dystopian vision of British totalitarianism had actually made me feel. Six words: “It’s a movie FOR DEAD PEOPLE.”

1984 opened in Europe in late ’84, but the U.S. opening didn’t happen until 3.22.85.

Dr. Phil: “In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania came in and said ‘we’re gonna tell you what words you can use, and what words you can’t use.’ Right now…what Oceania, 1984’s government, was doing, we’re now doing to each other.”

Bill Maher: “I understand. I couldn’t agree more.”

HE is pre-approving Tina Satter‘s Reality (HBO Max, 5.23). Directed by Satter from a screenplay she co-wrote with James Paul Dallas and adapted from the FBI interrogation transcript of American intelligence whistleblower Reality Winner, pic premiered with glowing reviews during last February’s Berlinale. Sydney Sweeney, Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton on top.

“Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realized piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge.” — from Tim Robey’s Telegraph review.
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Yesterday World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy passed along a report that roughly the first 20 minutes of Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix) will be presented in black-and-white. This in itself is intriguing.

Cooper has starred, directed, co-written and co-produced the upmarket Leonard Bernstein biopic, which will almost certainly debut at the early fall festivals, allegedly runs in the vicinity of 156 minutes.

“Lenny and Felicia,” posted on 5.31.22: Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro (Netflix), a biopic about legendary composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, only began shooting this month. It will almost certainly open during the early fall Oscar season of 2023, as it is obviously Oscar-bait plus and Cooper’s makeup after his direction of A Star Is Born failed to land a Best Director nomination in early ’19.

With Maestro we’re talking Best Picture (produced by Cooper, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Todd Phillips, et. al.), Best Director and Actor (Cooper), Best Actress (Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife of 27 years, the half-Chilean Felicia Cohn Montealegre), Best Original Screenplay (Cooper, Josh Singer) and so on down the line. Jeremy Strong costars as John Gruen.’

As much as I despise Donald Trump and his torrents of bullshit, he’s regarded by millions as a symbolic pushback against woke Maoism. And therein lies the essence of why MAGA nation is allegedly behind this lying animal, as poll after poll seems to indicate.

Factually and ethically speaking there’s no question that the 76 year-old Trump is a foam-at-the-mouth sociopath, and yet two nights ago CNN honcho Chris Licht gifted this beast with what boiled down to a 70-minute promotional pro-Trump event in the form of a televised New Hampshire q & a with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins.

I was flying during the Trump-Licht-Collins airing and only just caught up with the substance of it this morning (Saturday, 5.13). The 5.11 analysis piece from N.Y. Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman is obviously valid, and there’s no basis from which to argue that Collins wasn’t fairly disputing Trump’s lies with verifiable facts.

And yet what she and the never-Trumpers are saying would seep into the political bloodstream much more deeply and effectively if there was simply a frank, sensible, fair-minded acknowledgment that woke Maoism is not fanciful fiction. As Bill Maher pointed out three months ago, it’s not only real but malicious.

Which is worse, the Trump psychosis or a fanatical reincarnation of Mao Zedong’s Great Cultural Revolution? It would be so great if there were more voices (like Maher and others from the sensible, straight-from-the-shoulder moderate camp) saying that both extremes are grotesque.

Even Steve Schmidt, whom I’ve admired and respected since he was portrayed by Woody Harrelson in Jay Roach‘s Game Change (’12) as well as for his many blistering condemnations of the looney-ass right, has posted a great essay bashing Trump and Licht, but he would be heard and agreed with by many more millions if he could just admit the obvious about hard-left derangement.

“If the challenge were to pick out CNN’s lowest moment, its most disgraceful 90 minutes, it would be easy. It is incontestably the disgrace that was aired on CNN and ordered by CNN’s CEO and chairman Chris Licht, dressed up as news. [It was] a propaganda event — a forum given to Trump voters and sycophants….national gaslighting…America’s greatest liar lying with abandon.

“CNN’s Kaitlin Collins was the person strapped to Chris Licht‘s proverbial Titanic bow, [having] been given the challenge of trying to challenge Donald Trump when he lied. But she faced an upstoppable force.

“Chris Licht didn’t do this for news. He didn’t do this to educate. He did it because he’s a profiteer, just like Rupert Murdoch…in the business of manufacturing news. What he did was incite a clearly unstable person who seeks political power for the advancement of an extremist agenda. [It] was a business decision…[an event] aimed to make money. [Licht decided] to throw Trump a propaganda rally, to stack an audience full of his sycophants, and then celebrate it as news. The event that Licht produced was evidence of American’s sickness and decay.”

— from Schmidt’s on “why CNN’s Donald Trump Town hall was an affront to journalism,” posted yesterday on 5.12.23.

Orly touchdown around 12:20 pm. The after-dusk air feels October-ish, even chilly. Something called for silence. That plus the usual fatigue. 11 pm now, and every last table…every seat at Sancerre filled with beaming, jovial slap-happies.

Jordan Ruimy’s best films of the ‘60s critics poll has concluded, and the winners are HAL, Moonwatcher the bone-tosser, Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Andrei Smyslov and the hugely disappointing Jupiter (a gas planet that you can’t even land on in the first place).