During HE’s thrilling but arduous Paris-Cannes adventure (5.11 through 5.30) I somehow found the idea of paywalliing content a bridge too far, so everything was wide open for that nearly three-week period. So the paywall returns starting today. Thanks to subscribers for understanding and hanging in there. I’m even starting to figure out HE’s travel strategy for Telluride ’23, which is only three months off.

The music of the late Ryuichi_Sakamoto (1952-2023) constituted significant portions of the soundtracks of three films by Alejandro G. Inarritu — Babel (’06), The Revenant (’15) and Bardo (’22).

I’m repeating my conviction that Sakamoto’s Revenant score is an all-time grand slammer, and that Sakamoto himself is one of the greatest.

I passed along my deepest condolences to Inarritu after Sakaomoto’s death a couple of months ago (3.28.23), and soon after Inarritu offered to send me Travesia, a compilation of 20 Sakamoto compositions that Inarritu curated at the invitation of Milan Records’ Jean Christophe and Sakamoto’s manager, Norika Sora.

The two-disc vinyl album arrived at HE’s Wilton residence a few days ago.

A brief essay by Inarritu is printed on one of the vinyl sleeves. Here’s an excerpt:

“I vividly recall the sensory, emotional experience I had when I first listened to Ryuichi Sakamoto in the fall of 1983. I was with A friend, Carlos Claussel, in a car in Mexico City, trapped in traffic hell in the Perferico (i.e., outer beltway) at 3 pm. Carlos put in a bootleg cassette of a Japanese composer neither of us had ever heard of.

“At first a few piano notes arrived like some kind of fresh, light rain, and from that [came] a mantric cadence and a sweet deep voice. It felt as if fingertips were penetrating my brain and giving me a cosmic massage, [one] that went through my body and dissolved everything that might have been wrong in my life back then.

“It was the theme from Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and ever since that day a vital relation to Sakamoto’s music was within me. His work has become part of the soundtrack of my own existence.”

I don’t own a top-of-the-line vinyl turntable sound system at home (I make do with a Sonos sound bar), but a friend who lives nearby has an excellent sound system so that’ll be my way into this. Thanks to Alejandro for the gift, which I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. In early ’16 he also sent me a Revenant vinyl soundtrack album…thanks.

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HE totally supports the firing of those two female Lululemon employees who chased a pair of shoplifters and then called the cops on them. Shoplifters (especially young men of color) are definitely entitled to steal stuff, and employees who chase them or try to bust them are nothing but vigilante troublemakers.

🚨BOYCOTT: Two Lululemon employees were FIRED for chasing after shoplifters and calling the police on them in Atlanta.

Lululemon said it has a zero-tolerance policy for pursuing shoplifters at their stores.

Luckily the police were able to track down the robbers, who were later… pic.twitter.com/uSYXKjDTdb

— Phillip Oliver-Holz (Alpha Male) (@ThePhillipHolz) May 29, 2023

I wanted to post and discuss these Barry clips before getting on yesterday’s flight, but one thing and another kept getting in the way. I still haven”t seen the Barry and Succcession finales but at least I’m back in the zone. I totally know what happens in both finales, and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

I also need to see You Hurt My Feelings at the earliest opportunity.

It’s 7:20 am in West Orange, New Jersey (Jett and Cait‘s place). I woke up at 3:25 am. My French Bee flight left Orly around 7:25 pm last night; it arrived around 8:25 pm at Newark. I sat in a forward coach section…not horrible, not great. Unless you’re in first-class or business, eight-hour flights are generally agonizing as a rule.

Never, ever wear whitesides to an Oval Office meeting. Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries is a good hombre and a skilled operator, but in this instance he should be ashamed of himself. If you’re sporting whitesides you might as well wear knee-length beach shorts or a silky floral print shirt. We’re speaking of plaster cracks in the once-great wall of traditional civilization here. Certain sartorial instincts should be suppressed at all costs.

I mean, will you look at those light blue, horizontally-striped “happy” socks? Seriously…imagine getting dressed for the Oval Office meeting and actually saying to yourself “yeah, these socks definitely work for a White House conference about the debt ceiling…I’ll put them on.”

If there’s one must-to-avoid in terms of conversational observations about famous human beings, it’s deciding who’s “nice” and “not nice”.

Whenever I hear someone say that a famous person he/she has run into socially is “sooo nice” or “not nice,” I give them a death-ray look that would stop Gort in his tracks. “Nice” is welcome, of course, but overrated. What matters to me is “does a famous person I’m speaking to really mean what they say, or are they some kind of performative orangutan going through the motions?”

I don’t obsess over this stuff, mind, but a day-old Lewis Beale Facebook post brought it all back.

The thrust of Beale’s post was “oh, lordy, did Ben Kinsgley behave like an asshole when I interviewed him 30 years ago or what?” As well as “oh my God, Ian McKellen is such a sweetheart….I love the guy!…he’s a gift from God sent to earth to make all of our lives better and sweeter!”

Beale: “Ben Kingsley was interviewed a few days ago in ‘Headliner,’ a regular New York Times arts section feature, where celebrities are asked to name ten of their favorite things. The intro mentions that since Kingsley was knighted years ago, he likes to be referred to as ‘Sir Ben.’

“I interviewed ‘Sir Ben’ back in the ’90s, when I was a staff writer at the New York Daily News. I found him to be an insufferable, pompous bore. He sneered at my questions, treated the film’s publicist like dirt, and refused any posing suggestions from the staff photographer who accompanied me. He has since become my default answer when people ask me what was the worst interview experience I ever had.

“What resulted was the only truly nasty celebrity interview I’ve ever written, in which I compared ‘Sir Ben’ to the alien slime thing in the B-grade sci-fi film Species, which he was supposedly promoting.

“Not long thereafter I interviewed Ian McKellen, who had also been knighted. When I asked him if I should refer to him as ‘Sir Ian,’ he smiled broadly and said, ‘No, just call me Ian.’ He was a sweetheart.”

HE to Beale: I’ve chatted with Mr. McKellen three or four times over the years, and he’s always been a smooth, bright, learned, warm-hearted, unpretentious, cosmopolitan fellow.

There is also, however, room for edgy, prickly fellows like Kingsley from time to time. When you interviewed him he clearly had some kind of disturbance going on inside, perhaps due to the fact that he hated Species (or hated making it or both) and was ashamed to be promoting it.

Okay, he was a dick that day but does he have to be tied to the whipping post for this? Kingsley really has a wonderfully wicked and perverse sense of Don Logan-type madman humor inside, and was also beyond great in Schindler’s List (’93) and (never forget this!) masterful in David Jones‘ Betrayal (’83), not to mention Gandhi (’82) and Bugsy (‘91) and…what was that adaptation of Phillip Roth’s The Dying Animal called?

Why does oddball Ben or Kingsley-the-shithead necessarily have to be condemned? Not every person is conventionally likable in a way that you might prefer. It’s very easy and, I would argue, even somewhat meaningless to behave in a “nice” way. We all have a “nice” face or, if you will, a “nice” mask — it’s just a matter of putting it on.

Don’t get me wrong as I greatly prefer the company of nice, charming, gracious people with a twinkle in their eye, but I also accept or understand that sometimes unusual or interesting or even volcanic people are playing a different kind of game, or at least sometimes they are. They’re not evil — just possessed or mortified or their feelings have been hurt or something in that vein.

I’m a fan of both Ben and Ian…okay?

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If and when I get around to seeing The Little Mermaid (no way would I forsake my precious Paris time by seeing it here), I’ll probably feel underwhelmed. I’ve hated nearly every Rob Marshall film ever made (I found Nine half-tolerable), and he’s not going to change and neither am I, and this is just a live–action rehash anyway.

I’m a genuine fan of the 1989 animated original (83 minutes!), and so sight unseen I despise Marshall’s version, which tells roughly the same story, for adding 52 minutes of bloat.

Are there some hinterland trollers out there who are saying ixnay because of Halle Bailey’s casting as Ariel (i.e., standard Disney-fied diversity)? Yeah, I guess, presumably. But who believes that the shitty Rotten Tomatoes ratings (top critics at 47% and ticket-buyers at 56% if you count all of them) are driven by this?

The obviously gifted Bailey seems fairly cool and appealing, but I see no genetic evidence of her being the daughter of Javier Bardem’s King Triton, a pale-faced Spaniard by way of the deep blue sea. Why didn’t they make this aspect work? They easily could have. Not a huge deal but a deal.

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This may seem silly or wasteful or low-rent (it’s all these things), but watch the segment that starts at 4:18.

From Michael Herr‘s “Evolution of the Term ‘Hipster’, Pt. III” (excerpt posted eight years ago by Brecht Anderson):

“He haunted the Museum of Modern Art and the few foreign-film revival houses, the very underground Cinema 16 and the triple-feature houses along 42nd Street…he was already careless, even reckless in his appearance, mixing his plaids in wild shirt, jacket, and necktie combinations never seen on the street before, disreputable trousers, way-out accidental hairdos… (Even…in the late 50s, when he was working in Hollywood, the insouciance of his attire was remarked upon by many producers and actors, who thought that he dressed like a beatnik.) He was jazz-mad and went to the clubs, and a Yankees fan so he went to the ball games, all of this in New York in the late ’40s and early ’50s — a smart, spacey, wide-awake kid like that, it’s no wonder he was such a hipster — a ’40s-bred, ’50s-minted, tough-minded, existential, highly evolved classic hipster. His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruce‘s than to any other director’s, and this was not merely an aspect of his. He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.”

It’s Sunday evening (6:15 pm), the sun won’t slip into dusk for another three hours (during the warm months night doesn’t really begin in Paris until 10 pm), and for the first time in nearly two weeks I’m finally feeling relaxed and settled down. Breathing easy.

A couple of hours ago I took my first late-afternoon nap since…I don’t know, May 10th or something. It’s amazing what a decent snooze can do for your disposition. The whole city feels casual and chill. Everyone is sharing the same dreamy mood. Blue sky, gentle sunshine, not too hot.

After nearly two weeks of mostly Cannes-generated stress, deadline pressures, way too little sleep (i.e., the snore bear), waiting in line after line for the next Salle Debussy film and regarding the usual suspects askance, feelings of serenity are finally within. Not for long but at least tonight feels right.

Alas, it all starts again late tomorrow afternoon with my 7:15 pm flight to Newark. God protect me from being seated next to a Jabba.

In Todd Haynes May December, which I saw in Cannes a few days ago, Julianne Moore is Gracie Atherton, a 60ish native of Savannah (actually Tybee Island, a bucolic waterfront community 25 minutes to the east). She services the affluent locals with a dessert-baking business, and is living fairly flush or at least comfortably.

Gracie owns (rents?) an elegant multi-bedroom home, and apparently three nearly grown kids (a lad and — I think — two lassies), and they’re all in college or about to attend same. Not to mention their 36-year-old father, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), whom Gracie married after seducing him at age 13 when they were both working in a pet store.

Like the real-life (and now deceased) Mary Kay Letourneau, Gracie’s misdeed led to a prison term for statutory rape, but that was 23 years ago and life has since settled down. Joe presumably handles the delivery of the cakes, pies and pastries.

As I explained on 5.21, May December is about a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), visiting the Tybee homestead in order to research a forthcoming Gracie portrayal in a film about her once-turbulent life.

I was undergoing some turbulence of my own due to a nagging question: how is Gracie affording all this (pricey abode, college tuition)?

Maybe there was a line about inherited wealth that I missed, but if Gracie comes from a rich family why was she working in a pet store in her 30s?

And how much, really, could she be earning from making fancy birthday cakes and whatnot? Gracie is presumably catering to elites but even if she’s charging double Savannah pastry chefs earn less than $20 per hour, according to Google.

Did she raise money for the house through crowd-funding? Did she get into Bitcoin? Did she write a successful book about her thing with Joe? These questions may have been answered in the film, and okay, it’s quite possible I might have missed some info due to zoning out from boredom.

I only know that (a) wealthy filmmakers tend to write or otherwise create characters whose lives tend to reflect their own comfort levels, and (b) too much financial ease or abundance is alienating from a Joe Popcorn perspective.

Previously noted: Letourneau and Fualaau insisted from the get-go that their relationship was consensual; ditto Gracie and Joe in May December. After serving her prison term Letourneau married Fualaau and, like their screen counterparts, had kids with him.