While Uber-ing over to Cannes La Bocca at 8 am in order to catch an 8:45 am Cineum IMAX screening of Laszlo Nemes’ Moulin, I was reminded what a costly, time-consuming drag this option is. Plus the wifi is anemic once you’re there — all but worthless inside the theatres.
The second half of Moulin, which is mainly about Klaus Barbie’s interrogation and torture of French resistance martyr Jean Moulin, conveys a dungeon-like horror vibe, and as I was walking through the Cineum plex after the screening I still felt the malevolent dungeon atmosphere — the somber medieval interior literally feels like a house of horrors.
And then came the horrific bus ride back to Cannes…took forever, packed in like sardines, the bus stopping and lurching. Perhaps not a horrible experience, but certainly a grim one.
Few will argue with any sincerity that Chris Nolan‘s confirmed casting of 42-year-old Lupita N’yongo as The Odyssey‘s Helen of Troy is anything short of ludicrous.
But until last weekend I somehow hadn’t picked up on the absurd rumor that Elliot Page, whose general Odyssey casting has been common knowledge for several months, will play Achilles, the role that Brad Pitt played in Wolfgang Petersen‘s Troy.
N’yongo-as-Helen is one thing, but Nolan wouldn’t dare cast Page as Pitt’s replacement…he just wouldn’t dare. I read somewhere that Page plays some kind of half-pint crew member or mascot on Matt Damon‘s ship. This makes more sense.
I’ve just fast-forwarded through yesterday’s 60 Minutes segment on The Odyssey, and unless I’ve missed something Scott Pelley didn’t even ask Nolan about the N’yongo and Page castings. Do I need to watch it more thoroughly?
11:25 pmupdate: Barnaby Thompson’s Maverick is a purely pleasurable, right-down-the-middle, devotional movie-buff documentary about the life and legend of the late, great David Lean.
I felt constantly wowed, massaged, comforted, reminded, elevated, amused. The doc does everything you want it to do. It takes care of the flock. And that final LawrenceofArabia smash cut to the closing credits? Perfect.
There was a block of at least 45 or 50 unfilled seats when the doc began…curious.
Romantic-sexualsidenote: By any measure Lean’s romantic life was episodic, fitful and even turbulent — never quite stable or settled. Thompson doesn’t shrink from the fact that Lean was a serious hound (the sexual conquests were allegedly in the hundreds) and that he wasn’t much of a stayer.
Lean apparently lived for those first-bloom hormonal highs, but once the relationship settled into the usual humdrum, up-and-down, we-need-to-put-in-the-work phase, he was always sniffing around for the next one. Or so it seemed.
This didn’t go down too well with some women in the seats.
Narrator Kenneth Branagh reads two or three love letters that Lean wrote over the decades, and the last one (a heartfelt confession, penned in the early ‘80s to the much-younger Sandra Holtz) suggested that Lean was something of a serial cad, crooning the same old sentiments decade after decade.
This prodded an audible reaction inside the Salle Bunuel — women coughing, groaning, clearing their throats, chuckling. You shoulda been there.
I have one mild beef with James Gray‘s Paper Tiger, which I caught last night at 10 pm.
I felt completely throttled by Gray’s partly fact-based, family-history street drama, which isn’t so much a Queens-and-Brooklyn crime thriller as a middle-class film noir tragedy.
Like Gray’s Armageddon Time, Paper Tiger is set in suburban Queens, where Gray was raised in the ’70s and ’80s, and in Russian-mob-infiltrated Brooklyn and especially featuring the super-polluted Gowanus Canal, which I’d never even heard of until last night. (I’d now like to forget it.)
Set during the mid to late ’80s, it’s basically a “don’t fuck with the Russian mob psychos” deal, as well as a “life can be horrifically unfair” thing as well as a boilerplate serving of turbulent brotherly conflict.
The main characters are Gary Pearl (Adam Driver), a somewhat flamboyant ex-cop and flashy opportunist, and his younger brother Irwin (Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller), an upstanding, straight-arrow reservoir engineer who’s a father of two teenage boys, Scott and Ben, and a dutiful husband of Hester (Scarlett Johansson).
There’s a third-act action sequence that I’ll never forget, set within what initially looks like a dense, elephant’s-eye cornfield straight out of Fred Zinneman‘s Oklahoma!, but instead of Gordon Macrae singing “oh, what beautiful morning” you’ve got a key protagonist along with four or five Russian goons tramping through the weeds, all with guns drawn.
Paper Tiger, as noted, is not an action-and-suspense thriller per se, but a riveting gloom-and-doomer. It’s a stunningly somber arthouse thing. I was reminded at times of Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. I’m telling myself that it’s Gray’s most jarring and absorbing film ever. It leaves you with a “whoa” feeling…a real bent-over, stomach-punch sense of shock.
My beef is something that I can’t make especially clear as I don’t want to spoil.
It basically comes down to the dramatic rendering of justice, which is a basic audience requirement in a drama. Joe and Jane Popcorn don’t necessarily need a happy ending, but they will defintely feel thrown if a major character — good or bad, noble or cowardly, gentle or cruel — doesn’t meet with some form of appropriate Biblical response.
Put another way, malevolent criminal characters (bullies, murderers, cruel dads, crime family bosses) who cause terrible things to happen to a film’s mostly sympathetic protagonist[s] need to be disciplined at the very least, or, more preferably, suffer some kind of eye-for-an-eye slapdown. I’m not saying that a major shithead character in Paper Tiger evades God’s terrible swift sword but…okay, I actually am saying that. And it’s still bothering me.
How would you have felt after seeing The Godfather, Part II…how would you have felt if Lee Strasberg‘s Hyman Roth had just walked away at the finale with a fresh slice of birthday cake?
Let no one even briefly dispute that several big-name directors have earned reputations for occasionally behaving in a snippy or bullying manner with their actors and crew, or at the very least exuding crusty impatience, and sometimes even treating them with restrained cruelty.
Fitful, erratic eruptions, I mean…Otto Preminger, David Lean, Eric von Stroheim, William Friedkin, Michael Bay, David O. Russell, Michael Curtiz…allegedly Oliver Stone and James Cameron in their hormonal heydays…ditto John Huston and, on an allegedly random, bad-day basis, John Ford (ask Henry Fonda about the Mister Roberts shoot).
In Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s grade-A, exquisitely acted, brilliantly layered The Beloved, which I was totally wowed by on Saturday afternoon (5.16), Javier Bardem plays such a director…the mid-50ish, Oscar-rewarded Esteban Martínez, who behaved in decidedly loutish or tyrannical ways in his younger days.
Esteban has since mellowed, as older guys tend to do, but with a certain lingering, simmering undercurrent within, especially regarding Emilia (the excellent Victoria Luengo), his somewhat estranged, mid-30ish daughter.
Esteban has hired Emilia for a supporting role in his latest film, Desierto. He’s told journalists and others that she was hired purely on her acting merits, but the real agenda, of course, is that Esteban, who abandoned Emilia and her mother a couple of decades earlier for a new lady or a fresh marriage (or both), is looking to heal or nourish their relationship.
This is The Beloved‘s core situation, and the principal emotional trigger, as we’ll soon learn, is Emilia’s avoidance of or resistance to Esteban’s subtle emotional overtures. The more she dodges these, the more slighted the headstrong Esteban feels, at first only faintly or slightly but then more and more so.
And then, during the shooting of an outdoor dinner scene involving Emilia and several actors, Esteban’s irked emotions explode into icy fury. He becomes more and more frustrated at this or that aspect of the scene not being quite right, and gradually becomes angrier and angrier. It’s a great showstopping scene…the kettle boiling over.
But after this eruption (which is certainly unpleasant but far from horrific), Esteban is frozen out by nearly everyone. He quickly realizes the Desierto shoot is in trouble.
Feelings are more more sensitive these days among younger actors and crew members (this is an emotional realm in which Millennials and Zoomers are notoriously intolerant…”if you don’t cease your abusive behavior we will rise up and destroy you, boomer or GenXer..we will go to the mattresses over this shit!”). This hits Esteban like a waffle iron. He’s nearly incited a mutiny.
This sets the stage for a deep-down reckoning between himself and Emilia — a finale that is dramatically necessary, of course, but which feels a tiny bit undercooked.
It could be argued that in The Beloved, Bardem gives his strongest (some would say scariest) performance since No Country for Old Men. Then again Anton Chigurh was an unmitigated, murdering, pellet-gun psychopath while Esteban Martinez is simply an egoistic director whose refusal to be more emotionally honest (not just with Emilia but himself) about an underlying paternal agenda leads to serious trouble. Esteban blows it by under-estimating the emotional pushback among the wokeys within the Desierto crew.
These little candy-asses would faint, of course, if they worked for Preminger or von Stroheim or the Friedkin who forcefully directed The Exorcist a half-century ago.
This is what I would quietly confide to these little sweethearts if I was on the Desierto set: “Esteban overstepped, yes, and he should certainly do the hard thing by explaining and apologizing. That would be the manly thing to do. But you guys should also acquire some crust…I’ve been yelled at by some real pros in my time and sometimes you just have to shake it off and let the water droplets roll off your backsides.”
Put another way: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your woke behavior etiquette manual.”
Michael Che last night: “Speaking of giving little boys juice, Michael won the box office again this weekend, and since a few members of the Jackson family are actually in the audience tonight, I wanted to take a moment to tell everybody what I really think: Michael Jackson did nothing wrong! He was right to molest all those kids! And they were lucky. I would have paid him to do it, and I did. That’s right — when I was 10 years old, Michael Jackson molested me. And the only thing it gave me was a fetish for middle-aged white women.”
Friendo: The Real Time studio audience was conspicuously quiet for this one. Very little laughter, and (disturbingly) very little applause. The reason? I’m guessing many of the ideas and attitudes Maher is condemning here are ones they themselves hold. Regardless, this was — for me — one of Maher’s finest hours. And arguably his bravest.”
Six hours hence I’ll tap out a couple of relatively short reviews of (a) Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s TheBeloved, the Javier Bardem-starring father-daughter film-set drama, and (b) James Gray’s Paper Tiger, a tragic, family-driven crime drama set in various crummy areas of Queens and Brooklyn. I’m sorry but I need my six…lights out.
If you’re any kind of semi-knowledgable Beatle disciple, Steven Soderbergh‘s John Lennon: The Last Interview, which I saw this morning inside the Salle Agnes Varda, is almost completely worthless, certainly by Soderbergh standards.
There’s no 21st Century perspective of any kind…no fresh idea or strategy or sheen that might have given this thing a certain edge or extra dimension. Any garden-variety editor or director could have thrown this together on YouTube. Why did Soderbergh take this gig? Just for the bread?
JL:TLI is slick gruel…common, low-rent mulch — a montage-y, music-cue’d-to-death rehash of a radio interview Lennon gave to a trio of RKO Radio Network guys — San Francisco DJ Dave Sholin, scriptwriter/newscaster Laurie Kaye and radio producer Ron Hummel — to promote the recently released “Double Fantasy“.
The sit-down happened on the afternoon of 12.8.80, or roughly six or seven hours before Lennon was shot to death by Mark David Chapman, a pathetic fatass who believed that Lennon, having withdrawn from music and become a Dakota house-husband between ’75 and ’80, had betrayed his messianic legacy.
Soderbergh interviews Sholin, Kaye and Hummel as a framing device….a tiresome mistake.
I smelled crap when Sholin tells a story about David Geffen having played “Starting Over” without identifying the artist, and then asking if Sholin knew who it was. Sholin told Geffen he loved the song but didn’t recognize the voice…BULLSHIT! Everybody in the civilized world had known the sound of Lennon’s voice since the Beatles invasion of early ’64, and a guy who worked in rock radio drew a blank 16 years later?
Soderbergh should have stopped the interview in its tracks right then and there…”what the fuck are you talking about, Dave?…why are you bullshitting me?” Soderbergh should have yanked out a cat-oh-nine tails whip, told Sholin to take his shirt off and submittotenlashes, which was a sentence of mercy as he deserved at least 20 or 25…sic semper bullshitters!
I was asking myself “why am I listening to these old kiss-asses?…they’re dishonest, not especially thoughtful or articulate even…they sound like typical starfuckers…in fact, why am I even watching this film? I feel burned.”
At one bizarre point Lennon defends disco music (“just another wave pouring into the vast ocean of music”), but he never mentions whether or not he’s been to CBGBs or if he’s listened to Television or Lou Reed or Patti Smith or The Police, whose Outlandos d’Amour and Reggatta de Blanc had been out for a while in ’80…none of this.
And yet the Lennon who spoke that afternoon was a seemingly happier fellow than he’d ever been…a contented family man who loved his wife, was starting anew as a recording artist, and was looking forward to touring and whatnot. But he wasn’t as interesting as he was before he met Ono. The inventive, highly attuned, occasionally angry, creatively on-fire Lennon of ’65, ’66 and ’67…now, there was a guy worthy of a Steven Soderbergh doc!
Yoko Ono was a good partner for Lennon…she protected and mommy’ed him and so on, and he needed that. But I really hate listening to Ono’s voice, and I was reminded of my loathing for this bitch when I watched Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back and that footage of her sitting silently in the studio for hours and days on end…a black hole of anti-matter sucking up the creative energy of the four lads…who does that?
Nobody liked Ono before and nobody likes her now. Each and every second of my time with JL:TLI I was muttering to myself, “Her ability to inspire repulsion over a half-century later is truly remarkable…who else has this kind of enduring power?”
I’m not saying the Cannes Film Festival is principally, secondarily or even thirdly for catching zees. But if — if — you need a jet-lag napping recharge there’s no better option that the Salle Agnes Varda. Those red seats are cushy heaven. Five minutes after sitting down you’ll hear the cackly voice of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West…”sleep…sleep…now you’ll sleeeep.”
Sidenote: The gaudy designs and colors projected upon the Napoleon-era Notre Dame (third photo) are a vulgar desecration — as bad as Criterion’s teal vandalizing of EyesWideShut, etc.
In Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden, a harried, in some ways embattled director of a nursing home in the Parisian suburbs named Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) has been attempting to institute a humane care technique known as Humanitude, in spite of bureaucratic resistance and general nursing-staff recalcitrance.
But then she happens to engage one evening with Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese playwright-director, and boy, do they strike up a long conversation about end-of-life care and facing death! They talk and share for hours on end, not just into the night but into the pre-dawn hours and beyond.
And then they fly to Kyoto together and talk a lot more as well as explore the joyful art of foot massage (no lezzy stuff — just feet), and then they fly back to Paris for more talk and caring and well-massaged peds all around. And then (non-spoiler!) Okamoto’s character finally, inevitably gives up the ghost.
And there’s a Big Lebowski-like scene in which two of Morisaki’s nearest and dearest (a 70ish stage actor, played by Kyōzō Nagatsuka, and a developmentally disabled teenaged kid who yelps like a hyena when emotionally aroused) sprinkle her ashes from a pretty Kyoto mountaintop. Do they suffer the indignity of windblown ashes flying into their faces a la Jeff Bridges‘ Jeff Lebowski? Of course not — this isn’t that kind of film.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t suffer all that much through All of a Sudden. Well, I did to a certain extent (as did several viewers who bailed out of Friday afternoon’s press screening inside the Salle Bazin), but I was so impressed — amazed, really — at Hamaguchi’s audacity.
His bold-as-brass decision, I mean, to make a 196-minute film that is basically a slow-moving, didactic conversational instructional — a 21st Century counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard‘s Marxist instructional films (1967 to 1974) — that completely ignores pretty much all of the dramatic basics — no plot, no character arcs, no story tension, no second-act pivots, no third-act payoffs or dramatic surprises — but at the same time heavily invests in creating spiritual flotation vibes that are kind of catching and make you feel…well, settled and serene.
When my life eventually comes to an end, I would like this transitional passage to occur within a Marie-Lou-styled environment…seriously. I would probably decline offers of foot-and-toe massages but otherwise, cool. Let no one claim that All of a Sudden isn’t a nicely persuasive bit of pro-Humanitude propaganda.
Everyone gets and gives foot massages in this thing, and you can bet I was saying to myself “thank God Hamaguchi insisted on everyone receiving perfect pedicures before the cameras rolled….thank God Almighty for that.”
(1) Fatherland director/cowriter Pawel Pawlikowski, star Sandra Huller during Friday’s 11 am press conference; (2) Parallel Lives costars Virginie Efira (who seemed slightly more slender today than in Asghar Farhadi‘s just-premiered film) and Vincent Cassel; (3) Croisette-facing sculpture by Bruno Catalano.
