So that’s a no-go on catching tonight’s 6:45 pm debut screening of Baz Lurhmann‘s Elvis. (About 90 minutes hence.) Press tickets on the Cannes Film Festival’s online booking system have never once been available since I got here ten days ago. Several journos have requested tickets, and the replies from Warner Bros. have been either nonexistent or “we’ll try”.

So we’ve all booked tickets for Thursday morning’s makeup screening at 8:30 am, at the Salle Agnes Varda (formerly the Salle du Soixantieme). Extra-cool, in-like-Flynn journos caught the film in New York and Los Angeles before the festival began.

Trade reviews will presumably pop when the show gets out around 9:30 pm (3:30 pm in NYC, 12:30 pm in Los Angeles).

HE readers are hereby requested to post their capsule reviews right now. That’s right — imagine how it plays and write it up accordingly.

I’m not up on makeup techniques. I don’t know the functional differences between foam latex, gelatin, silicone and gypsum cement. But I’m moderately impressed by the Elvis transformation of Tom Hanks into Colonel Tom Parker, at least as it appears in the below photo.

A guy who’s seen Baz Luhrmann‘s film says that Hanks’ bulky, big-nosed Tom didn’t strike him as wow-level, but sometimes this stuff is in the eye of the beholder. The ears might belong to Hanks or not — I can’t tell. Otherwise I’m impressed by the thinning gray hair, the spray-tan complexion and especially the schnozz.

I understand, by the way, that while the film doesn’t transform Austin Butler into classic “fat Elvis” proportions (which reportedly manifested during the last couple of years, sometime between ’75 and the singer’s death on 8.16.77), Vegas-jump-suit Butler does appear slightly bulkier, or so it seemed to this observer.

Parker died in January 1997, or nearly 20 years after Elvis ascended.

Metronom, the debut effort by Romanian director-writer Alexandru Belc, is a spot-on, nearly perfect political drama about a pair of Bucharest-residing lovers in their late teens (played by Mara Bugarin and Serban Lazarovici) whose relationship is tragically perverted by Romania’s secret police.

It’s not a Cannes competition entry but part of the Un Certain Regard line-up, but if it were a competition film it would be a top Palme d’Or contender, at least in my book.

Set in October 1972, Metronom doesn’t particularly resonate with our present catalogue of political horrors, but serves as a time-capsule reminder of the beastly oppression of the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime, which ran Romania from early March of 1965 until Ceaucescu’s overthrow and execution on 12.22.89.

The story is principally told in personal, emotional and intimate terms, and is focused on the ins and outs of the relationship between Ana (Bugarin) and Sorin (Lazarovici). The inciting incident scene, which doesn’t happen until roughly the 45-minute mark, is a party in which they and their high-school-age friends listen to a Radio Free Europe broadcast by rebel DJ Cornel Chiriac (1941-1975).

Chiriac’s shortwave radio show, “Metronom,” delivered uncensored news from the non-Communist west along with contemporary rock music, and thus was feared and, as much as possible, suppressed by the Securitate.

As the party kids listen they decide to write a “thank you” letter to Chiriac for providing an anti-Commie view of the world, both topically and musically. Such an act, of course, was regarded by the bad guys as subversive and criminal, and so before you know it (and I mean while the party is still going on) the goons bust in, arrest the kids and take them down to headquarters to sign confessions about the letter.

Did someone rat them out?

That’s all I’m going to say about the plot, but what happens certainly has a significant effect upon Ana and Sorin’s relationship. Let’s just say that the last 55 minutes of this 102-minute film are quite chilling. This mood is complemented by Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s shooting style, which follows the standard Romanian-cinema aesthetic — plain, unfussy, longish takes.

I’ll admit that Metronom tried my patience here and there. Some shots seem to last too long. Bugarin’s performance is hard to read at times,. During the party scene there’s an announcement by Chiriac that rock superstar Jim Morrison has died in Paris, which is a problem given that the Doors frontman passed on 7.3.71, or roughly 15 months before the party scene in question. And near the end there’s a post-interrogation scene between Ana and her best friend Roxana (Mara Vicol) that doesn’t quite stick the landing.

But otherwise Metronom is quite riveting — an emotionally relatable story of state terror that sticks to your ribs.

From World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy:

If you count Monday, 5.16 (flight arrival, moving into the pad, picking up my pass, buying groceries), this is HE’s ninth day of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Three full days to go plus a wakeup…home stretch. At this point I always take a breather and kick back a bit. And now it’s raining with a little lightning and thunder, and some nice cool air filling the kitchen.

Just two films today — Jean Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ Tori and Lokita, a tragic immigration drama set near Liege, Belgium, about a pair of young, unrelated African kids (Pablo Schils as the younger Tori, Mbundu Joely as the teenaged Lokita) who get exploited and kicked around and treated cruelly by drug-dealing wolves. It ends sadly and shockingly. I didn’t melt down but I felt it.

The Dardennes have always had this plain, unaffected directing style — just point, shoot and watch. Believable characters, realistic dialogue, no musical score. Straight-up realism, a dependable brand. I’ve always emerged from their films saying “yup, that was a good, honest film” but I’ve never really been knocked flat. Because their plain-and-straight signature only penetrates so much. In my case at least.

At 10:30 this evening I’m catching Mario Martine‘s Nostalgia, about an older guy returning to his home town of Naples after a 40-year absence. My insect antennae are telling me not to expect too much, but it feels wrong to waste the opportunity.

Apparently I’m not going to be infected with monkeypox any time soon. Or down the road for that matter. Like everyone else I was mildly freaked at first by those horrific photos of boils and blisters, but fear itself is a virus.

“Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted infection, but experts are suggesting that some of the cases that are happening outside of Africa…may be transmitted through sexual contact.” — Jameisha Presecod, BBC Africa reporter.

NBC report: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating four suspected cases of monkeypox in the United States. All of the cases are in men and related to travel. The individuals in the U.S. reported they had traveled in April, with symptoms appearing in early May, according to the CDC.

“The majority of current cases have been reported in men who have had sex with other men.

“Monkeypox has not been historically considered a sexually transmitted disease. However, it’s transmitted through close physical contact, and can be spread during sex. Two raves held in Spain and Belgium among gay and bisexual men have been connected to the current cases.”

David Cronenberg‘s Crimes of the Future, which I caught last night, is basically a play — a dialogue-driven, restricted-locale chamber piece. I felt respect and fascination — the scheme is nothing if not disciplined — and there’s never any doubt that you’re watching a thoughtful, rigorously sculpted effort by a grade-A auteur.

But (and I liked this aspect) it’s quite removed from the kind of gross-out horror film aesthetic that your midnight-movie crowd might enjoy. It’s not elevated horror but a kind of perversely erotic body-probe mood piece, and if you’re the kind of viewer who’s into mad energy and geysers of cinematic pizazz and gooey gore for its own sake, the likely reaction is going to be less along the lines of “holy shit!” and more in the vein of “uhm…what?”

Remove the physical-effects stuff — bizarre surgical slicings, erotic body penetration, superfluous internal organ removal — and the seaside, small-hamlet, sound-stage setting (it was shot in Athens), and you’re left with a presentation that could have been staged at Manhattan’s Cherry Lane theatre or…whatever, on Philco Playhouse back in the early to mid ’50s.

Set in a bizarre future in which pain has been eliminated (hence the various surgeries and excavations without anesthetics) and people are growing strange organs in their chest and stomach cavities, Crimes focuses on a performance-artist couple (Viggo Mortensen‘s “Saul Tenser”‘s and Léa Seydoux‘s “Caprice”) whose show involves the removal of said organs before paying audiences.

Did I mention that Caprice is into tattoo-ing Saul’s organs? (She is, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out why or to what end.) And the hanging, tentacled, oyster-like bed devices that Saul sleeps or meditates in, and a scene in which he and Caprice (naked as jaybirds) share some kind of sexual communion? And that you need to chew on the concept of “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome”?

The main thing is that these flesh slicings and subsequent icky probes are a turn-on for all concerned. You’ve read this before, but the film’s most quoted line is “surgery is the new sex.”

A secondary couple (Don McKellar‘s “Wippet” and Kristen Stewart‘s “Timlin”) are investigators at the National Organ Registry. Admirers of Saul and Caprice, they’re both tingling with anticipation about watching their act.

The key plot element is about Saul deciding whether to include in the show an autopsy of a recently murdered young boy — a kid who had become some kind of plastic-eating mutant. I’ll leave out mentioning his killer, but the boy’s father (Yorgos Karamihos), a guy who eats purple chocolate bars with curious chemical components, is the one pimping the autopsy to Saul.

Cronenberg wrote Crimes of the Future almost a quarter-century ago — in 1998 — and in a 5.23 interview with IndieWire’s Eric Kohn insisted “that he hadn’t changed a word of his original draft when production resources finally came together last year,” Kohn writes.

Cronenberg: “The human condition is the subject of my filmmaking and all art. Right now, these are things that are intriguing in terms of where people are and how they’re living.”

The subhead of Kohn’s article states that Cronenberg “elaborate[s] on the [film’s] complex themes,” and yet at no point in the piece do Kohn or Cronenberg even mention, much less discuss, a somewhat related present-day parallel — the fact that over the last few years gender ideology has brought about surgical alterations in young bodies — puberty blockers, breast removals, genital surgery, other transitional procedures.