“Elvis” Stumbles

by

7:40 am: Years of movie-watching have taught me that if a new film’s reviews are on the disappointed, half-shitty side (as they certainly are for Elvis), the best thing to do, if I want to at least half-enjoy this allegedly shallow Baz Luhrmann sparkle-thon, is to swan-dive into the most negative assessments and let them cover me like liquid mud, so when I sit down with it myself (which will happen 50 minutes hence) I’ll emerge saying “hey, it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected!”

From Owen Geliberman’s Variety review:

“A Stone-Cold, Liquid-Nitrogen Classic”

by

The above quote is from a Peter Bradshaw piece about Mike Hodges‘ Get Carter (’71), which is being theatrically re-released in England. A buffed-up version will also be 4K Bluray’ed on 7.25.22

HE-posted on 8.23.15: One noteworthy thing about Michael Caine‘s icy performance in Get Carter is that he always looks stern, steady and focused. He never blinks an eye.

And yet by his own admission Caine was half in the bag while filming this Mike Hodges gangster flick. During the ’60s and early ’70s Caine was smoking at least 80 cigarettes and “drinking two to three bottles of vodka” a day, he’s said.

Caine reportedly quit cigarettes “following a stern lecture from Tony Curtis at a party in 1971,” and has credited his wife Shakira, whom he married in ’73, for steering him away from vodka.

Read more

God Only Knows

by

I don’t want to hear a single mention of the words “thoughts,” “prayers” or “God” from anybody on the right after the next mass shooting. Zip those repugnant thoughts and keep ’em zipped tight. Never again.

Hold Your Horses

by

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.

Read more

Hanks-Parker Conversion

by

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” Shoots Right To The Top

by

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.

Read more

Refrain

by

From a 10.5.15 Salon piece by Amanda Marcotte:

“Conservatives aren’t lying when they say they need guns to feel protected. But it’s increasingly clear that they aren’t seeking protection from crime or even from the mythical jackbooted government goons come to kick in your door. No, the real threat is existential. Guns are a totemic shield against the fear that they are losing dominance as the country becomes more liberal and diverse and, well, modern.’ (‘Diverse’, of course, being a code word for fewer whites calling the shots.)

“For liberals, the discussion about guns is about public health and crime prevention. For conservatives, hanging onto guns is a way to symbolically hang onto the cultural dominance they feel slipping from their hands.”

“In the comment thread I explained that “50 years ago this country was more or less run by WASP whitebreads + Irish and Italian Catholics, etc. Blacks were seen as a minority, most gays were closeted and women worked the kitchen and tended to the kids. Those days are over and old-fart rural conservatives know it. That’s what the guns are about. To give them a sense of power in times of increasing powerlessness.”

Due respect to Matthew McConaughey but a call to “do better” is something you say when you want to raise your grade-point average or swim faster in a 400-meter freestyle competition. And in the wake of this latest school shooting, anyone who issues a statement containing the word “prayers” (as in “thoughts and prayers”)…I’m sorry but that’s a gun-lobby sentiment.

Read more

Downshifting Feels Right

by

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.

No Monkeypox Freakout

by

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.”