…but all through it I was saying to myself, “This is a smart and aggressive political satire of sorts…a crazy relationship-driven thing…a pronounced antagonism film but this small-town ‘western’ set in May 2020 is basically just a narrative version of the same X-treme left vs. X-treme right insanity that we’ve all been living with since the start of the pandemic, if not 2018 or ’19…

“I appreciate the vigor and the pacing and the increasingly lunatic tone, but it’s a miss, I’m afraid…it’s just not happening…I’m not hating it or looking at my watch, but I’m not caught up in it either. I felt detached and distanced…I was in my seat and Eddington was up on the screen….different realms.”

Until, that is, Eddington abandons all sense of restraint and it becomes The Wild Bunch on steroids.

Friendo (half-hour ago): “How was Eddington?”

HE: “It’s a very smart, increasingly intense, ultimately surreal reflection of the stark raving madness of the COVID years. If you remove the over-the-top violence of the last 45 or so, it’s basically a movie about the same polarizing rhetorical shit we’ve all been living with since 2020 (or, in my head at least, since 2018). JUST YOUR BASIC AMERICAN POLARIZED MADNESS. Take away the bullets and the brain matter and it reminded me of the comment threads from Hollywood Elsewhere over the last five or six years.

One reason I didn’t fall for it or kind of resisted the vibe is that Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance as Joe Cross, the rightwing-ish, initally not-too-crazy, anti-mask sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico…Joaquin’s performance is fairly weak…it’s almost like he’s playing Napoleon again…I understood and had no argument with the arc of Cross’s journey and all, but I simply didn’t like hanging with the guy. There’s something flaccid and fumbling and inwardly uncertain about him. He’s not “entertaining”.

Pedro Pascal‘s performance as Ted Garcia, the sensibly-liberal mayor of Eddington, is much more grounded and appealing. Emma Stone is pretty much wasted.

Another reason I didn’t feel all that charmed or aroused is that Eddington doesn’t have any big keeper scenes or any dialogue that I would call signature-level in the manner of Scarface (“You fucked up too, Mel…The only thing in this world that gives orders is balls”) or Heat (“Because she’s got a….great ass!”) or Tony Gilroy‘s Devil’s Advocate (“He’s an absentee landlord!”)…

I’m not calling it a “bad” or ineffective film or anything, but it’s basically unexciting and kind of drab and sloppy and not much fun, really. And the chaos is…well, certainly predictable. It has some bizarre surreal humor at times, but mostly it’s a fastball thrown wide of the batter’s box.

The thing Eddington was selling never plugged in, never spoke to me beyond the obvious. It’s all about X-treme left bonker types vs. gun-toting, righty-right over-reactions. Okay, I felt taken when it became a bloody bullet ballet over the last 45 or so minutes, or do I mean the last 60 or so? I can’t remember.

,/p>A

All hail Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, which I saw this morning at 8:45 am. It’s EASILY the best Cannes ’25 film thus far…EASILY.

The only thing that scares me is that I saw Netflix’s Albert Tello at the screening, and it would be awful if Netflix were to capture this jewel of a children’s adventure film and bury it in their streaming feed. Cake is an upscale crowd-pleaser in the finest, richest, most culturally authentic sense of the term, and it needs to be seen theatrically….please. It’s my idea of an instant classic — all but guaranteed to be nominated for a Best Int’l Feature Oscar.

I tend to be impatient with films about young kids but this handmade Iraqi film (apparently the first from that formerly turbulent, war-torn country to be shown in Cannes) is different…it has an impoverished but compassionate Bicycle Thief atmosphere with just a tiny little touch of The Red Balloon and maybe a slight spritzing of Hector Babenco‘s Pixote, and you can tell almost immediately it’s a grade-A, pick-of-the-litter pearl.

Partially set in the wetland marshes of southern Iraq (which for the 37th time is not pronounced EYE-rack but Uhraq) but mostly in a big city (not precisely identified as Bagdad but shot there) and all of it occuring just before the 2003 U.S. invasion, it’s basically about a nine-year-old girl, Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), who lives in a floating straw hut upon the Mesopotamian marshes with grandmother Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat).

The plot comes from Hadi’s childhood memory of a school event in which one member of each class is chosen to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein‘s birthday (4.28). Lamia is selected to be her class’s cake-baker. She and Bibi are dirt poor and can barely afford, much less find, the chief ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar) but failing to deliver or, worse, refusing this honor is out of the question.

And so Lamia, Bibi and Lamia’s pet rooster Hindi head for the big city (Basra, Nasiriyah and Amarah are closest to the marshes). And yet the diabetic, overweight Bibi has a secret agenda in visiting the city, and this freaks Lamia out. So she takes off and hooks up with Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), a school friend and an Artful Dodger-like thief who’s roughly her age. The heart of Cake is about these two scrounging around Bagdad in a search for the cake ingredients and coping with a few Dickensian twists and turns.

Boiled down, the film is essentially a portrait of Bagdad street life and all kinds of crafty, hustling, struggling denizens (including a devious would-be molester) trying to save or make a buck or otherwise stay afloat.

Nayef and Qasem are not only perfect in a way that only non-actors can be, but they blend together beautifully.

The brilliant cinematography by Tudor Vladimir Panduru and the nimble editing by Andu Radu are genius touches.

Eric Roth and Marielle Heller helped bring Cake to life from a Sundance Screenwriting Lab. Roth: “It’s a small miracle…dear Hasan has a poet’s soul…in this too public business of absorbing the blows of outrageous fortune, Cake is that sweet taste of honey.”

Chris Columbus and Michelle Satter also pulled strings on the film’s behalf.

A U.S. distribution deal is presumably imminent, but please, God…please don’t let it be picked up and smothered by Netflix.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay from a screenplay by Ramsay, Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, the Montana-set Die, My Love is about a new mom developing sinking into postpartum depression and basically going whacko. Costarring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, with Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte in supporting roles. Tomorrow night (Saturday, 5.17) at 10:15 pm.

Late last night I was toasting some pita bread in “le pad” (8 Blvd. Montfleury), and the heat caused the pita to crack apart, so it had to be retrieved. I used a kitchen knife to scoop it out….zotz! The entire place went black, no power, nothing.

No breaker box in the place itself, but there are several boxes in the hallway. Off, on…nothing. I texted with exclamation points and called the landlord….flatline, silencio. No wifi, no computers. Smart phone or nothing.

Update: it’s now 8:35 am and the landlord hasn’t called or even acknowledged the problem via text.

What with the Cannes grind, I’m only just gotten around to reading that New Yorker excerpt from Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson‘s “Original Sin” (Penguin, 5.20).

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Sergei Loznitsa‘s Two Prosecutors, which I saw last night at the Salle Debussy, is a drably effective tale of bureaucratic cowardice and malevolence in 1937 Russia, during “the height of Stalin’s terror”, as a title card informs.

It’s basically a flat, slowly paced anti-drama about a naive young prosecutor (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) who tries to push for justice in the case of a political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the NKVD (aka The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs).

We know from the get-go, of course, that Kuznetsov’s Kornyev will not only fail in this quest but probably suffer persecution himself. This is precisely what happens in the end, so apart from Loznitsa’s exacting dialogue, Kuznesov’s quietly compelling performance, a much more theatrical one from Aleksandr Filippenko and Oleg Mutu‘s formal framings, there’s really not a lot to write home about.

You’re sitting there saying “Jesus, does Kornyev have any street smarts? He’s putting his own head into a noose and it’s just a matter of time before he’s arrested,” etc.

Loznitsa’s basic idea is something along the lines of “even in Stalinist Russia, there was no stopping a naive young man who wanted to see justice done, even if he knew deep down that he was asking for it.”

I was fine with Two Prosecutors as far as it went, but it could have been a more absorbing thing. No twists or turns, no brief flashes of hope, no unexpected moments. Nothing really happens except for the fact that Kornyev keeps trying to push his case. An intelligent, well-mannered idiot….congrats and enjoy your prison time!

Two Prosecutors was shot in 1.37 to 1…here’s how the Debussy screen looked last night before the lights came down.

Stateside friendo (received in Cannes late Thursday morning, right after the 8:30 am Grand Lumiere screening of M:I-8 was letting out): “So how was Final Reckoning, Jeff?”

HE to stateside friendo: “It’s a completely nutso, excessively self-regarding, deranged lunatic heebie-jeebie whackathon…an advertisement for itself and its own 30-year legacy…a superflick that welcomely won’t stop explaining and re-explaining the absurdly complex plot, and yet it goes off the rails almost immediately…wait, wait…what is this?…tricking and tap-dancing itself out…too effing show-offy by half…it double- and then triple-backs itself into what struck me as a state of self-satirizing abuse…abusing itself and the audience in the same bargain.

“Ostensibly made by Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie but an undeniably assaultive, essentially brutalizing experience that might have been made (and in fact probably was influenced on some level) by ‘the Entity’ itself…it’s a $400 million enterprise that almost feels like a goofball parody of all the Mission-Impossibles we’ve been watching since the original Brian DePalma version (which opened on 5.22.96)…an AI robot movie that will be best appreciated by wannabe AI robots in the audience.”

I felt beaten to a pulp when it ended…beaten, bloody and wobbly in the knees…169 minutes long, and burdened, I felt, by crazy-busy thigamajig plotting (steal this thing in order to unlock this thing and also recover Ving Rhames‘ “poison pill” in order to prevent worldwide nuclear disaster and yaddah-yaddah) that I found much more fatiguing and brain-straining than engaging.

I liked the red-and-yellow-biplane sequence at the very end, but I didn’t love it. I guess I was feeling too fatigued by the time it rolled around.

Plus it’s awfully damn slow to get its act together and shift into passing gear…the first scene that really works (Cruise’s Ethan Hunt explaining to Angela Bassett‘s U.S. president what absolutely needs to be done…no ifs, ands or buts…to destroy the Entity and avert a nuclear catastrophe) happens around the 45-minute mark, and if it takes that long for a film to put oars into the water something is very wrong.

There’s also something hugely eccentric and playfully meta about Cruise-McQuarrie using the theatrical opening date of the original DePalma version — 5.22.96 — as a key plot point. The date is hand-written on White House stationery by President Bassett, alluding to the earlybird hatching of the Entity or something in that realm.

Cruise’s appearance subtly shifts from scene to scene. He looks fit as ever in certain portions — lean and rugged in a creased and weathered way — and then his face puffs up a bit in others. And his hair shifts around also, shortish and moussed and well-styled and then wild and untended. The fact — this is important — is that Cruise is starting to look too old to be performing his usual energizer-bunny stuff.

Remember that most of MI:8 was shot sometime in ’21…right? It was initially set to open on on 8.5.22 but then delayed to 11.4.22, 7.7.23, 6.28.24 and then finally to the current date of 5.23.25. Cruise was 59 or 60 during initial principal photography, but he’ll be celebrating his 63rd birthday on 7.3.25. He’s still in excellent shape, of course — the big climactic biplane sequence is proof of this — but it’s probably time to hang up his six-shooter. The action stuff, I mean.

Remember Cruise’s perfectly-toned physique in that romantic foreplay scene with Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut? That was over a quarter-century ago. That muscle tone has sagged somewhat, and his midsection is thicker. It happens. Nothing to fret about.

I actually hated the sequence in which Hunt explores the underwater Russian submarine tomb…what’s it called, the Sevastipol or the Antropova? I don’t ever want to watch anyone immersed in arctic-temp seawater again. It made me feel miserable.

I don’t know what else to say except that it hit me this time that Simon Pegg is wearing a hairpiece.

The IMAX site states that MI:8 “includes over 45 minutes of IMAX’s exclusive 1.90:1 Expanded Aspect Ratio….shot wih IMAX-certified digital cameras.” Well, I didn’t notice any IMAX sequences. No IMAX large-format photography, I mean. Real IMAX is ideally shot and projected at a 1.43:1 aspect ratio.

…if I didn’t admit to feelings of trepidation. Five minutes from starting time (8:25 am)…please don’t piss me off…please enthrall…please.

Insult, insult, insult, insult, insult….topped off by a sentimental crescendo of praise. The Denzel (“Why is he here?”) is much better than the Scorsese.

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