Lone Wolf, Old-Timer…Nobody Wants A Wipe-Out

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The new F1 trailer ends with the words “Filmed for IMAX”. Meaning what exactly? All of it will be projected in 1.43:1 IMAX? No IMAX-shot film has ever screened entirely in that process. It’s always sections. So this is different? They need to be specific.

“Hope isn’t a strategy”….true.

When a costar asks Brad Pitt, “Any other words of wisdom, professor?”, he says “Drive fast?” Good one, except he should have said this more emphatically.

In my head it’s a profound tragedy that F1 won’t be playing at Cannes.

Cruise Never Combs Hair or Uses “Product”…Odd

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Every dude with hair uses “product” (Crew Fiber or Boost Powder, hair spray, Batiste dry shampoo, Brylcream…something) or at the very least a comb. To give it an intended attitude, a little shape. Otherwise your hair just flops and scatters out all over the place.

Tom Cruise definitely applied hair shapers and holders in the early days (Risky Business, The Firm, A Few Good Men) but not over the last few years. Nowadays he pretty much wears a raggedy-ass soup bowl. An odd way to go.

Nearly Ten Years Ago

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Posted on 6.9.15: “Nancy Wells, my dear mom, passed Sunday night. She gave me everything — life, love, love of the arts (she turned me on to Peter Tchaikovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, John Updike, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin…the list is infinite) and particularly love of theatre.

“She was the beating heart and balm of our family — 90% of the joy and spunk and laughter came from her, and she basically saved me and my brother and sister from my father’s alcoholic moodiness when we were young. (Not to diminish my dad’s influence too much — he gave me the writerly urge along with the barbed attitude, such as it is.) But I would have been dead without my mom’s emotional radiance and buoyancy. “

My mom loved show business, plays, films, music. She worked for NBC and BBC in the old days, acted in several plays in New Jersey (including Somserset Maugham‘s The Constant Wife) and directed two or three plays at the Wilton Playshop. She was partnered in her own real-estate business in the late ’70s and early ’80s. “

She had been gradually slipping away for a couple of years (during my last visit she didn’t even open her eyes). Now, at last, her peace is absolute.

“Floating Island of Garbage” Guy

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Besides being “offensive”, offensive humor is, on a certain level, good for the soul. Almost on a level of “the more offensive, the better”. Because any jokes that piss off wokesters are, on a certain level, quite soothing. I’m not saying that the actual import of racist humor is literally funny, but the howling and abusive spectacle of it all is, on a certain level….I don’t know what I’m saying.

Insult humor is often funny, okay? To sensible center-left types, I mean. I’m sorry but it is.

We all remember how Tony Hinchcliffe infuriated AOC and many other lefties after trashing Puerto Ricans at a Donald Trump campaign rally in Madison Square Garden on 10.27.24. He described Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage”, and joked that “these Latinos, they love making babies, they do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that, they come inside, just like they do to our country”.

He also riffed about “carving watermelons with Black people” and “making a rock paper scissors joke involving Palestinians throwing rocks, and Jews “[having] a hard time throwing that paper.”

This Oldie Holds Up

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This is still a very catchy and agreeable song….nice harmonies, easy 4/4 rhythm. Primarily written by John Lennon in early ’62, “Ask Me Why” was initially recorded at Abbey Road studios on 6.6.62….with drummer Pete Best.

Sure enough, Best got the axe nine weeks later — 8.16.62. Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison didn’t have the stones to lower the boom directly, so their 28-year-old manager, Brian Epstein, stepped up and did the deed.

“Ask Me Why” was recorded again, along with “Please Please Me”, on 11.26.62 with Ringo Starr on drums.

Best is still with us at age 83.

Is Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” About To Happen?

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Cannes Film Festival handicappers have been asking which film in the line-up, if any, will be this year’s Anora…a bracingly honest, non-downish diversion of sorts…a film that might emotionally touch bottom and actually pay off.

I know nothing but my gut is telling me that Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, which will screen late on Wednesday, 5.21, and twice more the following day…I’m going out on a limb by predicting that this comedy-drama costarring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Elle Fanning, Inga Lilleaas and Cory Michael Smith might be the shit…I really like and admire Trier and this feels like the right movie at the right moment.

Friendo: “Trier is good. And I think this is his time, his year…you can feel it.”

A Cannes regular is picking up good buzz about Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling, a German-made Competition film about “four generations of women connected by a farm in the Altmark region.” I’ll see it on Wednesday, 5.14.

Friendo #2: “Sound of Falling has no reason to be in Competition unless it’s actually good. It’s from a second-time, basically unknown German director and no big stars in the cast, so there’s no reason for the Cannes team to program it unless it’s an actual discovery.”

I’m also being told to expect a little something extra from Scarlett Johansson‘s Eleanor the Great, which stars June Squibb. The script by Tory Kamen (daughter of Mark Kamen, who penned Taken and Karate Kid) is kind of like an eldercare American Fiction by way of Alexander Payne.

“It basically revolves around June’s Eleanor Morgenstein appropriating the life story of a late friend who was a Holocaust survivor. Eleanor shares this after accidentally stumbling into a support group for Holocaust survivors and family of survivors. It’s this little white lie that she tells that snowballs and snowballs into this bigger thing, and soon she’s at a loss to stop it because it creates this whole kind of celebrity status for her in her new social circle at the retirement home, and she ends up befriending this college student who wants to write a paper on her, etc.”

The source says if (I say “if”) the movie delivers on the promise of the script, it’s a total award-season role for Squibb. And yet a friend who’s seen it says “meh.”

The other hotties are Ari Aster‘s Eddington, Lynne Ramsay‘s Die My Love, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Kleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent, Sebastian Lelio‘s The Wave, Harris Dickinson‘s Urchin, Kristen Stewart‘s The Chronology of Water, Christian Petzold‘s Miroits No. 3, Richard Linklater‘s Nouvelle Vague, Raoul Peck‘s Orwell, Jafar Panahi‘s A Simple Accident, Oliver Hermanus‘s The History of Sound (12 — 15 counting the top three).

What am I forgetting or unfairly dismissing?

I’m very wary about seeing Splitsville.

HE letter sent to friends this morning:

“I’m not sensing that we’re about to experience a weak Cannes, per se, but that the ‘25 edition may be a bit of an underwhelmer. Who knows? The real goodies, as usual, will show up in the early fall. Apart from the Trier and the Aster and the Jennifer Lawrence going crazy and I’m forgetting what else, have you been hearing any semi-encouraging buzz about anything? Anything at all?”

Friendo #3: “Every May there’s always a gem or two, but Cannes is mostly a bunch of unimportant films that people like Justin Chang and Guy Lodge, doing two weeks’ worth of cartwheels, insist are world-changing works of art.”

“That Aside, What Did You Think of the Play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

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Yesterday morning I read a 5.7.24 Richard Brody appreciation of the late N.Y. Times film critic Andrew Sennwald, who served as the paper of record’s senior film authority between 9.18.34 and 1.12.36.

Hired by the Times as a reporter at age 23, Sennwald soon became a top-tier, unusually perceptive examiner of the art and hoopla of film, Brody writes. Sennwald was an ardent admirer of director Josef von Sternberg, for one thing.

I’ve since read a few of Sennwald’s reviews. He wrote confidently and well, and certainly knew the realm.

It’s a shame that this highly respected guy died at age 28 and suddenly at that, and possibly by his own hand despite reportedly being in excellent health, not to mention in the professional prime of his life.

Weird as it sounds, Sennwald died of gas-stove poisoning, apparently or at least possibly a suicide.

On top of which the gas, which Sennwald, being dead, was unable turn off, exploded and wrecked his penthouse apartment at 670 West End Avenue, and not just the penthouse but the top three floors of the 17-story building. Investigators found Sennwald in his pajamas, on the floor of his kitchen.

Was this an accident? Why in heaven would a young man who’d quickly vaulted to a highly eminent position in his chosen field (it doesn’t get much better than being a top critic at the Times), a guy who lived in a fairly swanky abode and presumably had everything to live for…why would he off himself on a Saturday around midnight, and in his pajamas yet?

If I intended to do myself in, I would do so in my finest apparel — silk shirt, knotted tie, spit-shined shoes.

Sennwald’s last review focused on Rene Clair‘s The Ghost Goes West. Sennwald was succeeded at the Times by Frank Nugent.

Sennwald’s marriage to journalist Yvonne Beaudry, whom he met while going for his journalism degree at Columbia University, had apparently gone south. Sennwald’s Wiki page describes her as an ex-wife, although they were reportedly on cordial terms. Beaudry was out on the town when he died.

Sennwald may have been suffering from a serious eye ailment called Uveitis, but there’s not much info on this. He was also an insomniac.

While reporting that Sennwald’s death was seemingly a “suicide”, Brody otherwise focuses entirely on his film criticism. I respect his decision to ignore the curious circumstances that attended Sennwald’s passing, but that’s still one hell of an ignore.

It’s not like Sennwald swallowed some pills and slipped away quietly while slumping on a bench in Central Park. His death triggered a violent spectacle and a major neighborhood trauma — collapsed walls, fellow residents evacuated, a busted water main…bluh-DOOM!!

Brody could have just as easily have written about the Skull Island life of King Kong (wrestling an occasional T-Rex, killing Teradactyls, roaring a lot) and then blown off what happened on his final day of life in midtown Manhattan.

Not to mention the fact (I’ve made this point but indulge me) that a top N.Y. Times critic would never kill himself inside his West End Ave. penthouse at a fairly young age…does this make any sense to anyone at all?

A film critic hypothetically pulls the plug when (a) he/she can’t find decent employment, (b) is past his/her prime (65 or older) and (c) is barely making ends meet in a grubby flat in the East Village.

Reported by The Brooklyn Eagle on 1.13.36:

Brody:

Choose or Lose: Cannes Day #1 (5.14)

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Amelie Bonnin ‘s Partir Un Jour (lowered expectations) at 9 am, the Chris McQuarrie thing at 12:30 pm, Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling at 3:30 pm, ixnay on the Robert DeNiro thing, MI: Final Reckoning at 6:45 pm, Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors at 10:15 pm. Four films. Come hell or high water, I must commit at 1 am eastern, tonight.