That’s chicken feed!

And how many of these films did Yahoo Entertainment’s Kelsey Weekman write about as she went along? Anyone can watch films on the Côte d’Azur in mid-May, but you also have to man up and journalistically explore cinematic meaning while plumbing the very depths of your soul.

Weekman isn’t so much a proverbial suffering scribe as an on-camera personality who does breezy lah-lah videos. (Light on the soul-plumbing.) She did, however, file a few video reports in Cannes so no harm nor foul.

My own modest tally of 22 films over 11 days paled alongside Tomris Laffly’s Herculean ordeal of catching 40 films within the same time frame, but how many of those 40 did Laffly-the-screening-slayer bang out 500-word reviews of? Screenings plus timely filings are what separate the men from the boys and the women from the girls.

Plus what about catching Directors Fortnight films deep in the bowels of the J.W. Marriott, Kelsey?

And you and your husband (what’s his story?) blew out of town before Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, easily the best of the festival, began to be shown? And you missed (or had no interest in) Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague? And you liked the grimly agonizing Sound of Falling? Good God in heaven…why?

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I never knew “Cathy’s Clown“, released in April 1960, was solely written by the 23-year-old Don Everly, and that it was recorded live in a single take with Don and Phil Everly sharing a mike.

Born on 2.1.37, Don-the-tenor was roughly two years older than the soprano-ish Phil, who was born on 1.19.39.

“Cathy’s Clown” was certainly the Everly Brothers’ biggest-selling single, as well as the angriest and most emotionally grounded (not to mention the most self-loathing) of all their duets.

The lyrics describe a dude who is enraged and fuming about having been betrayed and humiliated by a duplicitous girlfriend.

The Everlys aside, the musicians included Hank Garland on guitars, Floyd “On the Rebound” Cramer on piano, Floyd Chance on bass and Buddy Harman on drums.

Phil became more and more of an arch-conservative as he aged. A heart ailment took him out on 1.3.14, at age 74. Don, an old-school liberal, passed in August 2021.

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Maher vs. Mamet: The first 18 to 19 minutes of this discussion of Trumpism, bullshit, incredulity and criminality is fairly good stuff.

And yet Mamet still can’t pronounce Kamala Harris‘s first name properly — it’s comma-lah, for Chrissake. And his over-sized beret looks kinda dopey.

Agreed — Mamet-the-playwright was God in the ’80s and ’90s, but that cred is totally shot now. Okay, yes….just about everything Mamet says about the legacy media and drooling Joe Biden is fairly spot-on, but…

The whole discussion lasts just over 90 minutes.

I’ve been drawing water from my Wes Anderson past for over 25 years now. The glorious ’90s plus The Royal Tenenbaums, I mean.

The last time I was truly delighted, Wes-wise, was 11 years ago, which is when I first saw The Grand Budapest Hotel at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s been a rough decade since. For me, at least.

Budapest aside, I am a genuine, whole-hearted fan of only a handful of Wes’s films — Rushmore (which I’ve always adored like a brother), Bottle Rocket, the original black-and-white Bottle Rocket short, most of The Royal Tenenbaums. But I dearly love the Wes signage, specifically the shorts and parodies. The SNL Anderson horror film short is heaven.

I will always be on Team Anderson, and I will never resign. Partly because I’m…well, 85% to 90% certain that one day Wes will reach into his heart and decide to broaden his scope, or perhaps even re-think things somewhat. (Wes is still relatively young.) He has to — artists have no choice. I just hope and pray he’ll make more of an effort to blend his hermetic Wesworld aesthetic with the bigger, gnarlier, more complex world that’s been there all along.

For those who’ve never watched the original 13-minute Bottle Rocket short that played at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, please give it a looksee. It boasts some of that raggedy, roughshod quality that defined Wes’s aesthetic 32 or 33 years ago…a quality that will never return, of course, but it’s a nice contact high all the same.

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A bearded Oscar Isaac as Colin Clive….we know that much. And the unseen Jacob Elordi as Victor Frankenstein’s monster.

…are, in this order, Peter Weir‘s Witness, John Huston‘s Prizzi’s Honor, Albert Brooks’ Lost in America, Woody Allen‘s The Purple Rose of Cairo and Robert Zemeckis‘s Back to the Future.

These five share 1985’s top honors…then, now and forever. Over the last 40 years they’ve not only held on but deepened or added.

I could possibly make room for a sixth — John Boorman‘s The Emerald Forest. (I’m actually thinking right now about re-watching it.) And a seventh, I suppose — Lawrence Kasdan‘s Silverado. And an eighth — Hector Babenco‘s Kiss of the Spider Woman. And a ninth, come to think — Stuart Gordon‘s Re-Animator. And actually a tenth — William Friedkin‘s To Live and Die in L.A..

So that’s five great ones and five very goods. Plus seven honorable mentions for a total of 17….not a bad tally.

Sydney Pollack‘s Out of Africa, which won ’85’s Best Picture Oscar, is handsomely shot, nicely paced and very well acted (by Meryl Streep in particular), but I haven’t rewatched it once this century. That means something.

I never much cared for Clint Eastwood‘s Pale Rider…haven’t rewatched it, will probably ignore it for the rest of my time on this planet.

I hate Steven Spielberg‘s The Color Purple, Terry Gilliam‘s Brazil, Richard Attenborough‘s A Chorus Line, James Bridges‘ Perfect, Wolfgang Petersen‘s Enemy Mine, Richard Marquand‘s Jagged Edge, Richard Donner‘s Ladyhawke, Carolco’s Rambo: First Blood, Part II, Michael Ritchie‘s Fletch, Joel Schumacher‘s St. Elmo’s Fire….if you want to be cynical about it, you could say ’85 delivered way too many shallow or otherwise disposable films.

Honorable Mention: Fred Schepisi‘s Plenty, Martin Scorsese‘s After Hours, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train, Roger Donaldson‘s Marie, Alan Rudolph‘s Trouble in Mind; Akira Kurosawa‘s Ran, Peter Masterson and Horton Foote‘s The Trip to Bountiful. (7)

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The problem with Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2, which I re-watched today after catching it last November, is that Nicholas Hoult‘s story can’t resolve itself in a way that feels fair or just.

It plays with you and keeps you guessing while boxing you in, but it’s deliberately meant to end “badly”, which is to say in a way that leaves you thinking “this isn’t right….I don’t like this…why did Hoult’s character, a decent guy, have to suffer so for an accident?”

If you ask me the Rotten Tomatoes critics overpraised it. They respected the story tension (as I did), but sidestepped the fact that the film is written in such a way that it can’t possibly resolve itself in a generally satisfying fashion.

Posted on 11.5.24: Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2 is a smart, somber, adult-angled jury deliberation drama that holds you start to finish. Alas, it leaves you with an unsatisfied feeling at the very end.

It’s about a reasonable, sensible 30something dude (Nicholas Hoult‘s Justin Kemp, a married, ex-alcoholic magazine writer) trying to wriggle his way out of a tough moral-pressure-cooker situation.

There’s no good way out of what Kemp is facing, and yet we, the audience, would like to see this obviously decent protagonist find a solution regardless.

Serving as a juror on a murder trial, Kemp is devastated early on by a two-fold realization — i.e., the guy accused of killing his girlfriend (Gabriel Basso‘s James Michael Sythe) is not guilty, and that Kemp, of all the forehead-slapping coincidences, is accidentally guilty of having hit this woman with his car on a dark rainy night.

Kemp initially thinks he might have hit a deer, but he’s also not sure. He’s actually suppressing a terrible inkling. His car was damaged by the impact but he had the dent fixed and then he lied to his pregnant wife about where the collision happened.

So the film is basically held together by Kemp’s moral discomfort as well as our own.

How to solve this horrific situation? Kemp tries the Henry Fonda-in-12 Angry Men solution by trying to talk his fellow jurors out of finding a guilty verdict due to reasonable doubt. A hung jury won’t suffice as the case will just be retried.

Juror No. 2 lacks the tension and intrigue of 12 Angry Men, but it never bores and it certainly ends boldly. That’s all I’m going to say.

Our natural inclination is to want to see justice done, which in this case means Kemp has to come clean and face the music. But an attorney friend (Kiefer Sutherland) tells Kemp that because of his prior alcoholism no one will believe he was sober at the time of the accident, and that he’ll wind up doing serious time. Excerpt hie wife (Zoey Deutch) is about to give birth so there’s nothing but pain either way.

Without getting into specifics there’s a major plot hole that involves auto-body repair receipts. That’s all I’m going to say but this issue becomes more and more bothersome.

I haven’t seen Laura Piani‘s Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, but leaving aside this Sony Pictures Classics release, we’re obviously looking at a dreary weekend.

The only respectable diversion, for some, is Wes Anderson‘s The Phoenician Scheme, which I saw a couple of weekends ago in Cannes. And yet it only has a 77% RT rating, which by high-school grading standards is equivalent to a C-minus. Has anyone seen it?

I felt immediately mystified hy the casting of Mia Threapleton, the 25 year-old daughter of the once-married Kate Winslet and painter-filmmaker Jim Threapleton, in the lead female role. She delivers the same kind of standard deadpan performance that Wes always gets from his actors. The odd thing is Threapleton’s appearance. She’s not only short and chubbyish, but her face is wider than it is tall, and I’m sorry but she simply doesn’t stir the pot. I just couldn’t understand why she was cast.

Otherwise The Phoenician Scheme is another Wes comfort zone movie. Too much so.

Posted on 5.19.25: It’s not important or even noteworthy, trust me, to explain the plotline of Wes Anderson‘s exactingly composed The Pheonician Scheme. Because it’s just (stop me if you’ve heard this before) another serving of immaculate style mixed with ironic, bone-dry humor — another signature tableau exercise in WesWorld stuff — wit, whimsy, staccato dialogue, a darkly humorous attitude, faintly detectable emotional peek-outs. Plus the usual symmetrical framings, immaculate and super-specific production design and the Anderson troupe reciting their lines just so.

I’ve written repeatedly over the last couple of decades that Wes needs to recover or re-charge that old Bottle Rocket / Rushmore spirit and somehow climb out of that fastidiously maintained Andersonville aesthetic and, you know, open himself up to more of the good old rough and tumble. Maybe there’s no remedy. Maybe we’re all just stuck in our grooves and that’s that. What’s that Jean Anouilh line from Becket? “I’m afraid we can only do, absurdly, what it has been given to us to do. Right to the end.”

Otherwise you should live your life, manage your affairs and achieve your goals cold sober. There’s really no other way.

I kinda like floating around on Ketamine from time to time but I wouldn’t touch Adderall or any other speed-like substances with a ten-foot pole.

Elon Musk to himself: “I can do what I want as long as I stay lucid and keep it together and, you know, maintain a respectable front.”

I saw A Complete Unknown three times in theatres last December, and then once more on my phone (not recommended).

The truth is that between Timothee Chalamet’s frequently mumbled dialogue, today’s imperfect on-set dialogue recording tech and the decent but less-than-immaculate sound systems in mainstream theatres today, I never heard each and every line. I heard most of the screenplay, but missed maybe 25% or 30%.

Last night I watched it on Bluray with subtitles, and what a difference! Every previously slurred, half-articulated line was revealed and clarified, and it really bumped up the enjoyment factor. It’s almost like watching an entirely different film. Not to mention the fact that it looks better on Bluray than it did at those various AMCs (two in Manhattan, one in Westport).

I’d still like to know which scene is the fictitious one…the scene that Bob Dylan cooked up…the one that director James Mangold expressed concern about including because it never happened in actuality, in response to which Dylan said “what do you care?…if the scene works, it works.”

You may see a casual shot of Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds and David Wayne on the set of The Tender Trap (‘55). I see that also, of course, but my eyes go right to Sinatra’s elevator heels, which may or may not have added two and 1/2 to three inches. Sinatra stood between 5’7” and 5’8” just out of the shower. Wayne was also 5’7”; Reynolds stood 5’2”.

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Six days ago (Friday, 5.23) I watched a “new 4K digital restoration” of Barry Lyndon, projected upon the big, beautiful screen at the Salle Debussy. I had somehow persuaded myself that it would somehow look better (crisper, cleaner, whatever). Well, it looked fine but unremarkable…un-bumped…about as unexceptional as a 35mm screening I caught in Savannah several years ago…no better, no worse.

If Lyndon has been shot today the images would look considerably more specific and detailed…if it had been shot with an iPhone 15 even… but it was shot on 35mm film by John Alcott 51 years ago, and the lenses of that era were what they were.

But you know what? I have a suspicion that it will look better on the 65-inch Sony 4K when the Criterion 4K disc comes out on Tuesday, 7.8..