Movies

The Cannes Film Festival remains the most glamorous and famous gathering of the movie industry in the world. High-profile, black-tie premieres attended by some of the best-known actors jostle alongside the more disreputable commercial market. Films on sale this year include My Neighbor Adolf, about the unlikely friendship that is struck up between a Holocaust survivor and a mysterious man who may or may not be Adolf Hitler. But back in the main festival, everything is going entirely to plan. Apparently. There has not been a “normal” Cannes Film Festival since 2019. The 2020 edition was canceled, and the 2021 event took place in reduced and rather glum circumstances in July. But now Cannes is back, back, back, bébé!

One of the most enduring images from the Oscars came two decades ago, at the 2002 ceremony, when director David Lynch revealed himself as one of the most courteous and pleasant figures in contemporary cinema. Ron Howard had just won the Best Director award for his work on the dishonest and ephemeral mental health drama A Beautiful Mind. As the beaming Howard — one of the most popular figures in Hollywood — headed onto the stage to collect his prize, two of his defeated rivals, Robert Altman and Lynch, embraced one another.

Next week marks the release of the third J.K. Rowling-scripted Fantastic Beasts film, a series that has overstayed its welcome. This latest iteration is subtitled The Secrets of Dumbledore. As if to wrong-foot those who would smirkingly speculate that one of Dumbledore’s secrets is his sexuality, the film opens with the old wizard and his former lover-turned-nemesis Grindelwald (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, replacing a disgraced Johnny Depp) mourning the end of their love affair, which at least makes the homosexual subtext hinted at in previous films explicit. But that, alas, is about it for any kind of coherence, or interest, or originality.

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.

I remember enjoying Murder on the Orient Express a few years ago, when I took refuge from a real-life blizzard in a Jackson, Wyoming theater to watch Kenneth Branagh’s decadent take on Agatha Christie’s snow-covered murder mystery. It was memorably cast with big-name talent (Johnny Depp makes one heck of a sleazy bad guy) and exquisite, if sometimes over-the-top, costumes and décor. If memory serves, the movie ended as a suspenseful and satisfying cinematic treat. Death on the Nile, not so much. Branagh teased his next adaptation of an Hercule Poirot novel at the end of Orient Express, but I found his second attempt wasn't worth the five-year wait.

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally. But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

Mr President, as you settle down for an extended seasonal vacation at the little seaside cottage you and your retainers call the ‘Winter White House’, may I, as your sommelier of visual entertainments, recommend a few seasonally suitable amusements for the Mar-a-Lago screening room? You being you, the sort of movie you might find admirable may not exactly square with popular feeling regarding the season of good-will to all men — and, as you recently said, ‘women too, to be politically correct’. If goodwill isn’t to your taste, perhaps the presidential palate will enjoy some ill will, with a side order of bile? Submitted for your approval, Jon Landis’s classic comedy Trading Places (1983).