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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013 - 1 Comment »
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Cannes IV 2013 (updated)

The pace of knocking out reviews within hours of seeing these films was a part of the festival experience I had willfully forgotten…. and which has quickly been re-illuminated as unfortunate, as best.

I have spent much of the last week reflecting on what would be my ideal experience festival experience would be… and I’m not sure I’m much closer to an answer. The glory of evolving technology offers opportunities, but they are not necessarily anything but variations on the same theme. Fast is fast whether it’s writing on the web or video on the web or Vine or Twitter, etc., ad nauseum.

Is 800 words in 90 minutes better than 140 characters in 90 seconds or is there something better in between?

I’m not unconscious that these are all very real in today’s media space. And I actually think there is validity on the existence of immediate response, even amongst professionals. The problem is that it is often the only form of response… and I consider that a real problem.

And I don’t know the answer… or even know if there is an answer. More than ever, we are in an editor-free role. There is a boss for most of us, but the role of the editor has changed. What we don’t know… gets printed.

Of course, there are all kinds of layers of good, bad, and simply incompetent. There are a lot of people doing their work here (and in Sundance and Toronto and elsewhere) and each has a focus and a perspective and parameters of their self-valuation. And who is to say who is right and who is wrong. You can pick your team, but your sense of “right” has boundaries by the very nature of the beast.

There was a time, not long ago, when a discrete stick of rhetorical dynamite, carefully placed, could move some stuff. Now, once past the artists who want to consider their work, only embarrassment and the avoidance of embarrassment drives change… not the work and not the chatter.

Sometimes you just have to piss in the ocean because you really need to piss. But is that what journalism has become in entertainment? That and the effort to be able to claim that someone even noticed the warm spot in the ocean?

I owe you some reviews. (Twitter gets some quick reactions.). But this afternoon was for ranting, it seems.

Death March
The Last Of The Unjust
Shield of Straw
Omar
CBGB
Behind The Candelabra
Sarah Prefers To Run
Bastards
Only God Forgives
La Jaula de Oro

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1 Comment »

One Response to “Cannes IV 2013 (updated)”

  1. The Pope says:
    May 23, 2013 at 6:07 am

    800 words is infinitely better. 140 characters in a few seconds is too much a knee-jerk reaction. We must lament the need for an instant response; cinema is not a fast art. It takes years to get a film made and due consideration should be given.

    I’m here in Cannes and a press conference is in progress for Daniel Noah’s film MAX ROSE. Jerry Lewis stars and he has been holding court for at least 5 minutes. STRAIGHT! The man is 87 years old!!!

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon