IN PRAISE OF LOVE — CANNES 2001

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French New Wave Cinema standard bearer Jean-Luc Godard's 2001 study in inventive filmic expression carries significant weight.

Godard refracts historic, personal, and editorial messaging through pure cinematic poetry.

The narrative involves a filmmaker navigating his current documentary navigating his current project while recovering emotionally after the break-up of a 10-year relationship.

A shift from black-and-white to color has a profound effect on the audience.

Godard's kaleidoscopic approach to storytelling is refreshing for his willingness to to make political statements big and small.

Jean-Luc Godard takes a steely knife to Stephen Spielberg, who he detests with an obvious fury.

Love isn't all that Godard is praising.

Hollywood and Americans represent people who refuse to ever become adults.

"In Praise of Love" could easily serve as a permanent installment at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I screened this beautiful film in its truly amazing 4K restoration, kicking off the L’Alliance New York's Version restaurée series, held at the lovely Florence Gould Theater in Midtown Manhattan.

Check it out.

The every-Tuesday night series runs Tuesday, September 10, 2024 - Tuesday, December 17, 2024.

Rated PG. 97 mins.

KINDS OF KINDNESS — CANNES 2024

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Theater of Cruelty

Yorgos Lanthamos Regresses

By Cole Smithey

Since going mainstream with the shockingly delightful "Poor Things," the heir-apparent to such Cinema heavyweights as Michael Haneke, Peter Greenaway, David Cronenberg, and David Lynch, serves up a half-baked mess.

Unintelligible.

Greek avant-garde filmmaker Yorgos Lanthamos re-teams with regular co-writer Efthimis Filippou to create a triptych of stories, each one more morose than the last.

It's the same poorly articulated breed of satire that hobbled other Lanthamos/Filippou projects — see, or rather don't see: "Dogtooth," "Alps," "The Lobster," and "The Killing of a Sacred Deer."

Here is feel-bad Cinema for the masses.

Pointless misery.

Eat up babies.

In "Kinds of Kindness," the viewer is left to their own devices to extrapolate on narcissist bosses, trigger-happy cops, group sex with friends, health cults, and, well yes, cannibalism. Rape and incest also get the Lanthamos spotlight.

If you are going to punish your audience, there ought to be a good reason for it. You will find no such purpose in "Kinds of Kindness" unless you are willing to put yourself through days of mental gymnastics.

The concept for the movie seems to spring from the Annie Lennox/Dave Stewart song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," that introduces the movie.

BDS&M misery.

It is telling that Lanthamos's most successful film "Poor Things" was written by other writers, namely Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray.

Telling too, is Filippou's explanation of "Kinds of Kindness."

"Our main concern is to observe people, behaviors, clothes, and reactions and create a story that relates to something almost real and relatively believable."

How vague can you get?

I dare say that this particular approach will never lead to the narrative heights that David Lynch reached with "Blue Velvet" or "Mulholland Drive," much less Lars von Trier's challenging high-wire act.

Lanthamos flagrantly disregards one of Cinema's strongest precepts, namely that the filmmaker is responsible for sustaining an audience's trust. One reason that Alfred Hitchcock's movies are so good is due to the way Hitch treats his audience. You know that you are in capable hands.

If he were a doctor, Yorgos Lanthamos might, for example, want to amputate your thumb just to see your reaction. Fun for him perhaps, but not for you.

Rated R. 164 mins.ZERO STARS

ASTEROID CITY

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How far the mediocre have fallen.

Wes Anderson has become more of an art instillation filmmaker than a storyteller.

"Asteroid City" is a fine thing to project on the wall of your next cocktail dinner soiree, but it isn't much of a movie, or a play, or whatever the feck Wes Anderson thinks it is.

Here is a movie you'll feel better about walking out on before it begins, than you will wasting the fifteen minutes it takes you to realize what a disastrous piece of inert garbage it truly is.

Still, walk out you will.

Other than inspiring a few chuckles, "Asteroid City" doesn't deliver enough humor, meaningful satire, or narrative structure to be entertaining.

If you like watching paint dry, then you should probably stick to watching paint dry.

I suppose Anderson's name actors (of which there are too many) were happy enough with the two-hundred to five-hundred grand that each were ostensibly paid for their participation in this huge waste of their individual talents.

Childish is as childish does.

Scarlett Johansson's gratuitous (body-double) nude scene takes the cake for just how embarrassingly low Anderson is willing to sink.

Disgusting. 

Rated PG-13. 105 mins.

ZERO STARS