Cannes Diary Day ???: "The Homesman," Or How Tommy Lee Jones Failed at Feminist Storytelling

Diana Drumm is reporting from Cannes for the The Film Experience. 

Based on the award-winning novel (that Paul Newman was attached to for years) by Glendon Swarthout (“The Shootist”), The Homesman is a bizarre, unwieldy Western about 31 year-old spinster Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) and questionable character Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones) who are driving three insane women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter) back East for treatment, or at least respite from their literally-maddening frontier lives.  

Or for a convoluted, reference-laden way to generalize it all, think of The Homesman as an inverse of the Robert Taylor-starring not-quite-classic Westward The Women (1951) meets the Glenn Close-starring made-for-TV movie Sarah, Plain and Tall (1991) with the madness and mismatches of Quills (2000, Briggs being the less couth, toned down subversive Marquis) divided by the stunning Western cinematography of Brokeback Mountain (2005, via Oscar nominee Rodrigo Prieto). Apologies, my brain is flooded with movies. 

Scale of Tommy Lee Jones orneriness, gender politics, and star cameos after the jump...

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Fantastic Links and When To Blog Them

The Dissolve Alfonso Cuarón might direct the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. The internet seems largely happy about this which puzzles me. I understand everyone likes money but isn't this a huge step backwards after Children of Men/Gravity gave us his full auteurist muscle unbeholden to someone else's franchise? I most definitely think so
Pajiba wonders what was up with that airplane curtain closing wordless scene on Mad Men this weekend? 
The Film Doctor asks 9 questions about Godzilla before realizing he's too old for that shit. (I loved Godzilla so much myself that I've been surprised at the level of thumbs down in comments and online)  
/bent wonders why The Kids Are All Right's director Lisa Cholodenko hasn't yet made a follow up to that financially successful and Oscar nominated feature 

Towleroad one of the Vikings in How To Train Your Dragon 2 comes out as gay kinda. (But ParaNorman will always be first in this regard.)
Antagony & Ecstasy on the intuitive, fluid sensory experience of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its companion novel
Slate Cliff Curtis, ethnic chameleon onscreen 
Gawker "selfie" is entering the dictionary. But why did it take "steampunk" this long?
MNPP JA zeroes in on one sweaty hairy detail of the Weinstein Co's Cannes preview: Southpaw's Jake Gyllenhaal 
The Wire wonders why the internet is so obsessed with Shrek --  I hadn't realized it was (just goes to show you how the interenet is not at all monolithic in terms of its obsessions  -- but this is an interesting article
The New Yorker if you're still grappling with your feelings about Godzilla here's a smart mixed take from Richard Brody which wrestles with the movies grandeur but lack of complexity and its largely passive human characters

Its scale may feel Biblical, but it doesn’t risk the crises and ecstasies, the sheer moral turbulence provoked by existential menace (cf. “Noah”). The monsters in the movie do monstrous battle, while people—the warriors ostensibly arrayed on the front lines against them—are reduced in the foreground to silhouetted spectators. They are the equivalent of the cutout characters of “Mystery Science Theatre 3000,” but without the comfort of a screen to separate them from the mayhem...

He Said / She Said
RogerEbert.com, which I always feel weird about linking to, since the link name always implies that Roger Ebert has written something new but he has of course departed from our mortal coil. Nevertheless, I started to enjoy these opposing pieces from  Michael Oleszczyk and Barbara Scharres on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars until I remembered after the first couple of paragraphs each that I really really really want to go into this one fresh so I can't read anything. BUT if you're not as "sensitive" as I am about reading reviews before you've seen a movie, that's one rave and one pan from the same site so we are now free to call the movie "divisive" as often as we'd like. It's our favorite kind of critical response - homogeneity being so dreadfully dull. Oleszczyk and Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair both rave about Julianne Moore's performance and that's enough to excite me for now without really reading anything!

Speaking of Julianne Moore...

Here she is with Harrison Ford at a party at Cannes. Remember when nobody knew who she was but her walk in The Fugitive (1993) was so grabby anyway? #whowasthat 

You can see more photos from this particular party at Vanity Fair.

Open Thread. Fix Your Face! "Look at My Muscles"

Jim Broadbent fixes Katherine Helmond's face in Brazil (1985)This week's banner is going out to Dusty who won the Kidman focused Say What contest. (Last week's "eye roll" was a hit so why not continue?) Dusty chose facial restoration of any kind. Cheeky! Thus I am obliged to pose thusly (see right hand sidebar) and find celebrity photos to accompany my goopiness up top. Hope you enjoy.

But this leads me to three questions.

01. Is this some sort of hint that I need to fix myself? It's true I have been looking worse for the wear (I don't recommend turning 40+)  as stated in the "weight watching" thread. So I'll take the hint given what I suggested there and set up a weekly offsite email group for encouragement (exercize, self-improvement, whatnot... probably with movies to help us) because it's easier to stay motivated in numbers. If you're interested, let me know. Consider it a sidebar experiment.

02. What's your favorite facial restoration technique or makeover sequence in a movie? 

03. Have you seen this little clip* from Ryan Gosling's Lost River? I'm only displaying it here because I was typing about self-improvement / possible exercize when I first heard its weird in your face mantra... 

Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. Look at my muscles. 

Yes, Matt Smith says it 13 times in this clip.

*I hope at some point there is a great reckoning about the lawlessness of YouTube and claims of "officialness" The account that posted this calls it the "official trailer" which it is clearly not (they are not the production company and there's no title or names or anything so if it's official it's doing a terrible job of making people aware of the movie) and a ton of websites are calling it the "first official teaser". I believe this is what's always been known as a "clip," a little moment (or moments) from the film. Words have meanings. Use them appropriately. 

Curio: Celebrating Sir Ian

Alexa here with some film curios for you. It's a big week for Sir Ian McKellen.  X-Men: Days of Future Past opens with his return as Magneto (along with Fassy playing the younger version of course) and on Sunday he turns 75.  He has much to celebrate, such a long and storied career on stage and screen, but I do wish there'd been an Oscar by now (he was my pick in 1999 for his James Whale in Gods and Monsters).  Maybe his turn as an aged Sherlock Holmes in A Slight Trick of the Mind will bring one? I'm already excited to see his interpretation of the deductive master.

 For now, here are some goodies to wish him a happy three-quarters century.

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RIP: Gordon Willis, cinematography of "The Godfather", "Manhattan", "All the President's Men"...

Here's one of my personal favorite critics, Tim Brayton, with a gracious crossposting of his lovely obituary for one of the greatest cinematographers who ever lived. - Nathaniel

It’s not tragic when an 82-year-old man, who had been happily retired for 17 years, following an incredibly strong and well-regarded career, dies. Any of us would be lucky and blessed to have that kind of live and that kind of death. But the loss of Gordon Willis on May 18 is heartbreaking anyway: it’s always heartbreaking when a true genius, visionary, and leader of his field passes away.

Willis was the most important cinematographer of the last 50 years of cinema. I don't know of any clearer or more concise way of putting it. If he'd only shot The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, a pair of films that fundamentally altered the way people used lighting and focus and the peculiar film stock of '70s American filmmaking, he would be one of the great masters of his field, and his passing a day of mourning for all cinephiles.

A beauty break featuring some of his greatest achievements after the jump...

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