“It’s like sex, you know there’s going to be a climax, you just don’t know when… If you make a movie that costs $100 million, you may have as much control as you want but if that movie doesn’t make half a billion, you’re going to have an issue. Creative control doesn’t mean a whole lot if what’s at stake is so tremendous. Hollywood is like going into a hotel room, a hotel lobby, the Carlton, and seeing the most gorgeous escort girl. And she will say to you, ‘You are the greatest filmmaker in the world, I will do whatever you want,’ do with me what you want, and you’re like so tempted, but you’re also a bit like ‘Am I gonna catch something?’ That’s still how I feel about it. I really want to fuck but I’m not sure that I can, y’know, come yet. Therefore? I have to feel ready to do that.” [Embed via Variety.com.]

Yes.

With only a couple of competition films left to unspool, the latest hot title is The Life of Adèle  (and whose-alt title is not hot, Blue Is The Warmest Color, which screams queer cinema and should be dropped). The genius of the film is that this “lesbian coming-of-age” film feels like nothing of the kind. It just feels like a coming of age film that happens to have a first love that is homosexual. This cannot be said of Jeune & Jolie, which is inscrutably female or Stranger By The Lake, which is relentlessly male.

The turn-on of the long, graphic, realistic sex scene between the women is what is a turn-on about any sex where partners seek mutuality. (Cannes’ sexuality, unfortunately, has been dominated with men/boys who seem to be unaware of what women respond to sexually. Even with all the good sex in some of the films, incompetence has more screen time.). I honestly have no idea how gay men respond to two female bodies writhing for an extended period, but I think I can say that heterosexuals of both genders would appreciate the sex in this film.

Ultimately, however, the sex is some of the proof, not the pudding in Adèle.

One of the other great decisions—which I wondered about while watching the film—was that it doesn’t linger on the unaccepting voices in Adèle’s life. Nor are they dismissed. The character, it turns out, doesn’t sweat the small stuff. But when things matter to her, they matter quite deeply… no commitment-phobe she.

If you ask, I will tell you that Life of Adèle is my favorite of the “girls gone wild” films (which also include The Bling Ring, Sarah Prefers To Run, Behind The Candalabra, and, to some degree, The Past). But I believe there is room for all of it without dismissing any one of the other films on the basis of expectation.

There has been very little filmmaking that can really be called “bad” with a straight face. The fight is about the choices filmmakers have made about what they want to discuss with their work.

I am a big fan of intellectual consistency and emotional acceptance. In other words, love or hate what you love or hate, but spare —professionally—the claim that there is something broken about the work because you don’t like the message or that it’s superior work because you do like the message.

After all, isn’t the whole point NOT to get caught up in expectations?

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

Looks better than anything I’ve see but Pacific Rim. No?

Underappreciated darkness. Borzage’s not just a romantic.