Category: Humor

Cannes: Inside Out

CannesEvery May, there is an atmospheric disturbance in Southern France when thousands of movie industry egos gather for the Cannes Film Festival.  (Apparently, you can see Quentin Tarantino’s from space.)  Despite stiff competition from Sundance, Toronto and even a couple of Online efforts, Cannes is still the Big Kahuna of film festivals.  It’s that magical place where Cordon Bleu sophistication meets Barnum & Bailey marketing, and this year is no exception.

In a marketing move worthy of Miley Cyrus, Cate Blanchett is promoting her new movie, Carol, with a combination of sly smiles and salacious answers.  In a Variety interview, Cate casually confessed to having had many “relationships” with women.  The titillation went viral.  What a coincidence of timing!

There’s a secret law in France that ever major motion picture has got to have Gerard Depardieu in it.  The guy is something and when he’s not renouncing his citizenship (again!) or taking a whiz in the corner of an airplane, he can act the pants off anybody — and frequently does.  Take a look at the guy: he’s definitely channelling Marlon Brando.  Either that or he ate him!

It’s very subtle, but the Germans have never been all that welcome at Cannes.  For example, rumour has it that the official Cannes website still doesn’t have a German translation.  Either way, German films have won the Palme d’Or only twice in 70 years, and many Deutschland directors don’t bother screening their movies there.  Personally, I think, despite all the EU/we’re-all-friends-now rhetoric, the French are still pissed about those swastikas on the Eiffel Tour.

Oddly enough, the whole Cannes Film Festival experience is basically a feminist no-fly zone.  Like it or not, Cannes remains an unrepentant phallocracy.  Every once in a while, a woman gets thrown a directorial bone, but, in essence, the girls are there for window dressing and the Red Carpet.  It’s pretty much dresses and diamonds for the ladies while the guys get on with the serious business of film making.  It might be 2015 everywhere else in the world, but for two weeks in May, nobody told the French.

When you collect a bunch of monumental male egos who wrap their women in jewelry, you’re going to attract your fair share of criminals.  Ever since Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief in 1955, Cannes gets robbed with amazing regularity.  This year, a couple of guys with guns robbed Cartier the day before the festival began — the total haul was about €17 million.  However, for straight audacity, in 2013, a single crook (whom the French actually called The Pink Panther)  made off with €140 million in jewelry from the Carlton hotel.  And, just to complete the Inspector Clouseau storyline, neither the jewelry nor the thief has ever been heard of again.

And finally, as the celebrities gather to eat, drink and watch each others’ movies, they generally leave their worthy causes at home.  At Cannes, there’s never much mention of  the starving multitudes.  One thing about the French: they realize it’s totally déclassé to start yipping about the downtrodden when you’re toting a swag bag with enough crap in it to feed an African village for the rest of the century.

50 Shades of Mom Porn — Revisited

grey1Okay, so I was wrong — big deal!  Fifty Shades of Grey (the movie) sucked.  Who knew?  My thought was when you start out with crap lines like “inner goddess” and “puckered love cave,” the only direction you have to go is up.  It never occurred to me that the movie producers, directors etc. would find rock bottom and start to dig.  My mistake.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been wr-wr-wr — not right, although I do stand by my definition of Mom Porn.  (You can read about it here.)  Actually, I’m relieved.  Now that Mom Porn isn’t sweeping through suburbia like some pandemic itch, people can see the 50 Shades phenom for what it is: Twilight meets The Story of O — at WalMart.

Here are a couple of other thoughts.

You can fool all of the people some of the time.  For nearly a year before the movie was released, 50 Shades was being touted as the ultimate erotic Valentine.  Herded to the box office by the hype, an unsuspecting public was initially scammed out of 500 million dollars.  However, within a week, attendance had crashed and the choruses of WTF were reaching a crescendo.  Still, there is no limit to the cojones of contemporary Mad Men (and women.)  In a blatant lunge for just a few dollars more, they released the DVD and Blu-Ray versions of the movie on May 8th — just in time for Mother’s Day!  Their assumption was dad would add it to the flowers in the hope that mom would get a little frisky on her special day and that mom was dumb enough to fall for the old “deleted scenes” con.  Cynicism, thy name is marketing!

Ironically, Universal actually sued Smash Pictures when the boys down at Smash announced they were going to produce a porno version of 50 Shades.  Just take a moment and let that one sink in!

Ultimately, it comes down to this.  Take Christian Grey out of his penthouse and three piece suit, put him in a trailer park in a t-shirt and jeans; then, turn Ana into a waitress at Denny’s and voila! Suddenly, you’ve got a book/movie franchise that’s actively promoting sexual abuse and violence against women.  It’s amazing how perversion becomes erotic when you dress it up in Armani.

And finally, the best test of a good movie: is anybody talking about the sequel?

Mother’s Day — And Mom Wars!

mother's daySunday is Mother’s Day, and for one brief shining moment, we’re going to be up to our elbows in flowers, chocolates and long-distance phone calls.  But it’s not all knickknacks and Netflix for mom this year.  Unfortunately, in recent history, our annual binge of maternal appreciation has taken on a darker tone.  Running just under the radar, there’s a dirty little war going on.  Moms everywhere are forming alliances, and across Social Media and the blogosphere, they’re speaking out.  Wrapped in their all-too-altruistic concern for better parenting, they’re sending each other one unequivocal message: “Hey, bitch!  You’re doing it wrong!”

Nobody knows who cast the first nasty, but it’s generally agreed that by the time Stay-at-Home Moms went public with their concerns over Working Moms’ lack of maternal instincts, the gloves were already off.  Working Moms responded by mentioning that all women face choices and some choose to utilize their additional talents to balance two jobs well, rather than one badly.  Seeing an opportunity, Hover (Helicopter?) Moms worried that downloading parental responsibility to institutions such as Daycare tears apart the natural genetic bond between mother and child.  At that point, Non-biological Moms, stung by the innuendo, pointed out that historically their image had been tarnished by fairytale depictions of the evil stepmother.  They went on to blame corporate giant Disney for perpetuating this stereotype.  Seizing an opportunity, Gay and Lesbian Moms declared their support for Non-biological Moms but wanted to raise awareness that they, too, had been victimized by Disney and called for a boycott of the corporate giant.  New Moms saw this as a direct attack on their own recent history and (while maintaining their tolerance for sexual orientation) wanted to know what was wrong with giving children positive role models like Elsa, Merida and Belle.  This was when Organic Moms and New Age Moms came together to admonish the film industry for not providing healthy snacks in movie theatres.  They went on to showcase several hundred DIY, chemical-free recipes for children and the whole family.  This resulted in an angry outburst from Single Moms who said they didn’t have the time or the money to grow their own oranges and quinoa, and somebody should get real for Christ’s sake.  Designer Moms immediately called for tolerance and voiced their concern that being a mom was all about parenting, not politics and (according to Criada, the nanny) free-range quinoa was available several places on the other side of town.  Free-Range Moms, upon hearing the words “free-range,” grabbed their kids, who had been playing in the backyard, and hid them in the basement, in fear that the cops and social services would come and take them away.

This is only the briefest synopsis and, no, it’s not pretty.  Personally, I live in hope that this Mother’s Day, moms all over the world will stop, take three deep breaths, forget their differences, and remember that all moms have one overwhelming thing in common: at some point, they didn’t practice safe sex.