Cannes reviews: Politics and troubled family lives in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," "Blue Ruin," and "Tip Top"

CANNES, FRANCE — While the red-carpet crowd at Cannes has been toasting the Coen brothers' tuneful "Inside Llewyn Davis" — you can read Barbara Scharres's take here — the parallel programs have also turned a spotlight on American movies. David Lowery's Sundance hit "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" showed Saturday and Sunday as a special presentation at Critics' Week, a separate festival that focuses on up-and-coming filmmakers.

The event's main location, the Miramar, is a far cry from the glitz one encounters when viewing the main slate. With creaky entrance doors and a screen that's not quite matted properly, the theater gives off the sense of a makeshift location — creating cognitive dissonance when stars like Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck take the stage.

In France, "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" is being called "Les Amants du Texas" — an elemental title well-suited to the film's wisp of a plot. Mara and Affleck play lovers on the wrong side of the law who are apprehended in a shootout. He's sent to prison; pregnant with their daughter, she raises the child alone. When he busts out four years later, going on the run, the movie ticks down the clock to their inevitable doomed reunion. Meanwhile, sympathetic lawman Ben Foster struggles to articulate his feelings for Mara's lonely mom.

Padded with shots of sunsets and country roads, the movie relies heavily on a woozy, lyrical style that increasingly plays like an affectation. Mara is a forceful screen presence who seems out of place in the '70s setting, while Affleck's character is little more than a moving target. Lowery, who served as an editor on this year's "Upstream Color," has a good eye, but his Malick-lite approach isn't a great fit. This plot calls for the energy of peak Sam Peckinpah.

Even so, the movie's outlaw portrait bounced pleasingly off of one of yesterday's Fortnight movies, "Blue Ruin," directed by Jeremy Saulnier. Shortly after we meet him, an unshaven vagrant (Macon Blair) knives a just-released convict in a men's room. Over the course of his spectacularly inept getaway, a back story comes into focus. Suffice it to say this is another movie that imagines contemporary America as a new Wild West — or at least the potential setting for a modern Hatfields–McCoys feud. Laced with dark humor (the protagonist struggles to attend to his gushing wounds without visiting a hospital), this mildly glib thriller also has a hot-button point to make. It's quite clear the body count would be lower if these characters had fewer guns.

Mordant comedy and social commentary also make for strange mix in the French comedy "Tip Top," directed by Serge Bozon, a practicing film critic here in Gaul. Art house aficionados may recall his "La France" (2007), an unclassifiable World War I fable that features Sylvie Testud in drag, spontaneous Beatles-like sing-alongs, and the kind of oblique editing one associates with Robert Bresson.

"Tip Top," showing in the Fortnight, is even wackier. Isabelle Huppert plays an internal-affairs detective assigned to uncover which of her fellow police officers ratted out a murdered Algerian informant. The mystery segues into buddy comedy with Huppert's dowdy new partner (Sandrine Kiberlain) and tangents involving their kinky personal lives. While Huppert's bad-cop routine is a hoot, broad jokes involving voyeurism and giant bruises acquired during rough sex coexist uneasily with the movie's ostensibly serious commentary on Algerian life in France.

At the Q&A, Bozon said through a translator that he never wanted the audience to feel too comfortable with the movie's actors or its tone. Still, he said, "My first impulse is not to disconcert the audience. It's to please them." Mission intermittently accomplished.

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A few characters in search of transcendence

This was the last movie review Roger Ebert filed.

Released less than two years after his "The Tree of Life," an epic that began with the dinosaurs and peered into an uncertain future, Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder" is a film that contains only a handful of important characters and a few crucial moments in their lives. Although it uses dialogue, it's dreamy and half-heard, and essentially this could be a silent film — silent, except for its mostly melancholy music.

The movie stars Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko as a couple who fall deeply, tenderly, transcendently in love in France. Malick opens as they visit Mont St. Michel, the cathedral perched on a spire of rock off the French coast, and moves to the banks of the Seine, but really, its landscape is the terrain is these two bodies, and the worshipful ways in which Neil and Marina approach each other. Snatches of dialogue, laughter, shared thoughts, drift past us. Nothing is punched up for dramatic effect.

Marina, a single mother, decides to move with her little daughter, Tatiana, to America with Neil, and the setting suddenly becomes the flatlands of Oklahoma, a land seen here as nearly unpopulated. Oh, there are people here, but we see few of them and engage with only a handful. Again there is the hushed serenity as in France, but differences grow between them, and there is anger now in some of their words. Neil reconnects with Jane (Rachel McAdams), an American girl he was once in love with, and romantic perfection between he and Marina seems to slip away.

In Oklahoma, we meet Father Quintana (Javier Bardem), a priest from Europe, whose church is new and brightly lit. We can almost smell the furniture varnish. His faith has been challenged, and many of his statements are directed toward Jesus Christ, as a sort of former lover. Quintana visits prisoners, the ill, the poor and the illiterate, whose dialogue is half-understood even by themselves.

As all of these relationships intertwine, Malick depicts them with deliberate beauty and painterly care. The mood is often similar to the feelings of the early small-town scenes in "The Tree of Life." Malick has a repertory of fundamental images he draws upon.

We don't need to be told Malick's in an autobiographical vein here; these memories surely belong to the storyteller. In both films, he is absorbed in living and dining rooms, looking out upon neat lawns and neighborhood pastoral peace.

As the film opened, I wondered if I was missing something. As it continued, I realized many films could miss a great deal. Although he uses established stars, Malick employs them in the sense that the French director Robert Bresson intended when he called actors "models." Ben Affleck here isn't the star of "Argo" but a man, often silent, intoxicated by love and then by loss. Bardem, as a priest far from home, made me realize as never before the loneliness of the unmarried clergy. Wandering in his empty church in the middle of the day, he is a forlorn figure, crying out in prayer and need to commune with his Jesus.

A more conventional film would have assigned a plot to these characters and made their motivations more clear. Malick, who is surely one of the most romantic and spiritual of filmmakers, appears almost naked here before his audience, a man not able to conceal the depth of his vision.

"Well," I asked myself, "why not?" Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?

There will be many who find "To the Wonder" elusive and too effervescent. They'll be dissatisfied by a film that would rather evoke than supply. I understand that, and I think Terrence Malick does, too. But here he has attempted to reach more deeply than that: to reach beneath the surface, and find the soul in need.

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Chicago Makes It a Little Harder for You to Own a Gun--Unless You are a Cop

One more part of the general trend in attempts to make gun
ownership or purchasing just a little bit more expensive or
annoying on the margin, since, darn it, they can't seem to ban them
entirely, this time out of Chicago, as
reported by CBS Chicago:

a new $25-per-gun tax in Cook County went into effect on
Monday.

WBBM Newsradio’s Nancy Harty reports the new gun tax is
estimated to generate $600,000 a year for Cook County. The gun tax
ordinance includes an exemption for law enforcement officers who
purchase guns in the county.....

Another bureaucratic measure making gun ownership a potentially
huge legal burden for the innocent:

The county also has targeted straw purchasers – people who buy
guns legally, then sell them to others who can’t – by imposing
fines of up to $2,000 for failing to report the transfer, loss, or
theft of a gun.

Unsuccessful lawsuits tried to block the tax, which proponents
admitted was partially aimed at limiting the number of guns in
circulation, admitting a Second Amendment-violating goal, not just
a revenue one.

I wrote for Reason back in 2010 the detailed
history of the Supreme Court case McDonald
v. Chicago, in which it was established that indeed they
could not ban them entirely.

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INSTANT MBA: You Need To Be CEO And 'Chief Ironing Officer'

Today's advice comes from Ivar Kroghrud, former CEO of Questback via The New York Times:

"Part of my role is to be 'chief ironing officer.' It’s very easy in a fast-growing company and fast-changing industry to get hung up on all the things that aren’t working and that we should be fixing. If you want to get extraordinary results, you have to play to people’s strengths and you have to help them work as close to plan as possible. If you allow them to get bogged down in all the problems that are out there — and there are always problems — they’ll be unproductive."

Kroghrud says it's up to the CEO to make sure everything is running smoothly. Keeping your employees happy and checking in with them every once in a while can be vital to an organization. The more you iron out the kinks, the easier it is to maintain productivity levels high in your company. When you fail to establish a relationship with your employees, you're also at risk of staying in the dark when major issues start plaguing the organization. 

"You can get a lot of speed by thinking of yourself as a chief ironing officer. Once you have a successful system in place, you can spend some of your time just walking around talking to people and asking: 'What’s preventing you from doing an even better job? What are you spending time on that you don’t feel you should be spending time on?' Those kinds of questions are easy to ask, and people relate to them."

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The More Americans Know About Drones, the Less They Like Them

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza gave his most recent "Worst
Week in Washington Award" to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose
assault weapons ban got stripped from a Democratic gun control
package last Tuesday for lack of support. Fair enough, but if
nonhumanoids can be eligible for the award (and why discriminate?),
I'd say that drones had the "worst week in Washington" last
week.

On Wednesday at a Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing, members from both sides of the aisle
seemed genuinely disturbed by the idea of "government drones
buzzing overhead monitoring the activities of law-abiding
citizens," as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, put it. When one of the
witnesses, an industry lobbyist, complained that the very term
"drone" had unfairly "hostile connotations," he ran into a buzzsaw
courtesy of Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who snapped, "We'll decide
what we'll call them."

On Friday, it was more bad news for friends of our robot
friends. In ACLU v. CIA, the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C.
Circuit forcefully rebuked the Obama administration for
stonewalling on an ACLU request, under the Freedom of Information
Act, for records related to targeted killing with unmanned aerial
vehicles. Given administration officials' repeated public comments
on the CIA's drone program, the agency's refusal even to confirm or
deny the existence of responsive documents was "neither logical nor
plausible," the court said.

In the wake of the 13-hour filibuster of March 6 by Sen. Rand
Paul, R-Ky. -- in which he used the word "drone" some 245 times --
we're starting to see pushback from the courts and Congress on the
use of flying, spying robot weapons at home and abroad.

In an influential 2011 article, "The Drone as Privacy Catalyst,"
law professor Ryan Calo predicted that the dystopian images that
drones evoke could spur much-needed reforms to American privacy
law. Their association with military spying and targeted killing,
the way they "represent the cold, technological embodiment of
observation," would provide the "visceral jolt" that reformers need
to make their case.

That's certainly happening on the home front. CNET's Declan
McCullagh reports that a bipartisan "anti-drone revolt" has
prompted the introduction of new federal and state legislation
restricting "law enforcement plans to fly more drones equipped with
high-tech gear that can be used to conduct surveillance of
Americans." Professor Calo, who testified at Wednesday's hearing,
warned that "American privacy law places few limits on aerial
surveillance" and urged Congress to "instruct the FAA to take
privacy into account as part of its mandate to integrate drones
into domestic airspace."

The "visceral jolt" that Sen. Paul's filibuster provided seems
to be shifting the debate on the drone wars abroad, as well.

As Slate's Dave Weigel observed yesterday, public opinion polls
show "A 50-Point Swing Against Targeted Drone Killings of U.S.
Citizens" abroad since Sen. Paul's anti-drone marathon. Even
erstwhile Obama allies are speaking out: Gen. James E. Cartwright,
former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently warned
about "blowback" from perpetual remote-controlled war. And on March
13, John Podesta, the former head of the Center for American
Progress, took to the pages of the Washington Post to praise Sen.
Paul's filibuster and warn that with his secretive approach to
drone warfare, "President Obama is ignoring the system of checks
and balances that has governed our country from its earliest
days."

Some say the filibuster is an obstructive anachronism. Sen.
Paul's marathon session earlier this month argues otherwise. With
it, he started a national conversation about the use of drones at
home and abroad that promises to go on much longer than 13
hours.

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