Hello, sailors

There’s a per­cep­tion out there that crit­ics in gen­er­al, and film crit­ics in par­tic­u­lar, are a herd of snooty, pinkie-in-the-air, latte and/or mar­tini swill­ing elit­ists who enjoy noth­ing bet­ter than get­ting togeth­er and laugh­ing at ordin­ary hard-working Americans. Well, I’m here to tell you: we drink beer just like every­body else. Only it’s European beer, get me? 

You might be won­der­ing what I’m get­ting at. Truth to tell, I’m won­der­ing what I’m get­ting at myself. 

Okay, there’s a story from Cannes that I’ve been want­ing to tell, but did­n’t want to tell without evid­ence in hand. Now that it’s in hand—or, rather, on desktop—I will spill. 

What was the night? It’s all such a blur now, for reas­ons that will soon be evid­ent. I believe it was the even­ing of the cluster­fucked press screen­ings for James Grey’s Two Lovers, press screen­ings which have passed into legend for reas­ons dis­cussed here. A bunch of us pinkie-raisers repaired to La Farfalla, the always-hopping but rarely too-full bis­tro across from the Salle Debussy, where a brace of “Senior” glasses of Carlsbad were ordered, and I found myself in a crit­ic­al minor­ity, hav­ing thought the film offered some strong and mov­ing stuff. 

Soon, a couple of sail­ors were com­ing to the side entrance, past our table. Eager for an exchange with some fel­low Americans who did­n’t want to talk about a James Grey film, I exten­ded my hand as they got close, and thus a new phase of the even­ing began.

The first two sail­ors we had a round with were a couple of F‑14 pilots, and as it happened, one of our num­ber, fab Fred Schruers, late of Première and every oth­er magazine on the plan­et and now blog­ging for Portfolio, has not only flown in an F‑14, he once pro­filed the Navy fli­er who had trained these two fel­lows. So that really opened some con­ver­sa­tion­al doors. Soon more of sail­ors showed, some in uni­form, some out. They were off the USS Harry S Truman, docked in Marseilles, and had come up to Cannes to…well, check out Cannes. Despite my fel­low crit­ics’ indi­vidu­al prot­est­a­tions of East-Coast-liberal-elitism, fact was that it was­n’t par­tic­u­larly long before we all settled into what one would call “guy talk” of the most ordin­ary vari­ety. (The Russian girls in Dubai, I really dig those styles they wear, etc.) More rounds were purchased—we elit­ists worked dili­gently to make sure none of the sail­ors paid for a drink—and the hours flew by. Some movie talk was also broached, and I did get the inev­it­able ques­tion “How do you get to be film crit­ic, any­way?” “Poor career man­age­ment,” I answered. It’s my stand­ard answer, although this time I was­n’t really kidding.

In any case, Freddie in his wis­dom decided to immor­tal­ize the event, and he just got around to send­ing me the pic­ture. I did­n’t get the names of the sail­ors, but the fel­low in the glasses to the far left is my friend Patrick Z. McGavin, of Stop Smiling and oth­er ven­ues; the next crit­ic is myself (the sail­or stand­ing dir­ectly to my right really dug my Silver Surfer t‑shirt, and had it not been a present from my broth­er I would have giv­en it to him), then my friend Tom Carson of GQ and friend Andrew O’Hehir of Salon. Freddie should be in the pic­ture, but like I say, he was tak­ing it. 

We shut the place down, and cer­tain of our num­ber joined the men in white in search of fur­ther liba­tion. I can­’t do that like I used to, so I went to get some shuteye. But I was happy for us to have had the oppor­tun­ity to sup­port our troops in a not inapt fashion.