“There’s Hollywood Elsewhere and then there’s everything else. It’s your neighborhood dive where you get the ugly truth, a good laugh and a damn good scotch.”
–JJ Abrams
(Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Super 8)
“Smart, reliable and way ahead of the curve … a must and invaluable read.”
–Peter Biskind
(Down and Dirty Pictures Easy Riders, Raging Bulls)
“He writes with an element that any good filmmaker employs and any moviegoer uses to fully appreciate the art of film – the heart.”
–Alejandro G. Inarritu
(The Revenant, Birdman, Amores Perros)
“Nothing comes close to HE for truthfulness, audacity, and one-eyed passion and insight.”
–Phillip Noyce
(Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Dead Calm)
“A rarity and a gem … Hollywood Elsewhere is the first thing I go to every morning.”
–Ann Hornaday
Washington Post
“Jeffrey Wells isn’t kidding around. Well, he does kid around, but mostly he just loves movies.”
–Cameron Crowe
(Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky)
“In a world of insincere blurbs and fluff pieces, Jeff has a truly personal voice and tells it like it is. Exactly like it is, like it or not.”
–Guillermo del Toro
(Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos, Hellboy)
“It’s clearly apparent he doesn’t give a shit what the Powers that Be think, and that’s a good thing.”
–Jonathan Hensleigh
Director (The Punisher), Writer (Armageddon, The Rock)
“So when I said I’d like to leave my cowboy hat there, I was obviously saying (in my head at least) that I’d be back to stay the following year … simple and quite clear all around.”
–Jeffrey Wells, HE, January ’09
“If you’re in a movie that doesn’t work, game over and adios muchachos — no amount of star-charisma can save it.”
I naturally want Biden to win, but the truth is that I devoutly wish that somehow or some way New York State governor Andrew Cuomo could just step in and become the Democratic nominee.
In her 3.27 column titled “Tough Love For Andrew Cuomo,” Maureen Dowd quotes Bill Maher: “I see Cuomo as the Democratic nominee this year. If we could switch Biden out for him, that’s the winner. He’s unlikable, which I really like.”
Initially posted on 9.4.15 but revised: I took part in a paintball game when I was working at Cannon Films in the summer of ’87. What happened was hugely embarassing, certainly from my vantage point
As we all know the basic objective in any paintball game is for somebody on your home team to steal the opposing team’s flag and make it back to our side without getting killed. I had suggested a bold kamikaze strategy to my fellow warriors. Instead of individual skirmishing and taking cover behind trees and bushes while trying to “kill” guys on the other team, I suggested winning the battle in less than three or four minutes.
The idea was for nine or ten of us to charge into enemy territory as a tight group — a Toshiro Mifune-style flying wedge. Three guys on both sides (6), one guy in the lead forward-thrust position, another guy in the rear-center position, and a guy in the middle. We come out guns blazing and just go for it.
Shock and surprise on the part of the enemy, I was thinking. If we charged into the area where their flag was, I explained, five or six of us might get killed right away, but in the process they could also shoot back and kill some of the enemy. Hold the formation, hold the formation. There might be only four or five of us left when we grab their flag, but at least we’d have it and could run right the hell back.
I was basically suggesting an Inchon invasion strategy. Nobody plays paintball with this kind of Douglas MacArthur-style determination. If we do it immediately when the whistle sounds, the enemy will be so surprised and off-balance they won’t be able to kill us all. Perhaps half or even two thirds, but they wouldn’t get all of us and we could definitely inflict harm on them while capturing their banner.
Alas, my flying wedge idea wasn’t unanimously supported. It couldn’t work unless we were all on the same gung-ho page, so that was that.
Plus when you actually get out there with your paintball gun in that sticky and sweltering Los Angeles heat and you’re dealing with dust and sweat and the sobering fact that you’re not exactly Steve McQueen in Hell Is For Heroes, things are a little different.
Trump’s Freudian slip arrives at the 7:10 mark. He meant to say “I don’t have to call” but instead revealed his smug egoistic mindset. The implication is that calling this or that Democratic governor or official would be, in his mind, a form of submission. Me me me me me me…”Be nice.”
A day or two ago David Ehrenstein complained that Bob Dylan‘s “Murder Most Foul”, a 17-minute long meditation about the brutal murder of the nation’s 35th president, was “mind-bogglingly banal.”
Not Dylan’s vocal performance or the musicianship, I presume he meant, but the lyrics. Lines and passages that are flush with familiar cliches and rueful reflections, well-baked recollections of what happened that day in Dallas, ’60s pop-culture references, etc.
Ehrenstein is missing the forest for the trees. The lyrics aren’t as important, I feel, as the tired and resigned way in which Dylan half-sings and half-mutters them, and more particularly why he’s released the song now.
I don’t know when “Murder Most Foul” was written and recorded but deep down I don’t think it’s about JFK’s last day on the planet as much as Dylan’s contemplation of his own mortality, and how he’s evolved into a wizened old coot who regards the gift of life with absolute reverence (age does that to you).
Simplistic as it sounds, he’s basically horrified by the idea of conspirators abruptly destroying everything that JFK had been and could be. Horror magnified in his mind. Along with the sadness. Dylan’s sense of his own mortality is undercurrent #1.
In late ’63 or early ’64 Dylan, then 22, said something about partly understanding where Lee Harvey Oswald was coming from, not to the point of agreeing with his fatal act but in terms of sensing his underlying despair. Dylan reportedly walked that statement back fairly quickly, but it was exactly the sort of thing that a brilliant iconoclast in his early 20s might’ve passed along.
Now Dylan is 78, and he sees things differently. The point of the song (one of them anyway) is that JFK’s murder, like that of Tom Dooley or Fred Hampton or Martin Luther King or any illustrious victim of a ruthless political agenda, was at root an act of terrible cruelty, and Dylan is simply saying that this particular act of malice has burned deep, and that 56 years later the after-shocks still flicker from to time, and that he can feel them more today than he did in the fall of ’63. Or something like that.
Above and beyond the lyrics, the song is basically a meditation about the horror of suddenly becoming lifeless tissue, at any age.
Most of us understood from the get-go that Woody Allen‘s “Apropos of Nothing” would be regarded through #MeToo-tinted glasses. Some in that camp are saying “I don’t think I can read this thing” (an actual Dana Harris tweet) and that’s fine. They’re excused. Nobody expected them to be attentive or fair.
Certain resentful, pissy-minded book reviewers are coughing up the usual bile. USA Today‘s Barbara VanDenburgh: “As if coping with the ravages of a global pandemic hasn’t made life unpleasant enough, now we’ve all got to talk about Woody Allen. Again.”
People aren’t calling his autobiography totally banal or shallow or both, but they’re saying large chunks of it are. Some have written that when he gets into the Mia-and-Dylan accusation thing that it feels like too much of an obsessive, woe-is-me pity party. Some have faulted Allen for not aping the meditative prose of Rainer Maria Rilke or Ezra Pound or William Styron. Their beefs boil down to “how dare Woody write in his own unaffected voice? How dare he process life in the same way he’s been doing since he began writing jokes for Manhattan newspaper columnists in the early ’50s?”
Woody Allen is who he is. His voice is his voice. If you can read “Apropos of Nothing” with that in mind, you’ll have a better-than-decent time with it. And by that I mean diverting, chuckly, passable, fascinating, occasionally hilarious, nutritional as far as it goes.
“Apropos of Nothing” isn’t the deepest or the most probing piece of literary self-excavation or self-examination ever published, but it does contain a wonderfully ripe and buoyant recollection of Allen’s Brooklyn childhood and early teen years. It flattens out a bit when he becomes successful in the mid ‘60s, and a certain banality creeps in. But I weathered the mundane or underwhelming parts. Allen has a voice and a style and a certain shticky attitude, and much of the book is like listening to some streetcorner wise guy tell a story from a bar stool.
I am convinced that the section that exhaustively covers the ‘92 child-abuse accusation plus the Soon Yi furor is almost entirely truthful, if not 100%. Try reading Moses Farrow’s essay — it synchs up perfectly with Allen’s understanding of Mia Farrow‘s history and psychology and what probably happened.
Does Allen burrow in too deeply or obsessively in this section of the book? Not in my view. He’s talking about events that have shattered his life in some respects. If you had gone through the same thing and knew you were innocent when it came to Dylan and Mia’s accusation, wouldn’t you mount your defense with vigor and exactitude and leave no stone unturned?
The union with Soon Yi did seem odd and ill-advised at first, true, but they’ve been a loyal and loving couple for 27 or 28 years now. Two adopted college-age kids, etc. Does anyone recall Barbara Kopple’s Wild Man Blues? The facts are the facts. Things are as they are.
The more I descend into the silent, quietly creeping hell of our current situation, the closer I’ve gotten to submitting to Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness. Joe vs. Carol, etc. I tried watching episode #1 last night, and turned it off around the half-hour mark. Boredom. I’ll give it another shot today.
I’ve been grieving over the fact that a series about a motley crew of scurvy low-rent Oklahoma bumblefucks has become as popular as it has. But this is the country that millions live in, God help us. And you know these appallingly attired, absurdly coiffed animal enthusiasts are almost certainly Trump supporters…that’s another rub.
I never watched Duck Dynasty either…eff those backwoods beardos.
From Variety‘s Todd Spangler: “Netflix has a tiger tale that has punched into the zeitgeist with Tiger King, stocked with a cast of real-life bizarre personalities and sinister plot twists.
“A true-crime-style docuseries that debuted March 20 on Netflix, Tiger King ranks as the most popular current TV show, according to Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 97% critic’s rating and a 96% audience score — putting it at the top of the site’s most-popular TV shows list, ahead of Netflix’s Ozark Season 3; USA Network’s Queen of the South Season 4; and USA’s The Sinner Season 3.
“And according to Netflix’s own daily rankings, Tiger King is the No. 1 most-watched title in the U.S. for March 29 on the service — both overall and among TV shows — and has been in the top 10 for the past week.”
Michael Crichton‘s Westworld is no one’s idea of a great or even a first-rate film. It’s a primitive sci-fi formula flick. But at least it’s lean and trim and doesn’t tax your patience, which is more than you can say about HBO’s endlessly infuriating Westworld series. Better yet, the Crichton doesn’t ask you to hang out with an actor like Tennisballhead. And the HBO series doesn’t offer one single moment like the one in which James Brolin and Richard Benjamin groan in irritation when Yul Brynner‘s robot says “draw.” Not one.
When I’m 103 and on my death bed (because I have the constitution of Kirk Douglas), someone will say “what did you do in your life that was good and redeeming?” And I’ll answer, “I hated Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy‘s Westworld with a passion, and I tried to spread that view frequently.”
Personal note: I’m reading that 89K COVID tests have been administered in California thus far. But my getting tested is still out of the question because I’m asymptomatic. Two nights ago I started experiencing a sore throat and a slight tightening in the chest…a slight achey feeling. “Uh-oh,” I said to myself. “Is this the beginning of COVID?” Yesterday both had totally disappeared. No sore throat, no nothing
You know why? Because I have great genes. No one is bulletproof but some of us have been gifted with exceptional coats of armor. I know — it’s bad form to mention this.
18 days ago (i.e., before the coronavirus had even begun to destroy American life as we know it) I posted a piece about Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan‘s “Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies” (Rutgers University Press). It was titled “1962 Was The Year.”
The paragraph that grabbed me was a suggestion that not only was ’62 a great year but also the last great annum for black and white films.
For mainstream monochrome features began to fade soon after. Fewer and fewer appeared in ’63, ’64 and ’65, which is precisely when color TVs were beginning to become more and more common in middle-class households. 1966 was the last year that the Academy awarded an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Black and White. The nominees were Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Fortune Cookie, Georgy Girl, Is Paris Burning? and Seconds.
Hammond: “[The authors] point out that so many of 1962’s best were in black and white (anathema for millennials today), and in fact only two of the ten lead acting Oscar nominees were in color. Thus it might be the last hurrah of black and white, followed by its ultimate decline before a little more than half the decade was out.”
Here’s my rundown of 40 exceptional 1962 black-and-white films: John Ford‘s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Robert Aldrich‘s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Bryan Forbes‘ The L-Shaped Room, Francois Truffaut‘s Shoot The Piano Player, Francois Truffaut‘s Jules and Jim, Agnes Varda‘s Cleo From 5 to 7, Luis Bunuel‘s The Exterminating Angel; Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd; J. Lee Thompson‘s Cape Fear; Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa. (10)
John Frankenheimer‘s Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate and All Fall Down, the Blake Edwards‘ duo of Experiment in Terror and Days of Wine and Roses, Frank Perry‘s David and Lisa, Pietro Germi‘s Divorce, Italian Style; Stanley Kubrick‘s Lolita, the great Kirk Douglas western Lonely are the Brave, John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving. (10)
Robert Mulligan‘s To Kill a Mockingbird, the internationally-directed The Longest Day, Arthur Penn‘s The Miracle Worker, Roman Polanski‘s Knife in the Water (released in the U.S. in ’63), Alain Resnais‘ Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’eclisse, Sidney Lumet‘s version of Eugene O’Neil’sLong Day’s Journey into Night, Otto Preminger‘s Advise and Consent; Jules Dassin‘s Phaedra, Don Siegel‘s Hell Is For Heroes. (10)
Tony Richardson‘s TheLonelinessoftheLong–DistanceRunner; Ralph Nelson and Rod Serling‘s Requiem for a Heavyweight; Serge Bourguignon‘s Sundays and Cybele (a.k.a., Les dimanches de ville d’Avray); Orson Welles‘ The Trial; Denis Sanders‘ War Hunt (which costarred Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack); Philip Leacock‘s The War Lover; Masaki Kobayashi‘s Harikiri; Andre Takovsky’sIvan’s Childhood; Robert Wise‘s Two for the Seesaw; Herk Harvey‘s Carnival of Souls. (10)
Comedy is a deadly serious business. We all understand that the best comedies are those that are played absolutely straight, and the worst are those that send signals to the audience that something is intended to be funny. Goofing off, self-pranking, going too broad, etc. It follows that actors must never laugh at anything the audience may or may not laugh at. Signalling that something is funny is called “breaking character” — a violation of the code.
It’s significant, therefore, that in this scene from Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove, perhaps the greatest straightfaced comedy ever made, a serious actor can be seen dropping the ball.
Peter Bull, as Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky, is the violator. It happens at 1:26 or thereabouts. Peter Sellers‘ titular character repeatedly beats his rebellious Nazi arm and Bull, standing nearby with a group of U.S. military officers, can’t help himself — he starts to grin very slightly but then reverts back to sternface. It’s surprising that Kubrick didn’t call for a retake.
I’m sorry but I’ve spent the last six hours painting the living room. Which of course involved more than just painting. I had to remove paintings and photos from the wall, tape off door jams, floorboards and light sockets, spread the plastic covering over floors and furniture, paint the main portions with a roller and then brush-paint the tops, bottoms and corners, which takes forever to do correctly.
You naturally assume he’ll say either (a) the late ’60s to mid ’70s or (b) the late ’70s to late ’80s. Nope — the sweetest career chapter was between the early to mid ’90s, he claims.
De Palma: “In my mid 50s [actually his early to mid 50s], doing Carlito’s Way and then Mission: Impossible. It doesn’t get much better than that. You have all the power and tools at your disposal. When you have the Hollywood system working for you, you can do some remarkable things.”
I’m sorry but DePalma is wrong. He was a truly exciting, must-watch director from the late ’60s to mid ’70s (Greetings, The Phantom of the Paradise, Sisters, Carrie), and an exasperating, occasionally intriguing director from the late ’70s to late ’80s (Dressed To Kill, Scarface, The Untouchables). His ’90s films certainly don’t match those of the previous decade, and his ’70s output, as noted, reigned supreme.
As I noted five years ago, De Palma is “one of the most committed and relentless enemies of logic of all time. For a great director he has an astonishing allegiance to nonsensical plotting and dialogue that would choke a horse. I tried to re-watch Blow Out last year — I couldn’t stand it, turned it off. The Fury drove me crazy when I first saw it, although I love the ending. I found much of Dressed To Kill bothersome when it first came out 35 years ago, and to be honest I haven’t watched it since.”
