Home
Subscribe
Archives
About
Contact
Twitter
Facebook
Search
Hollywood Elsewhere - Movie news and opinions by Jeffrey Wells

“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.”
–Jeffrey Wells, HE

  • Home
  • Subscribe
  • Archives
  • About
  • Contact
  • Merch
  • He Plus
Follow @wellshwood
23 Comments
Over by Thursday or Friday

“Asked if Barack Obama would wait to get a concession call from Hillary Clinton before claiming the nomination, Obama campaign adviser Anita Dunn said the onus was on Clinton now that the Democratic Party has firmed up the number of delegates needed to claim the party’s nod.

“‘He’s not going to wait by the phone like a high-school girl waiting for a date,’ said Dunn. ‘That’s not Barack Obama.”
Obama’s campaign is 68 delegates away from clinching the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, according to an ABC News delegate estimate. The campaign “expects to win around 38 delegates in the final three contests of Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana. If he hits that mark, it would leave him 30 superdelegates away from his party’s nod.”
Referring to the final contests of South Dakota and Montana, Dunn said that after Tuesday Clinton “can decide how united she wants this party to be.” — from an ABC News story, filed this evening at 8:57 pm.
The Page‘s Mark Halperin quoted Obama himself saying the following this evening: “Ithink that Senator Clinton and former President Clinton love this country. They love the Democratic Party. I think they deeply believe that Democrats need to win in November. And so I trust that they’re going to do the right thing.”

May 31, 2008 7:02 pmby Jeffrey Wells
19 Comments
Undercurrent

The five porn scenes excerpted in Daniel Murphy‘s “The Five Most Ridiculous Porn Scenes” (a 5.30 Esquire posting) aren’t funny. All porn is fundamentally dreary and depressing because the people involved on both sides of the camera are (a) obviously not very bright and (b) untalented (to put it mildly). But the idea of the piece — the promise of it — is…well, somewhat funny.

May 31, 2008 10:35 amby Jeffrey Wells
37 Comments
Vidal-isms

(1) “We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along…the moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable“; (2) “Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia”; (3) “I’ve developed a total loathing for [John] McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he’s wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him”; (4) “You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?” — from Vidal’s “What I’ve Learned” page in th new Esquire.

May 31, 2008 10:17 amby Jeffrey Wells

7 Comments
Nothing Much

East Hampton marina — Saturday, 5.31, 10:55 am.

May 31, 2008 9:48 amby Jeffrey Wells
68 Comments
Big Dough, Sad Observation

Due respect to Variety‘s Anne Thompson and other industry analysts who are seeing yesterday’s Sex and the City numbers as proof that the film, as Thompson put it, is “a big-titted hit,” but SATC is so far only a one-weekend wowser. If it shows legs next weekend and the one after that, great. Well, not so great when you think about it.

Michael Patrick King‘s film is, after all, an insipid thing to sit through — one of the most spiritually appalling successful films of all time — and, as Manohla Dargis and Thelma Adams have written, a capturing (or resuscitation) of a lifestyle attitude that has come and gone.
Right now it’s a huge first-weekend female moviegoer phenomenon — a marketing success extraordinaire based on viewer loyalty for the HBO series plus more inspired marketing. It’s also, arguably, an indication that a certain portion of middle-class American females — pre-teens, teens, 20- and 30-somethings, middle-agers — are, no offense, social dimwits and aesthetically clueless saps with the collective depth of three or four quarters laid on top of each other.
The single biggest negative for the image of African Americans over the last 15 years was their widely reported elation when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. People read those stories and saw the video clips and said to themselves, “What…?” The SATC phenomenon, I submit, is on a par with this — a cultural snapshot showing everyone in the world how utterly shallow and culturally nowhere mainstream American women have become, for the most part. If, that is, they continue to embrace this film over the next few weeks. One weekend’s worth of enthusiasm doesn’t make it a bona fide hit.

I’m obviously not speaking of women who are educated X-factor urbans, academics, journalists, hipsters, poets, creatives, etc. I mean the average American suburban woman with her fucking credit cards who sees herself as being “in the game” regardless of her age.
The Zelda Fitzgerald-Daisy Buchanan neurosis that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived and wrote about — something that was pretty much confined to the upper classes in the 1920s — has, of course, become ubiquitous today. A nation of Daisy Buchanans….good God! And what do the media mavens say about this? They say “great box-office,” “let’s make more of these,” “Michael Patrick King…the new Phil Alden Robinson!”
Thompson’s “big titted hit” line is a lift, of course, from Paddy Chayefsky‘s Network when Robert Duvall proclaims that The Howard Beale Show is “a big fat, big tittied hit!” (That’s tittied, not titted.)

(More…)
May 31, 2008 6:14 amby Jeffrey Wells
15 Comments
Sex Bucks

At 6:15 pm last night Variety‘s Pamela McLintock projected a $20 million Friday for Sex and the City. But sometime after 11 pm Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason posted a “shocker” report that SATC earned $28.25 million yesterday and is looking at a $70 million gross by Sunday night.
A Friday figure in the neighborhood of $20 or $25 million easily ranks as the biggest opening-day tally for a romantic comedy. As McLintock pointed out, The Devil Wears Prada — the last sizable chick-flick hit — earned $9.4 million on its opening Friday and $27.5 million for that weekend.

May 31, 2008 5:47 amby Jeffrey Wells

No Comments
Green Pine

Scallop Avenue in East Hampton — Saturday, 5.31, 8:15 am. A land where high thread counts are never questioned, much less commented upon — a given.

May 31, 2008 5:30 amby Jeffrey Wells
52 Comments
Departing Thoughts

Getting on on Air France 777 now (1:03 pm), having missed the 10:15 am flight. (Don’t ask.) Before every flight, I cross myself and ask God Almighty not to seat me next to a morbidly obese person. There are at least two whales in line right now, and I’m feeling a very slight apprehension about this. There are thousands of people in Paris who look well-fed or stocky or fat, but I’ve seen no Jabbas. You might expect otherwise in a foodie city like Paris, but nope.
Update: No fatties but Doug Liman is on my plane. He’s returning from a trip to three African countries, at least one or two of which (Rwanda or Uganda or both) proved to be fairly dangerous. He told me was arrested once, and possibly twice. I admire the cojones of anyone willing to risk the worst to order to encounter things unique, surprising, challenging. We talked about the red-clay color of Uganda’s dirt. Liman’s boot laces were untiedcand flopping around as we walked and talked. He was wearing a round-brimmed straw hat.

May 30, 2008 4:02 amby Jeffrey Wells
13 Comments
Give It Up

I need to be fair and and admit that the career-spanning video on Tom Cruise‘s website is nicely cut. (The Air France terminal I’m typing this on won’t let me load links, but it’s www.tomcruise.com.) Now and then some of it makes you grin in admiration for the guy…truly. The one scene in the entire reel that brought a genuine smile to my face? When Cruise’s Joel Goodson spots Rebecca DeMornay‘s prostitute character in the lobby of a plush Chicago hotel and does that little two-shakes-of-an-index-finger wag as I way of saying “I see you, you see me, we’re both here…tah-tah!”

May 30, 2008 3:06 amby Jeffrey Wells

15 Comments
Little Froggy

Harvey Korman has died; Hedley Lamarr lives.

May 29, 2008 9:49 pmby Jeffrey Wells
5 Comments
Lugubriously South

“There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.” — from Manohla Dargis‘ SATC review in today’s N.Y. Times.

May 29, 2008 9:44 pmby Jeffrey Wells
10 Comments
Done Right

By a standard set many years ago by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, “the women in Sex and the City are little better than also-rans,” writes the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, “and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.


David Hughes’ illustration for Lane’s review; one of Fancis Bacon’s Popes.

√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,’ Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (‘I got it’), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. ‘I can build you a better closet,’ he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come.
“The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding.
“The tactic here is basically pornographic — arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach — and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.
“When the wedding hits a bump (look out for Kristin Davis screaming ‘No! No!’ at Chris Noth like a ninth grader auditioning for The Crucible), and the bridegroom veers away, our heroine’s reaction to the split is typical: ‘How am I going to get my clothes?’ What, honey, even the puffball skirt that you wear to the catwalk show — the one that makes you look like a giant inverted mushroom?

May 29, 2008 9:30 pmby Jeffrey Wells

Page 1 of 251234»1020...Last »
  • Limp “Rifkin” Against Scenic Backdrop
    Limp “Rifkin” Against Scenic Backdrop
    February 12, 2021

    Last night I streamed Woody Allen‘s Rifkin’s Festival, and I’m afraid I can only echo what critics who caught it...

    More »
  • King Vidor’s “The Crowd”
    King Vidor’s “The Crowd”
    February 11, 2021

    Lewis Allen and Richard Sale‘s Suddenly (’54), a thriller about an attempted Presidential assassination, runs only 82 minutes with credits...

    More »
  • Full Ferrara
    Full Ferrara
    December 5, 2020

    It’s been 17 years since I last saw Rafi Pitts‘ Abel Ferrara: Not Guilty. The kids and I caught it...

    More »
  • Bring Back The Nannies?
    Bring Back The Nannies?
    February 14, 2021

    When Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering‘s four-part Woody Allen hatchet-job doc, Allen vs. Farrow, begins airing on HBO on Sunday,...

    More »
  • Movie Poster Violation
    Movie Poster Violation
    February 13, 2021

    The appearance of actors in a movie poster should never, ever argue with how they look in the film itself....

    More »
  • 21st Century Fizz Whizz
    21st Century Fizz Whizz
    February 13, 2021

    The banner headline on the March issue of Empire, which has been on sale for three weeks, teases “The Greatest...

    More »

© 2004-2018 Hollywood-elsewhere.com / All rights reserved.