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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)

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(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.”
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Washington Post

“Jeffrey Wells isn’t kidding around. Well, he does kid around, but mostly he just loves movies.”
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(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.”
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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

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28 Comments
Best Screen Musical Since Moulin Rouge, and Before That…Cabaret?

The Venice Film Festival reviewers were not wrong — Damian Chazelle‘s La La Land (Summit, 12.2) is a winning, audacious, often delightful Jacques Demy-styled musical for the 21st Century. Some of them added that it’s not quite a fall-on-the-floor great, and they were right about that too. Most of it, in my book, is an 8 or an 8.5. But hold on.

Because the opening song-and-dance-on-the-freeway sequence is a 9.5. And the last 15 minutes are an absolute 10 — they deliver, no exaggeration, one of the best-written and well rendered finales of any non-comedic musical ever. Sad, dazzling, wise and just right. So that makes La La Land better than an 8 or 8.5. Call it a 9.

And Emma Stone‘s performance as a struggling actress, trust me, is an absolute grand-slammer. A Best Actress nomination is 100% locked. Gosling is very good also but she dominates him. A friend who knows this racket thinks the Best Actress race will probably come down to Stone and Viola Davis in Fences.

Take away the songs and the dancing and Chazelle’s bravura direction…a silly thing to say, right? But take those away and La La Land, story- and acting-wise, would be an appealing, well-written, nicely done Los Angeles love story between two aspiring artist-performers in their late 20s — Ryan Gosling‘s Sebastian, a jazz pianist whose passion is too pure to pay the rent with, and Stone’s Mia, an actress who has the goods but has been bombing out at auditions for years, and she’s starting to wither.

But add the songs, dancing and bravura direction and you have…well, a helluva lot more.

The only speed bump, for me, is that Stone has a pleasing but fairly tiny voice (non-problematic but maybe a little above the level of Diane Keaton‘s singing in Annie Hall) and Gosling is no skilled croooner either so you have to accept these limitations. And I did. Speed bumps are finessable, negotiable.

A friend says that the fact that they can’t sing all that wonderfully works for the film — these are real people singing their feelings with real-people voices. I get that, a good point. But I still wanted to better pipes. Just a little.

It’s now 7:55 pm. I have to catch Moonlight, which starts at 8 pm. Did I state that La La Land is a definite Best Picture nominee? It has to be. The thing that gives it character and cojones is that it’s not a “happy” musical. It has the character to end…well, not joyously.

September 2, 2016 5:58 pmby Jeffrey Wells
34 Comments
In Your Face

The pugnacious, raspy-voiced Jon Polito, whom I always found a distinctive if somewhat overbearing performer, particularly in his Coen Brothers roles (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There), has passed at age 65. Sorry. I wish that just once he had played (or that I had seen him play) a calm, mellow type who never yelled. I never knew Polito was openly gay — hilarious. His career got rolling in ’81. He worked like a sonuvabitch on television. Big voiceover guy — he voiced “Conquedor” in the 2011 TV series Thundercats. I sometimes thought of him as am angrier, less thoughtful Danny De Vito. I even had an idea they were roughly the same size…wrong. De Vito is 4′ 10″ — Polito was 5′ 8″.

September 2, 2016 10:46 amby Jeffrey Wells
6 Comments
Da Wetness

Having experienced the trauma of last year’s “damp, windswept, bone-chilling Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch,” I’m thinking I might sidestep the 2016 version, which some are lining up for as we speak. It’s damp and gray out there, and it was flat-out raining an hour or so ago. The special patron’s screening, 2:30 pm at the Chuck Jones theatre, will be La La Land, I’ve been told. Added: There’s a Frank Marshall-produced doc, Finding Oscar, screening tomorrow afternoon, about a “search for justice in the case of the Dos Erres massacre of the ’80s,” etc. 11:05 am Update: Now it’s sunny — maybe I’ll hit the brunch after all.

September 2, 2016 8:47 amby Jeffrey Wells

13 Comments
Verhoeven’s Finest?

I truly regretted missing Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle at the end of last May’s Cannes Film Festival. (It’s not like I didn’t ask repeatedly about rue d’Antibes market screenings or any chance to catch it early….stonewall.) Just about every critic loved it. Why isn’t it playing Telluride? It pops a few days hence in Toronto.

September 2, 2016 6:39 amby Jeffrey Wells
3 Comments
Cheer Up

I was hugely irked yesterday afternoon, sitting on a doorstep on Telluride’s Colorado Avenue as I berated those Booking.com bozos on a Skype line. I hadn’t eaten anything, the iPhone 6 Plus couldn’t be repaired (the thought of not being able to snap any photos during this festival distress me to no end), the iPhone rental was a no-go, and I’d missed the deadline to pick up my press pass. And then a pretty lady slowed and leaned down and patted my recently bought saddle shoes and gave me a thumbs-up as she kept walking. Thank you. And then Telluride’s press rep Shannon Goodwin Mitchell walked by and saw me sitting there all cranky and pissed off and reached into a bag and gave me my Telluride pass pass…thanks! And then Sasha Stone pulled up with my wallet, which she’d retrieved at the Dolores Mountain Inn. And then four or five hours later I was sitting in Glenn Zoller‘s big, comfortable, well-lighted kitchen and enjoying a Grateful Dead track for the first time in eons. Glenn was listening to KOTO, the local cool-cat FM station, and all of a sudden Bob Weir singing “Satisfaction” put me in the greatest mood. On the worst days the nicest things can happen out of the blue.


Telluride’s vp public relations Shannon Mitchell during last year’s rain-soaked picnic.
September 2, 2016 6:17 amby Jeffrey Wells
10 Comments
Jolting, Different, “Pulp Into Art”

Something about Tom Ford‘s Nocturnal Animals hasn’t quite rung Owen Gleiberman’s bell. Some tingly little itch that hasn’t been scratched in the right way. It’s not that he dislikes it, far from it, but it’s not as good, he says, as Blue Velvet or In The Bedroom. And yet he’s calling it “a suspenseful and intoxicating movie — a thriller that isn’t scared to go hog-wild with violence, to dig into primal fear and rage, even as it’s constructed around a melancholy love story that circles back on itself in tricky and surprising ways.


Jake Gyllenhaal in Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals.

The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw, on the other hand, has totally flipped for it. “There’s a double-shot of horror and Nabokovian despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing meta mystery-thriller,” he writes. “It’s a movie with a double-stranded narrative — a story about a fictional story which runs alongside — and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally, something I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman never truly managed.

“Clive James once wrote that talk about ‘levels of reality’ never properly acknowledges that one of these levels is really real. That probably holds true. But in Nocturnal Animals, these levels are equally powerful, and have an intriguingly queasy and potent interrelation.

Gleiberman: “With Amy Adams as a posh, married, but deeply lonely Los Angeles artist, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the novelist from her past who finds himself trapped in a nightmare, the movie has two splendid actors working at the top of their game, and more than enough refined dramatic excitement to draw awards-season audiences hungry for a movie that’s intelligent and sensual at the same time.”

Nocturnal Animals, which apparently didn’t make the cut at Telluride but will screen in Toronto next week, “seizes and holds you — with its suspense, and its vision. It leaves no doubt as to Ford’s fervor and originality as a director, and it leaves you hoping that he’ll make his next film before another seven years passes by.”

September 2, 2016 5:40 amby Jeffrey Wells

15 Comments
Slugged Three Times

Today the battery on my iPhone 6 Plus died. By that I mean it wouldn’t take a charge. I first noticed it during the Denver-to-Durango flight. I drove right over to a Durango cell phone repair store and bought a new battery, and then that one died. The newbie had a 48% charge when I bought it, and it went right down to less than 6% over the next 45 minutes despite constant charging. No Google Maps, no phone calls, no music…nothing. Right now the phone is sitting in a tech boutique called Hub Telluride, where they’ll be trying to fix it tomorrow morning. As a temp-save measure they put my SIM card into a $25-per-day iPhone 5 rental, but then they discovered that phone had been locked by a previous customer with “find my iPhone” software.

No iPhone in Telluride means no after-the-fact editing, not checking Twitter as much, less filing, a little behind the eight ball. Not good. If it’s truly, finally dead I can’t replace it until I’m in Manhattan on Tuesday evening or early Wednesday.

And then I temporarily lost my wallet during the drive from Durango to Telluride. I stopped at a small hotel in Dolores so I could use their wifi to make a couple of Skype calls with, and I left my wallet in the hotel lobby. I do dumb shit like this when I’m upset and distracted. I called the hotel when I got to Telluride and lo and behold they had it, cash and all. A three and 1/2 hour round trip (Telluride to Dolores and back) awaited that evening, and then I thought of Sasha Stone, who at the time was driving north in her SUV from Southern Colorado. I called and asked her to drop by the hotel (everyone drives by the Dolores Mountain Inn) and pick it up. And she did. Sasha!

But more grief was in store. The geniuses at Booking.com never sent me any instructions about how to get into the two-bedroom condo at 350 So. Mahoney, which I initially rented last March. I paid $1600 and change for this sucker, and when I got here there was no way to get in, and the Booking.com agents (who work out of China) didn’t have any good phone numbers for the condo owners. They actually sent me a letter late this afternoon stating that the owners don’t want to accommodate me and I’m out of luck. And then they tried to put me into a Red Lion hotel in Montrose, Colorado. This is what happens when your booking agent lives in Shanghai.

Producer Glenn Zoller, who has a home here, took pity and gave me a bed for tonight, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?

September 1, 2016 10:52 pmby Jeffrey Wells
24 Comments
Hot Time in Durango

Women rarely give me the once-over when I’m roaming around Los Angeles. They duck my glances like champs. I used to be a combination of Peter O’Toole in What’s New Pussycat and Michael Fassbender in Shame, but those days are over. I’m past my sell-by date and I know it. But early this afternoon in Durango I was smiled or winked at three times, I swear, by mildly attractive 40ish women and a couple of ladies actually struck up a conversation with me in an airport diner. Women grin at no one in Los Angeles. They’re guarded and picky, and who can blame them? But today in Durango was like a time-machine visit back to 1985, and it felt kind of great. Okay, two of the smiles happened inside a Walmart. And it has to be acknowledged that Durango is kind of a downmarket place. A fair portion of the women look a little worse for wear. A little too much smoking and drinking, bad foods, not working out. Not a happy place. You can half-sense how hard it’s been. Loads of Trump-Pence signs.

September 1, 2016 10:14 pmby Jeffrey Wells
3 Comments
Drowning In Hard Choices

10:42 pm in cool, almost chilly Telluride after waking up at 4 am in Los Angeles, and enduring a hugely stressful day. If it weren’t for a Red Bull I just chugged, I wouldn’t be able to write much. I need to crash and maybe write a bit more at between 6 and 8 am. There’s a hoity-toity Telluride hotshot party happening right now near the NE corner of Galena and Fir. Tom Hanks is here for Sully but what about Clint? Deflecting, gunshy Casey Affleck is sitting for a couple of tributes prior to screenings of Manchester By The Sea, which I don’t think I can see here. Too much going on. I’m not even seeing Sully tomorrow. The flicks start around 2:30 or 3 pm with the Patron’s screening at the Chuck Jones, followed by Bleed For This at 6:15 pm, Moonlight at 8 pm and finally La La Land at 10:15 pm. That’s a full day. Right now I feel like Peter O’Toole after he brought Gasim out of the Nefud.

(More…)
September 1, 2016 9:54 pmby Jeffrey Wells

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