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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)

“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

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43 Comments
Sooner Or Later All Film Critics Meet The Terrible Bus

Longtime film critic Rex Reed, who’s been at this racket since the ’60s, has been iced by the New York Observer. Not out of any apparent malice but due to the paper’s dwindling revenues, which have necessitated cutbacks. The Observer‘s top-dog movie critic since the early ’90s, Reed was told last week that he’s toast. In the same way that all steers and cows have a date with the slaughterhouse, all film critics eventually get the axe. Unless, that is, they’re running their own online column in which case they’re bulletproof as long as the ads roll in.

Reed told Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn that “the Observer has been going down the drain financially for quite some time”, or since investment banker Arthur Carter sold the rag to Jared Kushner in ’06. Kushner’s brother-in-law, Joseph Meyer, took control of the paper as Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump moved to Washington.

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May 31, 2017 10:15 pmby Jeffrey Wells
26 Comments
What If Snow White Was Fat?

Don’t kid yourself, Chloe Moretz — the basic premise of Red Shoes and the 7 Dwarfs is that the classic Snow White image would be severely compromised if she turned out to be corpulent. The third act will deliver the standard bromide about true beauty lying within, I’m sure, but look at the trailer, for God’s sake. The dorky dwarves under the bed nearly faint when rail-thin Snow undresses, and then moan with displeasure when it turns out her slim bod is illusory. Is the trailer saying that fat is ugly? No — that it’s disappointing, at least initially. And yet the p.c., Moretz-endorsed line is that traditional physical allure is meaningless. Sure thing.

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May 31, 2017 9:40 pmby Jeffrey Wells
112 Comments
Humor Is Always About Pain

Talk to any comedian — there’s no such thing as “a joke.” There’s only slap-in-the-face reality and the clever spinning of some painful, humiliating experience by way of wit, audacity and imagination. Jokes are always about ghastly things of one kind or another, and in this light there’s no such thing as going “too far,” even in a political satirical sense. I feel that Kathy Griffin‘s severed Trump head appropriately addressed one of the most malevolent gargoyles in American governmental history in tit-for-tat terms. It expressed what I feel about that bloated orange pig, and it provided a satisfying emotional fantasy. But why is dead Trump bleeding from the scalp?

May 31, 2017 11:30 amby Jeffrey Wells

2 Comments
Fred Zinneman’s Toscana! in Todd AO

 
 

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May 31, 2017 11:05 amby Jeffrey Wells
13 Comments
Obvious Judi Dench Oscar Bait

The “how will this play among Trump supporters?” question is obviously irrelevant as Trump supporters generally avoid this kind of thing (intelligent, dryly humorous, Stephen Frears-ish) like the plague.

May 31, 2017 3:32 amby Jeffrey Wells
24 Comments
All-Media Screenings Will Never Be Deep-Sixed

Two days ago Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro and Anita Busch reported the following about the Rotten Tomatoes effect on soul-smothering would-be blockbusters, to wit: “Both Pirates 5 and Baywatch started high on tracking four weeks ago, $90 to $100 million over four days and $50 million over five days, respectively. [But] the minute Rotten Tomatoes hit, those estimates collapsed.

“Over the weekend it was heard that some studio insiders want to hold off critic screenings until opening day or cancel them all together (that’s pretty ambitious and would cause much ire, we’ll see if that ever happens). Already, studios and agencies are studying RT scores’ impact on advance ticket sales and tracking.”

I’ve asked this before, but when exactly did the Rotten Tomatoes effect change? Because it wasn’t that many years ago that I was hearing over and over that ticket buyers either (a) routinely dismissed film-critic opinions due to their dweeby, elitist, ivory-tower perspectives, and (b) were too dumb or distracted to check aggregate movie-reviewing sites (i.e., Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic), and that (c) mostly they just decided to see stuff based on gut reactions to trailers and the Twitter/Facebook chatter that followed.

When did all this change? The first stirrings I recall was when The Lone Ranger tanked and both producer Jerry Bruckheimer and costar Armie Hammer blamed critics.

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May 31, 2017 12:58 amby Jeffrey Wells

4 Comments
Paolo’s Place

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May 31, 2017 12:35 amby Jeffrey Wells
28 Comments
Paramount’s Pain Isn’t Exactly Rotten Tomatoes’ Gain

More or less verbatim from Richard Rushfield’s Ankler piece titled “is Paramount Cursed?”: “[There have been] plenty of Paramount films that, on paper, should’ve been okay. But somehow, something just didn’t go right. Every. Single. Time.

“Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard in a glamorous WW2 spy thriller! Sounds great! Reboot The Ring! Monster Trucks that are actually monsters! The kids will love it! A new Ben Hur for the Game of Thrones generation! Scarlett Johansson in a white body suit doing anime! A Martin Scorsese medieval thriller! A new Star Trek!  A new Zoolander! A new Jack Reacher! A bawdy Office Christmas Party with every buzzy comedy star on earth! A medium-budget Michael Bay contemporary war thriller! A Meryl Streep Oscar bait film! A Richard Linklater 80’s comedy! A Tina Fey war comedy! And best of all, Dwayne Johnson in an R-rated comic reboot of a universally known TV series!

“What a line-up! How could most of those not catch fire? Or at least…some? One or two? Okay, the last XXX did well in China. [But] when that much goes wrong in that many ways, it’s time to consider that supernatural powers may be at work and perhaps what you need isn’t a new studio chief as much as an exorcist.

Wells interjection: Brad Grey‘s sad, very recent passing requires Rushfield to avoid stating the obvious, which is that the above-described films were all Grey’s.

“I hear from the Paramount lot that a lot of nerves are getting jangly as they wait for the Gianopulos reign to kick in. Lots of high hopes, but still looking for that brilliant, curse-breaking plan to come down.”

“The trades are dissecting — with Paramount’s help — what went wrong with Baywatch,” Rushfield states. “Lots of finger pointing at Rotten Tomatoes and their blasted 19% score. “A recent internal study at Paramount concluded that younger ticket buyers pay close attention to aggregated scores on Rotten Tomatoes,” reports THR.

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May 31, 2017 12:22 amby Jeffrey Wells
7 Comments
Tuscan Fence Buzz

Tatyana and I are staying in a stone cottage on a wine farm called Azienda Agricola Caparsa (47 Via Caparsa), near Radda in Chianti. The owner, Paolo Cianferoni, is a dead ringer for Steven Spielberg if you take away the beard, and if you de-age Spielberg by ten years. Paolo told me yesterday that original Sideways author Rex Pickett stayed here some years back. So between Pickett, Spielberg and myself the place has a definite Hollywood aroma.


Paolo’s electric bolt fence is more or less dead center in this photo. You can’t see it all that clearly, I realize, but does that matter? It’s there, okay? I’m telling you.

I told Paolo that Tatyana and I were planning to hike over to Radda in Chianti, and so he pointed to a shortcut path through his vineyard. He then pointed to a metal gate at the top of a far-off incline. The gate was electrified, he said, to keep out deer and whatnot, but that I just needed to open it carefully and watch where I step.

So we got to the gate and I delicately opened it — no shock. Thinking I was in the clear, I stepped through and, being a bit sweaty and breath-starved, missed the fact that a thick, coiled, half-camoflauged wire was lying in the dirt three or four inches from the gate. My ankles touched it and suddenly I was James Cagney at the end of Angels With Dirty Faces. My body convulsed. I felt as if my kidneys had been punched by a guy with brass knuckles. The electric current was mild (i.e., high enough to dissuade animals without killing them), but it definitely rocked my attitude.

For a while there I felt like (a) a huge dumbass (I actually still feel this way) and (b) four movie characters at the same time, above and beyond Cagney.

Character #1 is Allen Garfield‘s character in William Friedkin‘s The Brinks Job, particularly in that scene in which Garfield’s character opens a door that says “do not open.” [After the jump] Character #2 is Richard Pryor‘s proverbial-white guy-walking-through-the-woods, which Pryor peformed in Richard Pryor in Concert [ditto — go to 3:25]. Character #3 is Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan in Sexy Beast: “It’s the bolt, it’s the buzz, it’s the general fuck-off of it.” Character #4: Boris Karloff‘s intrepid monster in Frankenstein, a fellow who isn’t harmed by electricity but revitalized.

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May 30, 2017 11:46 pmby Jeffrey Wells

7 Comments
Miller’s Law

In a 5.27 Indiewire piece from Cannes, Eric Kohn passes along a chat with Mad Max maestro George Miller, president of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival jury. Kohn wanted to know about the criteria that Miller brought to jury deliberations. “One of the good things to do is to ask everyone what they think makes a good film,” he said. “It varies with everybody. For me, the way I define a good film is how long it follows you out of the cinema. By the time you get to the parking lot, if it stays with you, then you know it’s good. How long does a film follow you around?”

HE answer to question #1: A good film is not one that massages some arcane aesthetic fancy or rehashes a Joseph Campbell myth or throws the lettuce leaves in the air without strategy or which reaches down into your private little p.c. cave and says ‘hey, homey…I’ve found you and we get each other…you’re my hombre and vice versa.” A good film conveys some kind of profound, universally recognized truth or truths that are recognized not just by you or your friends but by the stupidest assholes on the planet. It does this by slipping into private places, reshuffling old cards, resuscitating old feelings or generally bringing it all back home…it sinks into your system and reminds you that this, in part, is the way things really are. A good film might provoke or disturb on some deep-down level, but you know it’s dead real.

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May 30, 2017 10:36 pmby Jeffrey Wells
19 Comments
Train As Aphrodisiac

Fairly expert for this kind of thing. I’ve been on trains, felt these things or at least dreamt them. Directed by Seb Edwards, music by Max Richter, etc.

May 29, 2017 10:13 pmby Jeffrey Wells
65 Comments
The Last Time A D.C. Comics Superhero Flick Even Half-Delivered?

Scores of 97% and 79% are pretty high for a superhero flick, especially a D.C. Comics property from Warner Bros. I haven’t been able to see Patti Jenkins‘ Wonder Woman (Warner Bros., 6.2) due to the usual May travelling. It opens worldwide on Thursday, 6.1. I could catch it in Rome.

May 29, 2017 10:08 pmby Jeffrey Wells

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