Jeffrey Wells

With Miles having agreed to slip into the house to retrieve Jack’s wallet, it’s 85% certain that he’ll be running out a few minutes later with that big gorilla right behind him.

Obviously Miles should have told Jack to keep the engine running and the driver door open so Miles can hop right in and gun it. But no — as Miles runs out Jack has fallen asleep, the car is shut off and the driver door is closed.

In real life Miles would’ve never been made it, and that big, naked, blue-collar ape would’ve grabbed him and pounded away.

The term “blockbuster” means “important, heavy-hitting, big-studio powerhouse film that everyone has to see theatrically…an expensive, eye-filling, big-swing spectacle that not only earns a ton of money but feels like a cultural touchstone in hindsight.”

The term does not, however, necessarily mean “rooted in otherworldly CG fantasy.”

Steven Spielberg’s somewhat realistic, 51-year-old Jaws, for example, was a blockbuster. Jim Cameron’s Avatar (‘09) and Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer, for sure. Was David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) a blockbuster? In a certain cultural sense, yeah. Mike Todd’s Around The World in 80 Days (‘56) was a blockbuster; ditto Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (‘56). It is HE’s humble opinion that the richest and most resonant big-scale blockbuster of all time was David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (‘62).

Try telling this to Collider ‘s Diego Pineda Pacheco, who believes that within the realm of the last 50 years, only teen-friendly CG fantasies qualify.

Worse, Pacheco believes that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) sits at the top — the greatest blockbuster flick of the last half-century. To which HE responds by going “eccch!” and spitting on the sidewalk. Jackson was an over-rated flash in the pan, and is pretty much sidelined now; if you ask me the Rings trilogy was an endurance test before and it certainly is now. I’ll never sit through those films ever again.

If the greatest blockbuster of the last 50 years has to be a big-budget, geek-franchise fantasy, The Empire Strikes Back easily rules the roost.

It appears as if Michael (Lionsgate, 4.24) is more into avoiding than lying. I’m sure it blows smoke up its own ass in various ways, but it mainly seems to be about re-creating Michael Jackson’s ‘80s career highs while dodging the deep-down serpents who slither in the soft mud.

Michael ends around ‘88, I’ve read somewhere. The first little boy molestation accusation, the Jordy Chandler thing, broke in ‘93.  

https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/us-celebrity-news/heartbreaking-life-first-child-accuse-34774912.amp  

It sounds as if potential Michael viewers, before buying the popcorn and sitting down, will have to put the “sleeping with attractive little boys within the sanctum of Neverland for years on end” stuff into a steel lockbox and put the box into the trunk of their car out in the parking lot. After seeing Michael some may decide to leave the box in the trunk for an indefinite period.

I myself can double-track it. I can enjoy the secular ‘80s euphoria (Thriller, moonwalking, white socks) while at the same time accepting and respecting Leaving Neverland, which scalds hard.

“Fine Film, Wrong Title” — initially posted on 2.20.20:

“William Nicholson‘s Hope Gap (Roadside, 3.6) is an intelligent, fully felt, nicely layered domestic drama about the sad end of a nearly 30-year marriage in a small coastal town in England.

“Annette Bening and Bill Nighy play the 60ish couple, and the gist is that they don’t part by mutual agreement — Nighy has fallen in love with a local woman (a somewhat younger widow) and proceeds to lower the boom on Bening over tea.

“Both are excellent in a carefully proportioned and ruefully miserable sort of way, Bening in particular with her nicely vowelled British accent.

“The story is based upon the breakup of Nicholson’s own parents when he was somewhere in his early 20s, and how he found himself in the position of the anguished counselor and referee. Nicholson is played by Josh O’Connor (The Crown), who’s fully up to the level of his costars.

“I was pleasantly surprised by how much the film stirred and engaged me, especially given the sappy-sounding title. Hope Gap sounds like some kind of contact-high film — a spirited feel-gooder about things working out for the better. That’s not what this is.

“A much, much better title is The Retreat From Moscow, which is what Nicholson called the play version when it opened in late ’99 at the Chichester Festival Theatre. (Four years later it opened at Broadway’s Booth Theatre with John Lithgow, Eileen Atkins and Ben Chaplin in the lead roles.) Why it took Nicholson 17 or 18 years to film it is anyone’s guess.

“Why was it called The Retreat From Moscow? Because it alludes to acts of cruelty that allow the living to survive. In 1812 Napoleon’s once-huge army was decimated by the Russian winter along with a lack of food and sufficient clothing — only 27,000 troops survived. Those who fell by the roadside were stripped by their comrades and left to die naked in the snow, and drivers of wagons carrying the French wounded sped up over bumpy road in hopes that they might fall off.

“By the same token Nighy’s Edward sits down at the kitchen table and tells Bening’s Grace that they’re done — that he intends to move out because he’s fallen in love with Sally Roger‘s Angela. By any measure this is a brusque and hurtful move, but it also puts an end to a dry, unsatisfying union while allowing for a measure of newfound happiness between Edward and Angela.

“When Grace angrily strolls into Edward and Angela’s home in Act Three, she asks the younger woman what she thought she was doing when she and Edward began to become involved. Angela replies, ‘I think I thought there were three unhappy people, and now there’s only one.’ Whoa.

“Some critics have complained that Hope Gap feels too ‘written’, too much like a filmed play. Except the writing is quite good. All the angles and regrets and after-thoughts emerge in just the right way. I suppose some will find it a bit too solemn and dreary, but when the dialogue is this well-honed and the acting is this affecting, I don’t see the problem.”

Maybe if it was filmed in gorgeous Technicolor I might have somehow stuck with it? I love the subtle colors of Rome, especially around dusk. I only know that I’ve always found the concept of Audrey Hepburn’s princess living a restricted, regimented, hemmed-in life hard to swallow. Lame fairy-tale stuff.

April is bustin’ out all over:

“My God, there’s no end to it.” — Ned Beatty’s chubby salesman in Deliverance.

The last two episodes of season #2 of The Pitt really work. They feel amped, declarative, crescendo-ish. That baby really and truly saved Noah Wiley’s mega-stressed, chopper-riding Dr. Rabinovitch. He found the proverbial serene plateau. Did I ever believe that Robbie was actually mulling suicide? No, I never did. But I went along with the conceit.

Did I wind up feeling less hostile towards Dr. Trinity Santos because she was karaoke-singing Alanis Morissette at the very end? In a word, no. It was obviously good that Santos was venting all of the collected rage and stress, but I still think she’s bad news. Okay, I no longer think she should get hit by a car….I’ll give her that.

…happened ten and a quarter years ago (1.25.16) and I was right in the middle of it, bruh….a front-row seat at Park City’s Eccles theatre…and I called it what it was, blunt and straight and true….”one of the biggest self-congratulatory circle jerks and politically correct wank-offs in the history of the Sundance Film Festival.”

This flashpoint event marked the birth of the cultish woke insanity that would begin to engulf Hollywood two years later and which ignited big-time during the COVID–infected, George Floyd summer of 2020.

One of the more significant responses to my 1.25.16 report came from Variety ‘s Steven Gaydos, who more or less implied that I was some kind of racist Unibomber who needed to face my own ugliness and get my head straight and so on.

2026 hindsight: Gaydos had his head up his woke-cheerleading glee club woo-woo rectum, and I was channeling the spirit of Dalton Trumbo.

Yesterday I was knocked out by a nocturnal photo of the Brooklyn Bridge, which had been posted on Facebook by Reid Rosefelt. It has a fantasy-world quality…pinpoints of golden amber enshrouded by fog clouds, like an image of nighttime London out of Disney’s Péter Pan (‘53).

“It doesn’t seem real”, I thought, “but congrats to Reid all the same.”

Reid later clarified that the photo has been snapped by event photographer Jane Kratochvil, who lives in Reid’s building but has a better view of the bridge.

Kratochvil’s photos, which capture corporate events and shows and big celebrations, are all postcard pretty — bursting with color, perfectly balanced, full of joy and spirit, etc. Which is what her clients want.

Look at her professional website and you immediately think of that lyric from Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome”…”gives you the nice bright colors, gives you the greens of summer…makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.”

Alas, Jane’s magnificently foggy Brooklyn Bridge-at-night snap is apparently an anomaly — I found no other images on her website that seem to even aspire to its moody complexity, much less vaguely resemble it.

A divine and merciful Donald Trump blessing a resting (ailing? dying?) Paul Newman as Judge Roy Bean…what does this have to do with Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo?

And what’s with the winged, shadowy, flying monkey demon floating in the golden clouds behind Jesus H. Trump…the figure with the Statue of Liberty crown and flanked by two U.S. soldiers?

“To be happy, you must eliminate two things in your head. The fear of a bad future and the memory of a bad past.” — Seneca the younger.

I try to live with a loose-shoe, “everything’s everything”, be-here-now, zen-hepcat attitude, but I will never be free of the above. They will always haunt me. The only things that keep the HE boat afloat are (a) the love of great or very good or hugely enjoyable movies from the past and (b) unquenchable excitement about great movies yet to come.