Jeffrey Wells

…between a movie lover who reveres Jacques Tourner’s Out of the Past (‘47) and a Netflix couch potato who pants and yelps like a chihuahua over the prospect of watching the latest season of Stranger Things?

Scott Feinberg’s Oscar handicap lists are self-perpetuating, especially during November and December. There is no “I have no dog in this as I’m just forecasting what I think will happen without judgment or prejudice aforethought ”…bullshit!

And Scott’s persistent favoritism toward Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a skillfully directed leftist propaganda film that is basically a racially–flipped remake of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, has become a cultural albatross and is therefore untenable in terms of the film industry’s attempt to win back (if this is even possible) Joe and Jane Popcorn, who have long despised wokeism and are sick to death of being politically goaded or gamed or instructed by nutbag lefty fantasies.

And please, please…enough with the “because Ryan Coogler has blended the musical tradition of Robert ‘Crossroads’ Johnson with the coarse tropes of a schlocky AIP vampire film…and because he finished Sinners off by not only melting the wicked vampires but also by machine-gunning some overweight KKK crackers, and because Sinners made money…because of all this Coogler has to be Oscar-toasted for identity reasons alone”…please stop this self-ridiculing, identity-campaign bullshit. Stop it! The second half of this movie is low–rent junk. It’s a Wendy’s burger with arterial blood sauce.

The Best Picture competish is Hamnet vs. Marty Supreme vs. Sentimental Value…period.

Average schmoes will hate Hollywood all the more if One Battle After Another wins the Best Picture Oscar. Save yourselves, industry voters! Celebrate heart and verve and leave the progressive lefty shit behind. Plus OBAA lost $100 million!

Lead protagonists facing tough odds have to come to a decision of some kind. They have to act, even if it means a worsening or self-destruction. Catharsis is essential. They can’t just sit there and gloom out and become empty-vessel nihilists or downspiralling wimps.

Few things in life are more emotionally satisfying than a successful take-down campaign.

It’s been 12 years since I last saw Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here. It’s technically not half bad…decently composed, well-edited, real-ish, moderately affecting, believably acted. Alas, I didn’t much like it because of a single maddening performance by Felicity Price, the director’s wife who has the lead female role

It’s odd how a film with a hugely irritating performance managed to stay in my mind, but it has. And now I’m watching it again on Amazon. Yes, that’s right — I’m giving it another chance.

I took my original 2013 review down during the height of the #MeToo movement (late 2017 through late ’23) for fear of someone slitting my throat.

Wish You Were Here is about the fallout from a tragic Cambodian vacation — a getaway that married, expecting parents Dave and Alice (Joel Edgerton, Price) have recently shared with Alice’s younger sister (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Star).

Jeremy vanished at the end of the getaway and nobody seems to know (or be able to admit) what happened, although it’s obvious that Dave knows and will eventually spill the beans by Act Three.

I’m sorry if this sounds like a primitive reaction, but Wish You Were Here is no one’s idea of a film noir.

Because the film, primarily set in Australia, is mainly about the reaction of Price’s Alice to a brief instance of infidelity that happened in Cambodia. A drunken and woozy Edgerton and Palmer got together on the beach, y’see. The kind of infidelity that happened so quickly with both parties so drunk or stoned that neither party remembers much. And the minute Alice learns of this you’re muttering “oh, Christ, here we go.”

Not that it’s wrong or unnatural for Alice to be outraged, but it becomes sooo tedious — the same piano chord played over and over. The four characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal were much, much better at dealing with infidelity and whatnot.

After a while I started muttering to Price, “Jesus, get over it, for God’s sake…it wasn’t planned, it was just beach sex, they were drunk and they’re both really sorry…Jesus.”

So basically we’re stuck with a horse-faced pregnant wife who can’t let this one bad thing go, and a seriously fetching and tormented sister named Steph you’d like to hang with more and a good-looking missing guy whom you’d also like hang with a bit more.

But Steph has been relegated to the sidelines and Jeremy is missing. So we’re stuck with angry Alice and conflicted, shaggy-faced Dave going through the pains of hell because he hasn’t told the truth to anyone about what really happened.

Wish You Were Here is basically a “get away from me, you fucked my sister!” movie with a side-plot about what happened in Cambodia. It’s about the cost of suppressing the truth and not coming clean, and the cost of coming clean about meaningless infidelity.

Price to Edgerton: “You effed my much more attractive sister? You loathsome animal. You contemptible hound. You think you know what marital misery is? Well, you’re going to suffer like never before. In fact, I’m so enraged that I’m going to put the audience through as much agony as you, my dear husband. We’ll all sink into the quicksand together — you, me, Jeffrey Wells, all the other people in the audience.”

I’m sorry but my Amazon viewing (it ended an hour ago) left me feeling no better than I did 12 years ago when I first saw the film at Sundance.

Reminder to all infidels: Never admit to catting around, deny it until death. Nothing good can ever come out of admitting to infidelity. This goes for Olivia Nuzzi as well.

HE to friendo a few hours ago: “That’s it — between Richard Brody’s ‘trivial baby food’ put-down and Joel Edgerton’s ‘masculinity is a word that should be thrown out’ quote, Train Dreams is all but FINISHED as a possible Best Picture nominee. Stick a fork in it.”

HE’s “Jeremiah Johnson was better” review, posted on 11.17.25.

An amusing if tough-minded 11.24 Washingtonian piece by Sylvie McNamara, based on a chat with a pair of married-but-anonymous crisis p.r. professionals, pretty much spells out the Olivia Nuzzi career–option situation, and it isn’t good.

This drama could potentially end tragically for her. I hope it doesn’t, of course, but man, right now it seems quite bad.

Especially if “American Canto”, Nuzzi’s autobiographical book that’s mostly about the RFK “digital affair” mishegoss (it pops on Tuesday, 12.2) doesn’t mention her other alleged (according to ex-boyfriend Ryan Lizza) sexual affair with a big-time politician, former South Carolina governor and onetime presidential contender Mark Sanford.

If the book ignores Sanford, “Nuzzi’s credibility is shot,” one of the p.r. sources flat-out states.

I recently noted that the difference between Nuzzi’s glancing “digital affair” with RFK, Jr. (which may or may not have included oral pleasuring) and the curiously close relationship between President Lyndon Johnson and NBC and CBS TV correspondent Nancy Dickerson in the ‘60s may not have been all that different in this or that way, but who knows?

I doubt that Johnson and Dickerson were ever as decisive (much less athletic) as was Nuzzi in her reported 2020 tryst with Sanford.

Either way Nuzzi’s unfortunate infamy has resulted in an impressionist Isabelle Brourman painting of a mostly nude Nuzzi in a forthcoming Vanity Fair issue (i.e., also next Tuesday).

To me, this seems kinda cruel if not voracious, but when there’s blood in the water, the sharks tend to go crazy.

Update: Ryan Lizza‘s latest Telos chapter just dropped (just before 4 pm eastern), and it nails Nuzzi hard for questionable journalistic ethics and behavior. The finale mentions Olivia’s portraitist, the above-mentioned Isabella (aka “Izzy”) Brourman, whom Olivia asked to surreptitiously record an encounter with 2024 candidate Donald Trump.

Here’s how the piece ends:

Read more

Pic snapped early yesterday afternoon (Tuesday, 11.25) in Port Chester…

My only quibble with Lesh is that Altamont moment in the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter (‘71). Santana drummer Mike Shrieve informs the just-arriving Lesh and Grateful Dead cohort Jerry Garcia that some Hell’s Angels have been beating up on audience members. Lesh thoughtfully replies, “Doesn’t seem right, man.”

Kicking and bruising audience members doesn’t “seem” right? Hey, Phil…don’t go out on a limb!

…the Movie Godz, deeply offended, will do what they can to arrange for the winner to “pay off the debt”, so to speak, by condemning him/her to star or costar in…okay, perhaps not a string of mediocre films, but at least one or two.

Ned Beatty to Peter Finch in Network: “And you…will…atone!”

I wish I could say that one current example is Jamie Lee Curtis. Her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her laboriously broad performance as an IRS agent in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a deeply despised bullshit genre hodgepodge that opened three and a half years ago (3.25.22), was an awarding that will live in infamy. I literally shouted “no!…no!” when her win was announced.

Alas, Curtis’s career has been going great guns since she won that Oscar in early ‘23. Praise for her work in The Last Showgirl, and Freakier Friday even. Not to mention a well-received guest performance as an alcoholic matriarch during The Bear’s second season. Plus her successful children’s books.

But at least she’s costarring in James L. Brooks’ Ella McCay, which is allegedly an embarrassment. (A critic friendo calls it “awful”.) The trailer tells us that Curtis wildly over-acts as Emma Mackey’s mom.

It goes without saying that the careers of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, co-creators of EEAAO, will be adversely affected by those damnable ‘23 Oscars. Okay, I don’t know that but these guys ought to suffer. They damn well should. Will they? Who knows?

The first viewing of a film is a date. The third viewing of the same film indicates definite interest, hot cinematic “sex” and a potential for going steady. The seventh or eighth viewing means you’re living together and still having good sex, but oh, those first three or four times! The fifteenth viewing means you’re married and locked in the long haul, but the thrill is gone.