Jeffrey Wells

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.

HE to Owen Gleiberman: So much of life and living is propelled by illusion. But for me, Margaret Hamilton’s cackling, green-skinned witch is an absolutely genuine, real-deal figure of campy fun and wicked frolic. Matriarchy schmatriarchy!

https://variety.com/2025/film/columns/wizard-of-oz-wicked-feminism-patriarchy-critic-analysis-1236589628/

Political journalist Ryan Lizza felt betrayed, naturally, when he discovered five years ago that journalist Olivia Nuzzi, his live-in fiancé at the time, had done the gasping slurpy nasty with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, whom she had profiled for New York magazine in late ‘19.

Four years later came Nuzzi’s second affair of sorts — not an actual slippin’ and slidin’ thing, Nuzzi has written, as it was all about sexting — with an older politician, the hoarse-voiced Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. , Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Except in his second Substack piece about Nuzzi’s outre sexual entanglements, Lizza has posted a salacious excerpt from a “poem” that RFK allegedly sent to Nuzzi — one that not only challenges her “American Canto” account of an allegedly non-sexual involvement with RFK (whom she alludes to in the book as “the politician”) but graphically alludes to a pulse-quickening blowjob he may or may not have received from Nuzzi during their 2024 mess-around…hey, I’m just reporting this stuff.

Lizza has described “American Canto” as “a largely fictitious and self-serving account” of her thing with RFK. The honesty factor or lack thereof is between Nuzzi, her publisher and her readers, but it’s icky and rather vicious of Lizza to have posted RFK’s alleged account of…this is really distasteful in more ways than one…the adoring Nuzzi swallowing his “river” without spilling a drop.

Lizza’s (and possibly RFK’s) odious excerpt:

Even if Nuzzi did provide exceptional pleasuring last year to the nation’s current Health and Human Services honcho, Lizza’s attempt to publicly humiliate an ex-girlfriend reflects poorly upon his own character and temperament. Deciding to post that sliver of a b.j. “poem” was mean and toxic.

Lizza excerpts:

Lizza on discovering Luzzi’s Sanford betrayal — a note that alludes to more swallowing

A couple of months ago Nuzzi landed a West Coast editor position with Vanity Fair. Will Lizza’s posting RFK’s possibly genuine or possibly fanciful b.j. “poem” lead to VF cutting her loose? I say keep her on.

Nuzzi is obviously a tiny bit wacko, but she’s also a memorable “character” in the tradition of Isadora Duncan or Tallulah Bankhead or Marlene Dietrich, and who among us doesn’t enjoy colorful accounts of reckless, go-for-the-gusto living and yaddah-yaddah? Does each and every female political reporter or columnist have to radiate astringent, button-down posturing and no-monkey-business professionalism? The system can’t allow for an occasional free-spirited sensualist, just to liven things up?

It takes all sorts to make a world.

…and they are selling such books (I read them to Sutton last night), why not create children’s books based upon The Wild Bunch and The Towering Inferno? Hell, why not go real-world? Tyke books based upon the 9/11 catastrophe, the Kennedy assassination and the Cambodian genocide of the ‘70s, say.

Howard Hawks, Paul Newman and HE are now a power-sharing, chrome-steel triumvirate.

From this point on the guiding light perceptions of HE (all high-quality films feature a late-second-act pivot), Hawks (“three great scenes and no bad ones”) and Newman (Newman’s Law of 15 at the front and back) comprise the core of our movie-assessing philosophy.

Hawks, Newman and HE are hereby resolved to move forward in this moviegoing life based on the clarity and radiance of shared perceptions and accumulated life wisdom (i.e., long is the way and hard that, out of darkness, leads up to light).