Jeffrey Wells

Joey, Jett’s 13 year-old pit bull, died late last night. Heart attack, gasping for air, agonizing. But he didn’t die alone. Jett and Cait sat close and let him know he was loved…”with” him to the end.

Posted several weeks ago:

Since Thursday I’ve been dog-sitting in West Orange while Jett, Cait and Sutton are in Massachusetts for a weekend funeral. Joey, a pit bull with a bum hind leg, and Luna, a sausage beagle, are both older but they love me and I them.

But they insist on fairly close proximity and almost constant affection at all times, and after three days and nights I’m exhausted from lack of sleep due to sharing the guest room bed with these guys as they take up most of the mattress space. Three nights of bad sleep, mainly due to Joey.

Right now I’m trying to get a little extra shut-eye (I was up half the night from the sprawling bodies and dog farts, plus we just lost an hour to daylight savings) by locking Joey downstairs behind the plastic staircase gate.

And of course, Joey is whining and moaning and banging against the gate as we speak.

Update: Joey has somehow crashed or squeezed through the gate. He’s up here now with us, and of course he’s back on the bed. I love these guys but I’m getting sick of this — I’d like a little peace.

New update: Lying on the couch and of course they have to sleep either right next to me or on top of my legs.

Jett scolding: “U trained them, dad. U give Joey too much love and attention and let him walk all over u. My [disciplined] way may seem cruel but it’s the only way to have any sanity.”

I liked Nikki Haley (fast on her feet, razor-sharp comebacks) and Chris Christie (stood his ground, told it straight) in Wednesday night’s Republican debate -— definitely my top two.

A 9.26 post on a British 007 fan site (www.ajb007.co.uk), written by a Minnesota-based fanatic named “Gymkata”, has passed along allegedly knowledgeable intel about negotiations between Chris Nolan, EON and Amazon that would involve restarting the Bond franchise as a stripped-down, back-to-raw-elements ‘60s period fantasy a la Dr. No and From Russia With Love.

World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy yesterday passed along the second–hand “Gymkata” dish, chapter and verse.

Nolan’s alleged idea would theoretically mean a complete time-travel return to the Eisenhower-and-Kennedy eras, and particularly a refined and gentlemanly James Bond (possibly to be played by Aaron Taylor Johnson) with a vague undercurrent of casually cruel, sexist-pig entitlement…a perverse restoration of that (heh-heh, just kidding) good old “run along like a good girl, time for man talk” Sean Connery attitude…a rabbit hole immersion in a dusty, possibly pre-Beatles, low-tech realm of typewriters, newspapers, black-and-white TVs, phone booths, early ‘60s muscle cars, narrow-lapel Saville Row suits, unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, shaken-not-stirred Martinis and worldly but compliant sex bunnies who…Jesus H. Christ, who the hell are we kidding here? Ourselves?

You can’t go home again, bruh. Delicious as it may seem from a hazy distance, the pre-Goldfinger era couldn’t be fully, organically reconstructed unless the commitment to go back there is 100% total and absolute, and that would require a director with a brutally demanding Kubrickian mindset.

Plus the #MeToo brigade would shriek and howl. The deadweight EON caretakers (i.e., Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson) haven’t the courage for such a radical venture. And Nolan, a chilly control freak who’s shown time and again that he’s fundamentally unable to even flirt with the sensual, much less connect with pulp-erotic yesteryear dreamscapes…even Nolan would lack the necessary cojones to reinvest in a politically intolerable, dead-and-gone realm. And adhering slavishly to the original Ian Fleming stories…again, you can’t go home again.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to surrender to a convincing reboot of those old From Russia With Love ingredients. I just don’t think it’s politically or psychologically or even physically (i.e., financially) possible.

Would I love to be proved wrong? Most certainly. Not so much for the inevitable resuscitation of Connery-recalling, Hugh Hefner-ish sexism (which a time travel Bond film would have to accommodate for honesty’s sake) as a revisiting of old-fashioned, bare-bones plotting and atmosphere.

Taylor Swift is riding the hormones, buzzing along, giddy, giggling…another meaningless, thoroughly disposable new relationship once it runs outta gas.

Sooner or later she’s gonna dump him, and soooo what? Nobody ever lasts with her, man. Everything winds down, and it’s all stinking bullshit. Plus all football players get fat.

Thank God Kelce isn’t a freckly redhead…at least there’s that.

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The “Ruth Bader Biden” paragraph was spoken by Carville.

Hollywood Elsewhere approves only the white-haired guy in the center . The other two are the tea-drinkers.

A link of partial explanation.

The Sirk “legend” obviously wasn’t regarded as a major selling point by the Universal International marketing team.

William Freidkin’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial begins streaming on Paramount + / Showtime between 10.6 and 10.8. Boomers and GenXers will be watching but not many under-45s, I suspect. Am I wrong?

A great many people took notice when Edward Dmytryk‘s The Caine Mutiny opened exclusively at Loew’s Capitol (B’way between 50th and 51st, directly across from the still-in-existence Winter Garden) on Friday, 6.25.54.

It was a much bigger deal to see Dmytryk’s Technicolor WW2-era film inside the cavernous Capitol (a deluxe 5000-seater where the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity had premiered ten months earlier) than it will be for older viewers to flop on the couch and “watch” Freidkin’s film, paying sporadic attention while surfing-and-texting, feeding the pets, taking out the garbage, etc.

The Caine Mutiny’s biggest first-run competitor was Demetrius and the Gladiators, which had opened a week or so earlier at the nearby Roxy (153 West 50th, corner of 7th Avenue).

Roughly a month later Elia Kazan‘s On The Waterfront — a gritty, black-and-white, working-class drama set in wintry, down-at-the-heels Hoboken — would open at Loews Astor (1141 seats) on Wednesday, 7.28.54.

Jean Negulesco‘s Three Coins in the Fountain, a schmaltzy Rome travelogue romance, had opened on 5.20.54.

Full credit to “@StephanieX” (is that her full name?) for creating this:

Created by Sasha Stone:

HE to Cameron Crowe: I know what Bernie Taupin used to look like. Longish hair, gentle features, sensitive eyes. Exactly like a sensitive lyricist would’ve looked in 1973.

Now he looks like someone else. Shaved head, pork pie hat, white goatee, leather jacket. Like a jazz musician from Marseilles, or the twin brother of French director Jacques Audiard. No resemblance at all to the yesteryear guy.

You and I look like older (but not too much older) versions of our youthful selves. Elton still looks like Elton, just older and heavier with artificially thick hair. Bernie looks like someone else entirely.

Snapped in ‘62: Gregory Peck was peaking with To Kill a Mockingbird. Cary Grant had peaked with North by Northwest three years earlier, but he was on the gradual downslide and would retire four years hence. The stout, moustachioed, Ugly American-ized Marlon Brando had peaked in the early to mid ‘50s but would resurge in the early ‘70s. Rock Hudson was peaking with Lover Come Back but…okay, he had Seconds to look forward to, I suppose.