Jeffrey Wells

From THR‘s Katie Kilkenny

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My Cannes Killers of the Flower Moon review, tapped out on my iPhone 12 outside an old-town eatery, amounted to a B or a B-minus.

What I wrote between bites of pizza and salad under a damp awning wasn’t a pan. I don’t regard Killers as a weak or poorly crafted film (from a technical standpoint) at all. It’s not. I regard it as a solemn, diligent, semi-haunting, very well made film that “doesn’t quite get there.”

Repeating: Flower Moon isn’t a bad film or a failure. It’s somewhere between a B and B-minus. But it never really tags one. Albert Pujols‘ bat never really goes crack. You know that feeling when a film is moving along at a steady professional clip and then the big crescendo is supposed to happen but it just kind of trickles off? A film that rumbles along in a steady, workmanlike and then cruises to the finish line without setting off fireworks? That’s Flower Moon.

HE to World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy: “Whadaya mean by saying that The Holdovers is ‘far from Alexander Payne’s best film’?

“It is one of his best, and it’s very carefully rendered…every line and and every shot lands just so…each and every brushstroke contributes exquisitely to the whole…c’mon, man, don’t be a snob!”

Here’s my abbreviated Telluride review.

I doubt if I’ll ever re-watch Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (12.02) again.

Daniel Day Lewis’s “Bill the Butcher” performance and Dante Ferretti’s production design are the best aspects. It certainly looks and feels authentic in terms of sets and period details and whatnot. But the idea of rival 19th Century gangs hacking and clubbing and chopping each other to death…later.

This Shawn Levy tweet (posted last night) got me going:

The Gangs of New York Wikipedia page notes the following:

Here’s my favorable review of Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker’s Gangs of New York work print as it existed in October ‘01, or roughly 14 months before the final version opened in theatres. I titled the article “Gangs vs. Gangs”:

Note: In paragraph #2 I should have written “Scorsese’s apparent lack of interest” rather than “disinterest.” Disinterested means impartial, which wasn’t the case.

My recent Telluride viewing of Andrew Haigh’s All Of Us Strangers reminded me that I really, really don’t want to be subjected to explicit gay-male sex scenes, especially if they involve older guys with beard stubble. And double-triple especially if they involve Joaquin Phoenix…pushing 50, paunchy, salt-and-pepper, etc.

I wouldn’t want to watch Phoenix having sex with a woman either. Please.

Todd Haynes has told Variety’s Elsa Keslassy that his next film will be a 1930s-era gay love story starring Phoenix and a not-yet–cast younger guy, and that it will feature “explicit” or otherwise “challenging” sex scenes, and that during their discussions Phoenix had been “pushing it further into more dangerous territory, sexually.”

What the hell would “dangerous territory” mean? I could speculate but let’s not.

Compromise: Back in the 1950s and ‘60s producers used to shoot two versions of sex scenes — tamer, less graphic ones for the U.S. market plus racier, more explicit versions for Europeans. What about Haynes and Phoenix shooting explicit sex scenes for those who are game plus straight-friendly versions in the vein of Call Me By Your Name or Brokeback Mountain for fraidy cats like myself?

Jordan Ruimy’s version of the story:

[9.8.23, 3 pm] Rewritten, amplified upon — I was depleted when I wrote last night’s first draft:

Earlier today (9.7) Rolling Stone’s Krystie Lee Yandoli posted an extensively-sourced torpedo piece about The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon. It describes the 48 year old host and comedian as something of a neurotic, erratic, hair–trigger type, and the show’s general atmosphere being on the stressed, unsettled, far–from–serene side.

Yandoli assembled the story from chats with 16 Tonight Show employees — two currently working there and 14 ex-staffers.

Secondly, we’re all familiar with this unfortunate syndrome, which for the time being we’ll call the Jimmy Fallon syndrome. Over the decades more than a few powerhouse comedic stars of hugely popular TV shows have, to varying degrees, tended to be difficult, turbulent bosses who have caused staffers to kvetch and suffer and briefly contemplate suicide. I’m sorry for the employees who’ve had to deal with the erratic whims and occasional outbursts that are par for the course when you work for intense, half-crazy, highly demanding types like Fallon, but the complaints in Yandoli’s article don’t represent a one-off — they represent a well-established pattern of abusive behavior that probably reaches back to the eras of George M. Cohan, P.T. Barnum, Edwin Booth and, quite possibly, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I’m presuming that similar discomfort was felt decades ago by staffers who worked under Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson (although not Steve Allen, reportedly a more mild-mannered type than the others).

Similar vibes have also emanated, of course, from staffers who’ve worked for Ellen DeGeneres, James Corden, David Letterman, et. al. I don’t know about Jimmy Kimmel workplace vibes.

It does seem to go with the territory, Not always but often.

HE comment posted during Ellen DeGeneres brouhaha:

As of yesterday, the general Venice Film Festival response to Woody Allen‘s Coup de Chance had been largely positive. Not a half-hate, half-love thing, but something like an 85-15 or 80-20 split in favor of Allen’s infidelity thriller.

Despite this the N.Y. Times, seemingly aligned with and loyal to the hater camp, has posted a Kyle Buchanan piece that claims the Venice reception was “decidedly mixed.”

This is a fundamentally dishonest reading as any fair-minded assessment of the Coup de Chance response would necessarily dismiss anti-Woody protestors, as they’re basically a fringe hate group.

The response to any film at any major festival is always about what sophistos in the know — critics, fellow filmmakers, industry columnists — are saying. You can’t count what fringe nutters are howling about from the sidelines

Considering the likelihood that at least a few Venice Film Festival critics have tried like hell to respond as negatively as possible to Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance in order to satisfy the haters, it’s hugely exciting and satisfying to read how positive the overall response has been.

HE loves the idea of the #DeathtoWoody villains gnashing their teeth and muttering “drat! curses! foiled again! “We’ve managed to kill Allen’s domestic career, and now you’re telling us…what, that he’s back from the dead? Well, we won’t have it!! We’ve been terrorizing Hollywood and generally making everyone miserable for the last five or six years, goddamit, and we don’t want this to stop!”

Owen Gleiberman:

The big crescendo of the 50th Telluride Film Festival was Saturday night’s Werner Herzog theatre screening of Poor Things. The energy levels began to lessen the next morning (Sunday, 9.3) — the only screening I caught was The Pot–au–Feu.

Today (Monday, 9.4) is my last and final. Paso Dorji’s The Monk and the Gun at 2 pm, followed by Errol Morris’s The Pigeon Tunnel at 4:30. Then I’ll be driving down to Dolores for a nice cozy night at a creekside motel before driving the next day (Tuesday, 9.5) down to Albuquerque, and then a red-eye flight back to LaGuardia, arriving Wednesday at 6 am.

Several weeks ago a dismissive Cannes review of Aki Kaurismaki ‘s Fallen Leaves lowered my want-to-see. But at the urging of SBIFF kingpin Roger Durling I caught it yesterday afternoon, and was glad that I did. It’s a simple but pleasing romantic fable — bare bones, wholly believable, well acted and genuinely touching.

Nobody’s urging me to see Rustin, which screens at the Palm at 4:15. The reviews have been tepid. Trusted critic friend: “It does exactly what you expect it to do,” I’ll be attending but I won’t use one of my early-entry passes. It’s not worth it. If I don’t get in, fine. Pretty Things is at 7:30 pm.