Jeffrey Wells

Strange as it may sound to some (Stalinist wokeys in particular), but in the old days actresses were not only given opportunity but valued and rewarded not just for their talent but also their looks. Audiences have always loved the company of dishy-looking performers. Or at least they used to.

Cecil B. DeMille’s mostly bald head was at least 50% larger than Billy Wilder’s nearly-as-bald cranium. Look at the difference! They’re standing right next to each other! DeMille could almost be a Kanamit from Rod Serling “To Serve Man”.

…due to job demands, here’s a reaction from HE’s own “bentrane”:

“I know you’re not a fan of High and Low, which I think is easily one of Akira Kurosawa‘s best films. That said, Spike Lee’s version has some pluses, but overall, it’s just okay. 

“Although I was never bored, it’s too long, and it takes too much time to get to the main story.

“It also lacks the moral clarity of the original. In this version Denzel seems to put up the kidnap money for his chauffeur’s son not because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but more because he’s afraid of what social media will say about him if he doesn’t ante up.

“The film also doesn’t know when to end. Like the original, Highest2Lowest has a scene in which Denzel meets the kidnapper in jail, and their respective social standings and issues come to the fore. That was the end of High and Low, and it was a powerful one.

“But instead of ending it there, Spike had to add a totally unnecessary audition sequence in his apartment, which adds nothing to the film.

“Pluses: the cinematography; the soundtrack; the subway sequence; the very New York feel; the acting. But they’re not enough to overcome a bloated running time and a messy script.

“I’m giving it 2 1/2 stars out of four.

“And the wonderful State Farm joke, which had the audience roaring with laughter, won’t be understood  by anyone outside the U.S.”

An 8.12 Variety story by Jazz Tangcay reported that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (‘98) was the first battle film to use an accidental shot with small globs of splattered blood on the camera lens in the finished film.

I’m not disputing this claim, but I’ve watched Ryan at least four or five times (twice theatrically, two or three times on Bluray) and I don’t remember any such globs or blood splatters sticking to the lens.

The first time I noticed this kind of unintended effect was in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (‘06).

At first I figured I had forgotten the Saving Private Ryan lens splatter, but I went searching for either a YouTube clip or a frame capture of same, and found nothing…zip.

Does anyone recall such a moment in Spielberg’s film, and if so can the splatter effect be specifically described? And have they seen a video clip or frame capture that proves it actually happened?

Here’s Armond White’s full review of An Officer and a Spy, but I love his use of the term “dismissible embarassments” in the first sentence.

We all have stand-out, less-than-becoming physical traits of one kind or another. Myself included.

Way back when a girlfriend joked that I had “bird legs”…not my thighs as much as my calves. She wasn’t wrong. They’re also called stork legs. I was born with them…couldn’t do much about that. Still can’t.

You know who else had bird legs and didn’t feel good about it, and didn’t want to wear swimming trunks before movie cameras out of shame? Paul Newman. He admitted this once in an interview about The Drowning Pool (‘75), for which he was obliged to wade into a large Louisiana lake (or the Gulf of Mexico) during an Act Two scene.

The late Israeli actress Dalia Lavi clearly had bird legs.

So for myself, Newman and Lavi, a common trait was acknowledged.

In one of my 2024 Poor Things riffs I wrote that Emma Stone had “large, slender, shovel-like feet.” Was I blaming her for this? Of course not —just observing a physical fact. No biggie. Join the Greta Garbo club.

It’s a universal rule that actors and actresses and foot close-ups are a must-to-avoid. Directors never go there. Nobody wants to be tagged for having funny-looking or less-than-attractive feet, which applies 98% of the time. Man-peds…no!

If anyone ever comes up and says, “You’re no one to talk…you have bird legs, for God’s sake!”, my response will be “yup…guilty.”

The Rotten Tomatoes verdict on Scarlet Johansson‘s Eleanor The Great (Sony Picures Classics, 9.26) is “okay, it feels fairly conventional as a ‘what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive’ story, and it certainly could’ve been better, but it’s at least worth the price for June Squibb‘s lead performance. Not a winnning success, but not a failure either.”

I’m sick to death of movies that portray this or that white guy as the proverbial villain — deplorable or weak or impossibly selfish or, you know, some kind of primal seed of evil. I’m sick of this shit…sick of it, sick of it, sick of it.

Some kind of real-world hacked ticket from a seemingly deranged gremlin posing as a Trenitalia rep arrived last night in my inbox: