Jeffrey Wells

Imagine Actually Thinking This

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Imagine being so clueless, so bottom-of-the-barrel and perverse in your movie brain that when somebody asks “favorite Gene Hackman film?”, you actually respond “Superman”!

In no particular order: Crimson Tide, The Firm, Hoosiers, Night Moves, All Night Long, Downhill Racer, The French Connection (Friedkin & Frankenheimer), The Conversation, Bonnie and Clyde, Another Woman, Young Frankenstein, Mississippi Burning.

Once In The Game

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All my professional life I’ve regarded Amy Taubin as a first-rate, tart-tongued Manhattan film critic and essayist. So it came as a mild surprise to read the other day that (a) she was once a fledgling, semi-noteworthy actress/filmmaker, such that (b) casting director Lynn Stalmaster included her among a list of possibles to play Elaine Robinson in The Graduate.

Hudson Yards Meditation

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I’ve just read Adriane Quinlan’s 4.7 “Curbed” piece about Paul Schrader’s life these days at The Coterie, a pricey (at least $15K monthly) luxury high-rise for interesting (read: fairly loaded) seniors. It’s called “Paul Schrader’s Very Paul Schrader Days in Assisted Living.”

This is a dry, well-written observational that almost reminded me at times of Didion’s “Play It As It Lays.” But unlike his well-tended wife Marybeth, Paul doesn’t seem to be living “in” assisted living, or at least not according to my limited understanding of that term.

Living in The Coterie is easy and luxurious, sure, but with Paul churning out screenplays, planning to shoot a kind of Ivan Ilyich-type drama with Richard Gere later this year and thinking about visiting a Manhattan dive bar in order to counter-balance a feeling of too much sterility and perhaps keep in touch with the hurlyburly to some degree, he seems to be living in a fashion that’s more adjacent to assisted living (out of necessity for his wife) than “in” it.

Terms of Imprisonment

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I tend to avoid or at least suffer through prison movies as a rule. To varying degrees they’re all about yearning for freedom, of course, but they always feel more confining than liberating (i.e., why does the caged bird sing?) and because life itself, for me, has always been about the defiance of suppression, confinement and regimentation so I already knew that tune backward and forward.

I don’t need and in fact have been forbidding the idea of a movie reminding me about these basic terms, and I’ve felt this way since my early teens, which is when I started to understand the degree of dull underlying horror that permeated normal middle–class life. This is how it seemed, at least, in suburban New Jersey (Westfield) and exurban Connecticut (Wilton).

As much as I admire Morgan Freeman’s performance in The Shawshank Redemption, I’ve never been able to derive any real pleasure or payoff from that film. Ditto Papillon, Birdman of Alcatraz, Bronson, Hunger, The Green Mile, Starred Up, Each Dawn I Die, 20,000 Years at Sing Sing, et. al.

Don’t even mention Oz or Orange Is The New Black.

The only prison flicks I’ve enjoyed, unsurprisingly, are about breakouts. Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (‘79) is the champ. Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (‘67) is more about the spirit of freedom than escape, but it still qualifies. Ben Stiller’s Escape at Dannemora** (‘18) is an excellent bust-out film. I love the comical breakout sequence in Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock (‘71).

There’s one exception to my rule — a prison flick that isn’t about escape and just says “fuck it — life on the block is what it is” while staking claim to being a serious meditation on morality and jailhouse ethics: Robert M. Young and Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes (77).

A couple of months ago I visited a friend who lives near the village of Ossining, which is about 40 miles north of Manhattan and is the home of Sing Sing prison. Peter Falk grew up there, and during an interview he recalled that all the lights in the town would flicker and grow dim whenever a guy was getting fried in the chair.

** Escape at Dannemore is actually a limited series so that makes it a whole different bowl of rice!

Whatever It Was

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…that was making my chest ache and keeping me from slumber all last night…whatever it was, it gave up the ghost a couple of hours ago and now I’m feeling okay again.

Tiny Appendages

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I’m sorry but it’s time to come clean about those micro-sized Johnsons that Michelangelo painted and sculpted time and again.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with thimble-sized packages. A self-respecting man should always display a little “heft”, as Terry Southern used to put it. It’s just not cool to have a push-pin shlongola, and I’m wondering how and why a gay man like Michelangelo would be down with this.

To this day I can vividly recall the slight feelings of discomfort when I caught my first glimpse of a semi-hefty male organ. It happened in the showers of the Westfield YMCA, and I remember muttering to myself “Jesus, this guy’s bigger than the golden nude male statue (“Prometheus”) at Rockefeller Center.”

More “Coup de Chance” Praise

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Roger Friedman has seen Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance, and is so impressed with the 90-minute, French-speaking noir that he’s suggesting it could end up winning the Best Int’l Feature Oscar next year.

It’s great to hear this level of enthusiasm, and it makes me all the more hopeful that Coup de Chance will play Cannes next month.

It goes without saying, of course, that Allen haters would never allow it to even be nominated, much less win. They would shriek and howl at even the possibility.

And what’s with the 90-minute length, by the way? Doesn’t Allen understand that the average running time these days is well over two hours?

I Saw It Again

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..,last night, and you know that I shouldn’t.

I’ll almost certainly never speak to the great Richard Lester, 91, but if somehow this were to happen, I would begin by praising Juggernaut (’73) and The Three Musketeers (’74). I would also sing the praises of Petulia (’68) — a landmark film. And then…

Sic Semper Tyrannis

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Humphrey Bogart to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: “There are certain sections of New York, Congressperson, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”