Jeffrey Wells

I’ve written respectful, approving things about Sound of Freedom, and I strongly disapprove of all the lefty (or woke Stalinist) critics who’ve either panned or refused to review it because of the QAnon nutbag associations.

But I’m off the bus now.

Reason: Last night’s special Donald Trump screening at the Bedminster Golf Club, which was also attended by Freedom star Jim Caviezel. It’s a very decent film, and it’s just crested $100 million domestic, and they couldn’t leave well enough alone — they had to invite The Beast onto the bus.

I’m not saying “fuck this movie,” but I almost am. As far as I’m concerned Caveizel and associates have poisoned the well.

Okay, that’s it, Paul Schrader oversold it and now the game is more or less over — Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer (Universal, 7.21) has been given a respectful-but-no-Cuban-cigar review by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman.

Even Nolan’s recreation of the Trinity explosion is a “letdown” Owen says…WHAT??

And then comes the funniest line in the whole review, a casual mention of “that damn Atomic Energy Commission hearing” which Nolan reportedly keeps cutting back to. As I chuckled I could see Gleiberman flinching in his seat: “God, man…enough with the damn AEC hearing already!”

And then Gleiberman really sticks the knife in by calling the second half “a doleful meditation” on atom-bomb morality and whatnot. Aaagghhh!! I’m melting…I’m melting!

Cillian Murphy’s titular performance will likely result in a lot of Best Actor talk, Gleiberman implies, but along with David Ehrlich’s backhand across–the–chops reaction (“Nolan’s first biopic feels like some sort of grandiose self-portrait”) you can probably forget any serious Best Picture Oscar headwind. Murphy and Robert Downey, Jr., fine, but that’s where it ends.

Honestly? It isn’t Nolan who’s taken the big hit here — it’s Schrader.

I for one would pay top dollar to see an Elon Musk–vs.-Mark Zuckerberg cage match between World of Reel’s Jordan Ruimy and the highly assertive (i.e., trans-agenda-driven) Zoe Rose Bryant.

The dispute is over Barbie, of course. Ruimy first and then ZRB…

Bryant tweet-slammed Ruimy, but she seems to be aiming her slings and arrows at the general anti–woke community of sensible, fair–minded, Kool–Aid-averse centrists, myself and Sasha Stone included.

Amy Taubin’s reaction to Barbie — petulant, enraged — misses the entire point, which is that for better or worse, Greta Gerwig’s film is infused with real–life 21st Century girlboss feminism.

One view is that Taubin is feisty; another is that she’s a snobby, short-tempered know-it-all.

I waited and thought about and generally settled into Jane Birkin’s passing, and I just couldn’t think of anything heartfelt to say other than I felt sorry for her family and friends. My only vivid imprint is the Blow–Up violet paper orgy scene (filmed when she was 19 or 20) and the very first glimpse of female pubic hair in a mainstream movie — a swingin’ Londön cultural benchmark if there ever was one.

Richard Roud’s embarassing Guardian review of Blow-Up.

This morning I read Seth Abramovitch‘s THR piece about Tatum O’Neal (7.17.23), titled “After Her Debilitating Stroke, Tatum O’Neal Attempts to Heal a Fractured Relationship With Dad Ryan O’Neal.”

Subhead: “Recovering from an overdose-induced crisis that nearly killed her and forced her to relearn how to speak, the actress looks back on her life and career: ‘Weird shit happened. It kind of went in the wrong direction to happiness.'”

The apparently ailing but buoyant-of-spirit Ryan O’Neal, 82, and daughter Tatum, 59 — posted on Instagram last April.

“Ryan O’Neal’s Five Untouchable Years,” posted on 8.4.19:

I prefer to sidestep the biological reality of Ryan O’Neal being 78, and to think of him as the guy he was in the early to mid ’70s, when things were as good as they would ever get for him.

I had two minor run-ins with O’Neal in the ’80s. The first was after an evening screening of the re-issued Rear Window** at West L.A.’s Picwood theatre (corner of Pico and Westwood) in late ’83. As the crowd spilled onto Pico O’Neal and his date (probably Farrah Fawcett) were walking right behind me, and I heard O’Neal say “that was sooo good!” Being a huge Alfred Hitchcock fan, this sparked a feeling of kinship.

Four years later I was a Cannon publicity guy and charged with writing the press kit for Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which didn’t turn out so well. I for one liked Mailer’s perverse sense of humor.

I did an hour-long phoner with O’Neal, and my opening remark was that he was becoming a really interesting actor now that he was in his mid 40s with creased features. He was too good looking when younger, I meant, and so his being 46 added character and gravitas. O’Neal was skeptical of my assessment but went along — what the hell.

In fact O’Neal’s career had been declining for a good five or six years at that point. He knew it, I knew it — we were doing a press-kit-interview dance because there was nothing else to say or do.

O’Neal’s last hit film had been Howard Zeiff and Gail Parent‘s The Main Event (’79), which critics panned but was popular with audiences. He had starred in four mezzo-mezzos before that — Peter Bogdanovich‘s Nickelodeon (’76), Richard Attenbrough‘s A Bridge Too Far (’77), Walter Hill‘s The Driver (’78) and John Korty‘s Oliver’s Story.

Consider this HE anecdote about some 41-year-old graffiti on a New York subway poster.

O’Neal’s career peak lasted for five years (’70 to ’75) and was fortified by a mere four films — Arthur Hiller‘s Love Story (’70), Bogdanovich’s What’s Up Doc? (’72) and Paper Moon (’73), and Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon (’75). (The Wild Rovers and The Thief Who Came to Dinner, which O’Neal also made in the early ’70s, were regarded as mostly negligible and therefore didn’t count.)

O’Neal has said for decades that his career never really recovered from Barry Lyndon — Kubrick had changed the film entirely in editing, and had made him look like a clueless and opportunistic Shallow Hal of the 18th Century. Plus the film had lost money.

Read more

I still haven’t seen Barbie, of course, but being reminded yesterday of Greta Gerwig’s co-authoring of Disney’s seemingly woke-as-fuck Snow White bummed me out. This plus her reported interest in directing a Chronicles of Narnia film and her apparent general leanings as a writer-director since 2019’s Little Women, which seemed to signal an ardently feminist chapter…a proverbial turning of the page as she began to swim in a politically ideological stream…

Gerwig is obviously an inventive and visually exacting filmmaker, but I’m less taken with the incarnation that has come to be seen, felt and heard over the last four or five years than who she seemed to be (and with whom I fraternized two or three times) during her Obama-era output…her Greenberg, Frances Ha, Mistress America and Lady Bird period (2010 to 2017) when she was radiating a curiously appealing take on 21st Century life…truly imaginative and wonderfully peculiar…among the most idiosyncratic and organically rooted creative minds out there.

“Antonioni Gerwig,” posted almost exactly ten years ago:

Posted on 11.16.16:

This may sound silly and it probably is, but a voice out of the space-time continuum is telling me that Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (‘64) can and should be rebranded, rejuvenated and re-culturalized by merging original Marnie poster art with the ironic girlie bullshit kitsch design of Barbie marketing and more particularly “Barbenheimer.”

There’s always been something vaguely suffocating about Marnie; it’s simply a matter of saying “okay, let’s add apocalyptic to suffocating and substitute red for pink and see if the cat licks it up.”

I can’t explain where this idea has come from exactly, and I certainly haven’t worked out any of the thematic details. I only know that in some strange way Barbie and Marnie have begun to bleed together in my mind. I’m 97% certain that Marnie cultists (Richard Brody, Dave Kehr, Glenn Kenny, et. al.) would somehow approve. .