Jeffrey Wells

Radical concept: James Bond re-imagined as a cerebral, borderline-dweeby, George Smiley smarty-pants type…fully capable of self-defense but no one’s idea of fiercely aggressive. And no seducing the broads.

I have no idea who painted this or how old it is or anything. Anyone? I just noticed it last night.

Will you look at those twinkle-toe beach sandals that Albert Einstein is wearing here? My mom used to wear summer shoes like this; ditto Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck. I understand that genius types are usually indifferent to macho fashion statements and traditional male garb, but this is embarrassing, man!

Kamala Harris’s forthcoming campaign memoir “107 Days” (Doubleday, 9.23) will not admit failure on her part. Listen to her shpiel tonight when she chats with Stephen Colbert. Laying her cards face-up on the kitchen table is not her specialty. I don’t think she knows what “cards face up” even means.

She will not admit that she torpedoed herself when she said on The View there were no Biden policies that she disagreed with. She will not admit that her campaign had no interest in listening to, much less trying to win over, alienated white males and young right-leaning black dudes. She won’t admit that she erred in picking Tim Walz instead of Josh Shapiro as her vp running mate.

Harris sees herself as an evangelist for ambitious, well-educated women and willful women of color in particular, and so she can’t let hair down. And so her book will dodge, equivocate, sidestep, blah–blah and shilly–shally.

I voted for Harris but her missteps (the View thing in particular) really pissed me off, and all I can say now is that she really, really needs to forget about running again in ‘28.

The Dems need to go with Rahm, Gavin or Pete…a tough but sensible moderate liberal dude…not a woman this time.

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If I was a USC film student who wanted to direct, and if guest lecturer David Fincher told me to “shut up and siddown” after asking me for a movie pitch, I would either say (a) “wait…hear me out…it all comes together at the end” or (b) “don’t be rude, dude…have a little patience…a little faith”.

The Lost Generation (i.e, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Zelda Fitzgerald) were young strivers and explorers in the 1920s. But they didn’t stop being born in 1900 — figure more like 1905 or even 1910.

The Greatest Generation (i.e., suffered through the Depression in their teens, fought in WWII…Woody Guthrie, JFK, Burt Lancaster, Tyrone Power, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Alan Ladd, Frank Sinatra) began to pop out around 1912 and not 1901. Their birth era drew to a close around 1928 or thereabouts.

The name for the so-called “Silent Generation” (born between 1929 and 1945…Woody Allen, Dennis Hopper, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty) is actually the “Baby Bust” generation…born and reared as very young kids during the Depression, mid-teen puberty when WWII ended, young and hungry and fancy-free 20somethings in the ‘50s.

I am not a boomer — I am an existential X-factor Zen samurai jazzcat with no particular ties to the Woodstock generation except for my musical tastes and preferences. Otherwise I’m free of that shit.

Nobody calls them Generation Z —the common default term is Zoomers.

My granddaughter Sutton (DOB: 11.17.21) is a junior Gen Alpha.

Chris Nolan has not only shot The Odyssey entirely in full-screen (1.43:1) IMAX, but the apparent intention is to project the entire film in this boxy, super-tall aspect ratio.

Does anyone believe this? I don’t. Because it’s never happened before. Because IMAX films always wind up being projected in 1.85. Even in theatres capable of presenting a full IMAX image, it’s always a cheat. Because it’s a marketing scam. Because it’s all a lie, or has been so far.

Posted on 5.16.25:

…why I was wasting my time on TikTok reactions to those Sydney Sweeney American Eagle “good genes” ads…these Clueless Clems have surely realized by now that by the early afternoon (Monday, 7.28) the entire MSM had jumped on this story also.

I was told yesterday that a University of Chicago student is looking to write an essay about prison movies. I was asked if I’d be willing to share some thoughts about this genre. Here’s what I sent along:

First and foremost, I don’t want to know from prison movies as a rule. Prison movies are almost always — inevitably — about systemic suffocation or more precisely and ominously a kind of state-imposed death…repression, resignation and the turning off of spiritual lights.  

I realize that the best ones address the age-old question “why does a caged bird sing?”

And speaking of birds…yes, I know that John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz (‘62) is about a kind of liberation within this hellish suffocation, but it’s still set in a place of grim, gloomy, concrete regimentation.  

Prison movies are generally bad for the human soul.  So much of real life and standard-issue drama is about spiritual or economic confinement. I am currently living in a prison of my own making, and every day I’m trying to bust out.

You know what a good “prison” movie is/was? Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman — both the Lee J. Cobb and Dustin Hoffman versions. Or Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Or Prince of the City..

I admired Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet (‘10) but I’ll never re-watch it because it simply lacks sufficient oxygen.

And yet I was deeply moved by Lazio Nemes’ Son of Saul (‘15), arguably the grimmest, most hopeless WWII concentration camp film ever made.

I respect Buzz Kulik’s Kill Me If You Can (‘77), but mainly for Alan Alda’s ace-level performance as Caryl Chessman. Ditto Lawrence Schiller’s The Executioner’s Song (‘82) with Tommy Lee Jones. And yet both are primarily legal strategy films.

The best “boy, it sure is fucking miserable living in a U.S. prison” flick is Robert M. Young’s Short Eyes (‘77), which is based on a stage play by Miguel Pinero. (It’s the only prison film I’ve seen more than once, and possibly even thrice.) 

The only ones I want to even think about watching or re-watching are prison escape movies:  Escape From Alcatraz, Call Northside 777, The Great Escape, The Hot Rock, Ben Stiller’s Escape From Donnemara.

If I never watch The Shawshank Redemption again, it’ll be too soon.

I loathe The Green Mile with every last fiber of my being.

Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing is a “lemme the fuck outta here!” film. I felt bored and drained by the set-up and especially by Colman Domingo’s soulful lead performance. The more emotion the prisoners summoned from within, the more bummed-out I felt. While sitting through it I was thinking “where is James Cagney and his Cody Jarrett break-out routine when you really need it?”

Oh, and I really hate Franklin Schaffner and Steve McQueen’s Papillon (‘73). Ditto Life Is Beautiful.

If you’re flying to Europe on the reasonably-priced Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), you’ll have to accept a stopover in Stockholm, Oslo or Copenhagen. So on my way to the Venice Film Festival (the outgoing JFK red-eye leaves late Saturday afternoon, 8.23) I’ll be staying in Copenhagen for 25, 26 hours…something in that vicinity.

But the next day I won’t be flying straight to Venice’s Marco Polo airport. Just for the eye-filling splendor of it all, I’m flying instead from Copenhagen–Kastrup to Luca Guadagnino’s Milan (haven’t stood before the Duomo since ‘92) and then taking a late-Monday-morning train to Katharine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi’s Venezia San Lucia. Just for the visual-sensual-spiritual-atmospheric aspects.

I’ve visited Venice as an X-factor traveller-tourist six or seven times, and have never stayed for more than two or three days. Next month’s visit will last 12 days.

I’ll be hitting Milan for nearly a full day on my way back