Jeffrey Wells

Artist Hank Willis Thomas obviously isn’t stupid. He knew that “The Embrace,” his recently unveiled Martin Luther King-Coretta Scott King sculpture, would be derided by the meat-and-potatoes crowd as an image of four hands and arms gripping a giant brown schlong or resting upon a huge turd.

Literalists are always voicing the same beef — “this work of art isn’t literal enough!”

Then again why did he create a 19-ton sculpture that looks like four hands and arms gripping a giant schlong, etc.? HWT knows the game. He knows that the proletariat masses always have the final say.

At 70 Liam Neeson seems too far along to play a certain legendary shamus in Neil Jordan’s forthcoming Marlowe. (Open Road, 2.15).

In two previous films Phillip Marlowe (described by novelist-creator Raymond Chandler as early 30ish in the mid 1930s) has been depicted as spiffily middle-aged. Humphrey Bogart was a fit 45 when he made Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (‘46). The dashing James Garner was 40 or 41 (but looked younger) when he made Marlowe (‘69).

Robert Mitchum, on the other hand, seemed a little too creased and weathered when he made Farewell, My Lovely (‘75) in his late 50s, and more so when he returned as Marlowe in Michael Winner’s Big Sleep remake (‘78)

This said, Neeson appears to have been digitally de-aged in Marlowe. That or my eyes deceive.

I didn’t say what this bespectacled neckbeard says I said. I didn’t say that the only people who swear by EEAAO are those “who go to the movies.” I said this infuriating film has no friends outside the hermetic realm of Millennials and Zoomers.

…as to actually write about Glen Powell having over-exerted himself during the celebrated Top Gun: Maverick beach football scene? And then having the audacity to call it “breaking news”? Can you imagine?

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike — that Hollywood Elsewhere would never, ever write such a thing.

The Critics Choice voters are total woke lemmings — they’ve gone over the cliff (i.e., are lacking in good taste) and are no longer predictive of the Oscars, and that’s final. And where did Brendan Fraser’s win come from? How did he muscle aside Colin Farrell and Austin Butler? HE applauds Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress win for Tar, of course.

Veteran producer friendo (i.e., burdened with a sense of taste): “It’s criminal that Everything Everywhere All At Once took Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards. And RRR for Best Foreign? Get outta town.”

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking script (essentially a barn-dialogue primer about women standing up to white male sexual assault) winning the CC’s Best Adapted Screenplay trophy is curious, given the obviously superior investigative pedigree of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s She Said screenplay.

The CC ceremony was some kind of award season glitch, a belch, an anomaly.. Voting the woke party line (sacralization of race, gender, sexuality plus focusing on emotional core issues over an instance of morbid self-destructive obesity) means NOTHING in this context.

Cate Blanchett’s Tar win aside, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Critics Choice voters lining up like stooges and voting a straight woke party ticket and, say, Democratic trade unions voting for Richard Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine ticket back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Wokeism is a cult and a scourge — its followers are indistinguishable from those obedient, red-book-waving Mao lapdogs during China’s “great cuitural revolution.”

I don’t know why I’ll always remember Captain Meathead, but somehow this late-night Park City encounter (1.17.14, or almost exactly nine years ago) has taken up residence. Probably because I loved the late Lynn Shelton’s Laggies (‘14) and…I don’t know. All seemed right with the world back in ‘14, and I was very happy for Shelton that night. Happy all around. I’m very sorry…well, for a great many things.

It was the cat. It’s always been the cat. The cat had to be in Dylan’s lap and looking at the lens.

Sally Grossman passed on 5.11.21 at age 81. She led an engaged life as honcho of Bearsville Records following the 1986 death of husband Albert Grossman, but nothing she did or said after the April ‘65 release of Bringing It All Back Home could rival the iconic power of that red pants suit, lit cigarette and neutral-bordering-on-chilly expression.

Joyce Carol Oates, author of “Blonde: A Novel”, isn’t altogether wrong about Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, and there’s no arguing that in terms of delivering a tough, unsparing biopic within an artful impressionistic realm, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is a lot more probing and less inclined to turn the other cheek. But almost everyone dislikes Dominik’s film for its heartlessness, and that’s always the bottom line. Heart always wins.

Posted on 10.7.22:

…if I was able to write something? I can’t tap anything out because I’m driving and it’s dark out. Later this evening…Jeff Beck sleeps.

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