Jeffrey Wells

Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is a strange and shadowed study of self-imposed confinement. Brendan Fraser’s Charlie is a suffering sad sack, all right. I felt for the poor bloated guy, but what a tragedy. What a ghastly, grotesque experiment in plumbing the depths of regret and self-loathing, not to mention the drip-drip process of slow suicide.

Charlie’s choking-on-a-sandwich scene is one for the ages; ditto his eating binge + vomiting scene. Ditto his sweat-soaked, white-light death scene (i.e., my favorite moment in the film). James Whale and Todd Browning would be impressed; so would Montgomery Clift.

Obviously an intelligent filmed play, and mildly pleasurable for that. Fraser’s performance is a whopping, tearful freak show, but I felt the heart of it. And I was moved by that final gasp (partly a cry of release) when he finally goes to God. And yes, I’m proud that I got through it. I‘ve been terrified of watching this film for months, and now I’m past that hurdle. And I’ll never have to watch it again.

Robert Evans on aging, spoken directly to HE back in ‘96 or thereabouts: “Your hair turns gray, your nose gets softer, your ears get longer and your teeth get smaller.”

But noses don’t change their basic shape. Or at least mine never has. If you have, say, a button nose as a 22 year-old, you’re not going to end up with a Basil Rathbone nose when you’re 70.

Three hisses….hah! Mistake. Three guesses as to which Oscar prognosticator wrote the following, and the first two guesses don’t count.

In a two-day-old (1.17) Oscar assessment piece, Variety’s Clayton Davis dutifully reported what almost everyone except for guys like Bobby Peru have accepted since the ‘22 / ‘23 Oscar season began several months ago, which is that Everything Everywhere All At Once is probably too divisive (read: hated by the over-45 crowd) to prevail in the Best Picture category unless international voters come to its rescue (“rally round the flag, boys!”).

…and they told me to state my pronouns, I would write Eat / Me. Okay, that’s fairly vulgar but I’d probably feel better about that designation than He / Him, which seems overly compliant.

Given the basic sinking-into-the-swamp dynamic that’s been evident for some time now…

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.