Jeffrey Wells

The late Tom Sizemore mattered in the ‘90s and will continue to matter forever because of two live-wire performances — Michael Cheritto in Michael Mann’s Heat (‘95) and Sgt. Mike Horvath, Tom Hanks’ second-in-command, in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (‘98).

Sizemore passed this evening (Friday, 3.3) at age 61. Hugs and condolences to friends, fans, colleagues.

He costarred in three Kathryn Bigelow films: Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days.

Natural Born Killers was bad for my emotional health, but I respect the passion that some feel for it. Sizemore played Jack (brother of Seymour) Scagnetti, the cop on the trail of Mickey and Mallory. Some have called it his strongest, most personal performance.

Sizemore was 33 when he made Heat in ‘94 — he had a stocky build and graying hair and looked at least ten years older. Genes, lifestyle, luck of the draw — it goes like that for some.

For a woman of 58, Monica Bellucci looks fairly trim and foxy. But Tim Burton, bless him, has never been even a half-sexy dude…ever. Even when he was youngish (i.e., the Beetlejuice days) he was kinda dorky-looking. And he’s never resembled a health-club fanatic.

So it’s the fact that he’s super-wealthy, right? What else could it be?

And anyone staying at the Ritz, where Hollywood superstars often bunk in Paris, isn’t looking to be “coy.” If you want to avoid photographers you’ll stay in a rented apartment in the Marais or Passy or Oberkampf or, you know, somewhere in the 3rd arrondisement…that line of country.

I hate guys like this. I mean, I really hate them. Pompeii?? They’re enemies of decency, of goodness.

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The real Eddie Ginley has been an HE voice for some time and has posted 3900 comments. The fake Eddie_Ginley, a shit-talker and an all-around bad fellow, has an underscore between his two names and has posted 40 comments. Deep-sixing is obviously required.

Besides the obvious description, Sarah Polley ‘s Women Talking (‘22) is a long nocturnal discussion in a barn about whether or not a group of Mennonite women should more or less submit to an obviously intolerable situation or gather their things and split. You’re sitting there throughout the film and asking yourself “what’s to debate?”

Sidney Lumet ‘s 12 Angry Men (‘57) is about an all-male jury deliberating the guilt or innocence of a teenaged boy who may have stabbed his abusive father to death. And yet it’s really about the issue of reasonable doubt, which a single, well-educated, fair-minded juror (Henry Fonda) persists in exploring on a logical basis until he gradually persuades 11 fellow jurors that he has a point.

It started with a 3.1.23 Katie Herzog tweet. It sure feels good to know that EEAAO haters are legion.

Jeffrey Wells
If EEAAO wins, it will be like the meteor that slammed into the Yucatan during prehistoric times and killed all the dinosaurs.

Chris Nolan and Universal have strangely, curiously wimped out of a Cannes Film Festival debut for Oppenheimer (7.21). Okay, maybe Nolan’s post-production schedule doesn’t allow for a mid-May showing, but my gut tells me that he and Uni concluded that screening his adult-angled, IMAX-lensed historical drama in Cannes could possibly diminish the promotional push. Not in terms of critical response but possibly because it seemed too early. Either way what a drag! (Hat-tip to Jordan Ruimy)

Around 2:30 am Tuesday morning a trio of guys wearing dayglo green hoodie parkas plus the usual snow gear were shoveling out the driveway of my Wilton condo community. I was awake anyway as I’d just updated my Web.com nameserver codes, but the sound of their snow shovels scraping the driveway surface…”guuhhrrutt!…guuhhrrutt!”…was an eye-opener.

Where would the movie realm be right now if Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had never dreamt and maneuvered their way into a certain A24 orbit that has strangely transformed itself into a Millennial consciousness brand that is darkening many more brows than just my own?

Hard to say but boy, my heart is not only bleeding right now but staining the wood floors and certainly the carpets. And for some reason a lyric from a mediocre Jimmy Webb song is filling my head…”I don’t think that I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it, and we’ll never have that recipe again.” The bad guys are winning!

There are few events presently unfolding on the global stage that deliver more in the way of moral clarity than Ukrainians fighting tooth and nail against the rank evil of Vladimir Putin. If you can’t or won’t put aside peripheral matters and grasp which side is with the angels in this conflict, I don’t know what to say to you. Except that a certain moral fiber or awareness is clearly missing deep down — that your sense of humanity is minus an essential component.

Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.

We all understand, sadly, that a certain either-or mindset, born of a certain malevolent social-media logic, has settled into award-season consciousness.

Last year at this time a fundamental shift of allegiance among the Academy middle-grounders happened…a moment when it became clear that a weird 1920s western about repressed queer desire and a refusal to bathe and an anthrax murder scenario just couldn’t be the Best Picture standard bearer, and that a generally decent but underwhelming family fable about singing, destiny and deafness had to replace it…my God, what a totally myopic, solitary confinement prison–cell choice that was!

But it happened, sadly, and what were we left with at the end? Nothing…nothing but a feeling of being surrounded and enveloped by mediocre minds (i.e., the degraded identity-politics principles that flooded the delta when SAG became SAG-AFTRA).

And this year and right now, we’re back in that same dank prison cell with a choice between a multiversian IRS audit-meets-queer politics Marvel film that has stymied and suffocated people of taste and perspective in every corner of the globe and certainly among the storied 45-plus community…a choice between a film by the makers of a metaphysical fart movie called Swiss Army Man and a smart, crafty, populist-pleasure machine that saved the film industry’s ass (in the view of no less a personage than Steven Spielberg).

God help us but the SAG-AFTRA philistines have apparently decided to choose, for the fifth time since the 2017 Oscar ceremony, identity politics symbolism over other considerations…again. Moonlight, Parasite, Nomadland, CODA, EEAAO.

Talk about The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant or The Bitter Tea of General Yen. Or, you know, anything using the word bitter.

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