Jeffrey Wells

Season #2 of The White Lotus has sparked interest in the scenic beaches and cultural pleasures of Sicily. Let’s visit there next summer! Well, not so fast when it comes to Palermo. Here’s a Facebook exchange between myself and director Rod Lurie earlier this evening.

“Sack of Palermo,” posted on 5.27.10:

I did a little reading about Palermo over the last few weeks, knowing I’d be visiting there during my post-Cannes travels. And having yesterday spent a few hours traipsing around Palermo’s mean streets, I can now state with authority that certain travel writers and travel websites have lied through their teeth about the largely ugly and rancid nature of this city.

Palermo is a mafia rathole — a corrupt, crime-infested, economically challenged, overly-congested sprawl of mostly unattractive apartment and commercial buildings (mostly of a skanky gray, grayish-brown or dogshit-orange color) with a few historical buildings and commercial diversions to keep the tourists happy or at least diverted.

I’m sorry but my primary impressions are as follows: air-polluted, generally unkempt, vaguely smelly, over-populated, too many buses and scooters, overstuffed garbage bins — a festival of clutter and crap. Certainly not what anyone would call “clean” or “well-maintained.”

Are there tiny little pockets of beauty and cultivation here and there? I’ve read about them and I’m sure they exist (I’m sitting in a very pleasant air-conditioned hotel lobby five blocks from the harbor), but much or most of Palermo feels like some kind of hot and humid third-world nightmare that you can’t escape from fast enough.

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The consensus after Joshua Logan’s Picnic opened in December ‘55 was that William Holden, who’d turned 37 the previous April, was too old to play Hal Carter, whom original author William Inge had written as a drifter in his mid to late 20s.

But Holden’s Picnic miscasting would have paled alongside another mismatch that mercifully didn’t happen. The film was Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Americanization of Emily (‘64), in which Holden had been cast as dog-robber Charley Madison. He wisely pulled out.

James Garner, who had previously been cast as “Bus,” the role that James Coburn ultimately played, took the Madison role.

Holden would have been at least a decade too old to play Madison, who is supposed to be a youngish, slick-operator type (mid 30s — Garner was 35) and certainly not 40ish and world-weary.

Filming on The Americanization of Emily happened in late ‘63 (a hotel party scene was filmed on 11.22.63) and, I believe, early ‘64. A drinker, Holden was 45 at the time and looked every inch of it. He was even looking a bit haggard and baggy-eyed in The Counterfeit Traitor, which was filmed in ‘61 when Holden was 43.

Remember how over-the-hill, creased and saddle-baggy Holden looked in The Wild Bunch, which was filmed in ‘68?

Which other major roles were filled by actors who were clearly too old to play them? Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hansen doesn’t count — too recent.

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Two and a half years ago I was kicked, beaten and spat upon by Stalinist scolds (including Guy Lodge **) for saying that as much as I respect and admire the music of Ennio Morricone, I didn’t regard his film music as truly mountain-peak level (except for his Days of Heaven score). As I have a somewhat similar opinion of the music of Angelo Badalamenti (respectful salute, admiration, David Lynch’s right-hand guy) I’ll just leave it there. The 85 year-old Badalamenti was a brand…touched by the hand.

** “What a brand!”

The HFPA has done everything possible to atone for past sins and it’s still not good enough — the twitter wokesters (Tomris Laffly, Clayton Davis, et. al.) want them suppressed and blacklisted to death.

I’m in a skin clinic undergoing a basel-cell cancer removal procedure**, but the woke Stalinists are trying to suffocate the Golden Globe awards by telling everyone (publicists in particular) not to mention this morning’s GG nominations.

Here’s what Sasha Stone posted a little while ago:

One of the reasons the wokesters are trying to suppress the Golden Globes is because the HFPA didn’t adhere to the feminist quota system — i.e., no women directors were nominated. For this and other reasons the GGs must be punished!

Here’s a complaint from Variety’s #1 wokester Clayton Davis:

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“I just have this really weird feeling that something bad is gonna happen…”

McCuddy: “The big climactic bullet tango on the yacht does two things. It satisfies our curiosity especially after Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) asks the blood-soaked Quentin (Tom Hallander) if her husband was cheating and he says nothing PLUS it tells us something about next season. My 22 year old daughter thinks next season should be an African safari, which would be cool.”

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Mashable’s Robert Daniels has posted a strong disapproval of Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light. It’s fair, I think, to call this a racial admonishment piece, as Daniels has voiced a fundamental objection to older white directors “fumbling” films about black characters — i.e., having the temerity to make such films in the first place.

Paul Rai’s approving comment [below] also laments James Gray’s Armageddon Time, another instance of an older white director “using black characterization as foundation fodder for [a white] director’s ethos.”

What do you think Daniels is talking about when he calls Empire of Light “a contrived, politically trite exercise”? He obviously doesn’t like the brief romantic pairing of Olivia Colman‘s Hillary and Michael Ward‘s Stephen, and he regards Mendes’ decision to merge an older, white, mentally anxious lady with a young, good-looking lad of color as a “trite” attempt to inject some kind of current cultural flavor.

In short, Daniels is saying, older white directors (Green Book’s Peter Farrelly included) need to stay 100 yards away from period sagas involving black characters, and 500 yards away if the story involves interracial sex.

Here’s how I put it on 12.7 in an HE piece “HE Fights for Empire of Light”:

Daniel Craig is intending to become the first ex-007 to play a gay guy. Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan…none of them expanded their repertoire in such a fashion. But Craig will boldly go where no James Bond has gone before.

The Industry’s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Craig will star in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, an adaptation of William Burroughs’ same-titled, partly autobiographical novel that was written in the early ‘50s but not published until ‘85.

Presumably to be set in old-time Mexico City, where Burroughs himself lived in the early ‘50s, Queer may or may deal with the accidental shooting death of Burroughs’ wife, Joan Vollmer.

Sasha Stone and I have leapt back into the podcast fray — Oscar Poker, Part Deux. A weekly thing with occasional extras and detours. But on Substack this time. The usual strategy applies — free at first and then paywalled. And not just anti-woke rants and whatnot.

We spoke for an hour earlier today — (a) Avatar 2 vs. other Best Picture contenders that haven’t much chance. (b) how many more years will the woke plague endure?, (c) kicking around Nat’l Board of Review winners (what happened to Tar?), (d) this weekend’s White Lotus finale, etc.

Please join us in daring to give a shit. How can Sasha and I be a little different? Is there anyone in Media/Journo/Hunger Land who isn’t podcasting?

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After foolishly flying into Russia last February with a small amount of hash oil, which led to an arrest, a trial and a long prison sentence, WNBA star Brittney Griner has been swapped for demonic arms dealer Viktor Bout and is now flying back home. President Joe Biden approved the deal late last week — a big political win any way you slice it.