Jeffrey Wells

At the end of David Grubin‘s LBJ, the landmark 1991 documentary about the tragic story of Lyndon Johnson, historian Ronnie Dugger says that Johnson “was just interesting as hell. I mean, you know, compared to most people who kind of go through life vainly, making their dreadful moral points of condemning this or hoping for that or scratching the back of their head, Lyndon really moved. He was moving all the time. The few times I was with him, it was…he was just fun to be around.

“And you liked him. You liked him. I liked him when I was with him more than I did when I was thinking about him…heh-heh.”

It struck me last night that the dual worlds of politics and the film industry are overflowing with people of this type. Slick operators who are quite likable and charming and have really gotten around and seen the world and learned about human behavior first-hand — people you always enjoy talking to, hanging with and are always waving to at parties — but when you take a couple of steps back and seriously consider what they do, what they’ve done and what they’re actually about, you can’t help but go “hmmmm.”

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I went to see To Kill A Mockingbird at the Aero last night. 53 and 1/2 years after its initial release, Robert Mulligan, Alan Pakula and Horton Foote‘s Oscar-winner is still three things — (a) a great children’s POV drama that doesn’t pussyfoot around when it comes to the darker side of human nature, (b) a poised liberal fable about measured, compassionate humanism (as embodied by Gregory Peck‘s Atticus Finch) vs. vile backwater racism, and (c) a very moving film that still gets you in the gut.

It was screened in 35mm, and once again the celluloid experience disappointed me. The detail wasn’t all that sharp, and the monochrome tint (grayish, half-sepia, murky swamp) shifted from reel to reel. The Universal Bluray is a much richer, smoother and more needle-sharp rendering.

For whatever reason the producers decided against filming exteriors in some authentic-looking small town and chose to shoot the whole thing on the Universal back lot. And so the first shot of Maycomb, Alabma (a stand-in for Harper Lee’s Monroeville) still looks absurd with the smoggy air and the mountains of Burbank visible in the near distance.

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The first-wavers saw Richard Linklater‘s Everybody Wants Some! last night. Responses are requested. Key portions from my 3.29 review: (1) “The good news is that [it’s] cool, smart, fresh, atypical…a refreshingly unusual jocks-on-a-college-campus comedy, which is to say something quieter and more oblique and introspective and curious about what makes this or that guy tick”; (2) “The bad news is that it’s mostly about a bunch of baseball-star jocks sharing a fraternity house”; (3) “It’s a little too much of a laid-back, easy-time mood trip for its own good…[nobody] pursues anything wth any real hunger or urgency”; (4) “I was frowning as much as smiling through this thing [but] I really love that Linklater couldn’t care less about satisfying the submentals who want a certain kind of hormonal college sex romp, and that Everybody Wants Some! takes its time and plays its cards in a nicely unhurried way.”

If Donald Trump snags the Republican Presidential nomination, a scenario that’s seeming less and less likely despite his current lead in delegates, he will absolutely get murdered by Hillary Clinton in the fall. Clinton may not pull off a landslide in the tradition of Reagan-vs.-Mondale in ’84, Nixon-vs.-McGovern in ’72 or Johnson-vs.-Goldwater in ’64, but a 4.2 N.Y. Times analysis by Jonathan Martin and Nate Cohn states that “without an extraordinary reversal — or the total collapse of whoever becomes his general-election opponent — Mr. Trump could be hard-pressed to win more than 200 electoral votes.”

The general fear among Republican establishment types, of course, is that a brutal Trump defeat could lead to across-the-board losses of Republican candidates on a Senatorial and Congressional level, which could conceivably lead to a loss of the majority that Republicans now enjoy in the Senate and a weakening of its numerical majority in the House…maybe.

Many would be delighted if this occurs, but either way the Trump brand is clearly imploding right now. You can feel it — the winds have changed — anti-Trump fervor is gathering steam. If Trump loses the Wisconsin primary, he could arrive at the Republican convention in Cleveland without enough delegates to clinch a first-ballot victory. How he fares in New York and California will tip the balance one way or the other.

It’s becoming more and more likely that the Cleveland gathering will be an historic shitshow in which Ted Cruz or John Kasich could overpower Trump on the second and third ballot. In so doing the Republican heirarchy will essentially be saying to all those rural, nihilistic, under-educated, pot-bellied, heroin-snorting Trump bubbas out there that the party’s over, fellas, and tough shit.

Cruz would also lose against Clinton, of course, but if Kasich were to be nominated (a seemingly all-but-impossible scenario) he could emerge victorious. Either way the idea that seems to be taking hold is that Republicans need to at least lose honorably in the fall, and that means without Trump as a deciding factor.

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As widely predicted, Batman vs. Superman is down, down, down on its second weekend — an 81% drop from last Friday or, as Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allessandro has qualified, a 72% plummet if you eliminate the $27.7 million earned in pre-weekend previews. Last night’s BvS haul was $15.3 million, down from last Friday’s $81.55 million. The majority obviously hates this movie — the word-of-mouth is overwhelmingly negative. BvS is doing so poorly that it’s only made $224,422,793 domestic and $587,822,793 worldwide so far…appalling! The all-but-universally despised film is projected to take in $50 million by Sunday night.

Until last night I’d never seen the Studio Canal Bluray of Carol Reed‘s The Third Man (’49). Yes, it’s a somewhat darker, de-grained, scrubbed-down, somewhat less specific version, okay, but it has enough detail for me, and it’s certainly a damn sight preferable to that notorious 2009 Criterion Bluay, which I bought and panned back in early ’09. The latter disappeared from circulation a long time ago.

Frame capture from my just-purchased Studio Canal Bluray.

From the Criterion Bluray

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Producer friend: “Tom Hiddleston is looking like a real movie star. He’s also a terrific actor and one film away from an Oscar shortlist. Next James Bond?” Me: “Hiddleston is a first-rate actor with an icy-cool gravitas, but what about the brawn? There’s something a bit geeky and scarecrow about him.” Producer: “London rumor mill says that Hiddleston’s on the shortlist for the next Bond. And he’s said he’d love to do it. And he’s sexy. Pierce Brosnan was lean also but it worked.” Me: “Okay but Hiddleston is a long throw from the gold-standard Sean Connery model.” Producer: “Agree, but the definition of sexy for Bond isn’t just all muscle. Hiddleston is taking off in the leading man category. If Benedict Cumberpatch is a huge sex symbol (that one I really don’t get — wonderful actor but not sexy at all) then Hiddleston is next.”

Posted on 5.24.15, following the end of last year’s Cannes Film Festival: “Giving the Palme d’Or to Jacques Audiard‘s respectable but far-from-stellar Dheepan was a huge forehead-slapper. Laszlo Nemes‘ Son of Saul, which won the second-place Grand Prix award, would have been a far more deserving recipient; ditto Todd Haynes‘ Carol, which many fell to their knees over. (A producer pal: ‘Every year the Cannes critics rave about a film like Carol, so then the Jury goes out of its way to not to give it a prize. It’s as if they have to defy the pure merit of it all just so as to not appear ‘populist.’)

“I’m telling you that nobody and I mean nobody expected Dheepan to win anything, much less the Palme d’Or. In this sense it’s fair to say that the Cannes Jury (chaired by Joel and Ethan Coen) was completely divorced from a perceptual reality shared by nearly every journalist I talked to during the festival. Nobody even fantasized about Dheepan emerging as the Big Winner…nobody.

Journalists: “Dheepan is easily the least distinguished of Audiard’s last three films — a good or even a pretty good film but far from exceptional. At best a modest achievement.” Ethan Coen: ‘[The jury’s reaction to Dheepan] was swift…everybody had an enthusiasm for it. To some degree or another we all thought it was a very beautiful movie. We’re different people, some people had greater enthusiasms for other things or lesser, but in terms of this movie, everybody had some level of excitement, some high level of excitement and enthusiasm for it.’ There was no overlap here.

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Everybody Wants Some! is the only new film of consequence out there. God’s Not Dead 2..Christian garbage. Meet the Blacks…phffft. I was never invited to a screening of The Dark Horse (Maori speed chess) and probably wouldn’t have attended if I had been. The Girl In The Photographs (slasher), Kill Me, Deadly, Kill Your Friends, etc. I wanted to see Don Cheadle‘s Miles Ahead, and I offer no excuse for failing to do so except that I tried. Natural Born Pranksters, Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart, Standing Tall…meh.

Rebecca Miller‘s Maggie’s Plan (Sony Pictures Classics, 5.20) is an intelligent, nicely honed, reasonably decent romantic triangle dramedy with Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke and Julianne Moore. It was widely reviewed during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, resulting in a combined 75.5% rating from Rotten Tomatoes (73%) and Metacritic (78%). I didn’t love it but it’s okay. It moves along, hangs together, does the job. I looked at my watch two or three times but I never covered my faced with hands or moaned or any of that other stuff.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I can never again consider the idea of seeing Ethan Hawke in a film without this image coming to mind. Fairly or unfairly he’s suddenly become an icon for the self-absorbed guy who licks his fingers after he eats.

I won’t burden you with the tangled particulars, but Maggie’s Plan is about a faintly neurotic academic type (Gerwig) and a somewhat older academic and would-be novelist (Hawke) falling in love and deciding to cohabit and have a kid after he leaves his former wife (Moore), a needles-and-pins controlling bitch type with whom he has two older kids. The second half is about Gerwig deciding to disengage from Hawke by way of a sly manipulative scheme when she realizes he’s not really in love with her and is more or less using her because she’s a great organizer-assistant type.

Why did I leave 7 or 8 minutes before it ended? Because I suffered an intense visceral reaction when Hawke licked his sticky, greasy, sauce-covered fingers for the third time.

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“As much as I hate to spoil any movie’s ending in a review, I have to do so here because I was so gobsmacked and disgusted when it happened. The audience I was with shared my profound disappointment and there was actually a small riot in the IMAX theater, with seats being torn out of the floor and flung at the screen. We didn’t even get to see the end credits stinger because by then the riot police had shown up to wrestle angry comic book fans in costumes to the ground in one of the most horrendous sights I’ve ever seen (well, after this movie, of course). I have a feeling that reaction will be fairly common come May 6th. Theaters should start hiring security guards now. It’ll be a bloodbath.” — from imaginative 4.1.16 High Def Digest review of Captain America: Civil War by Phil Brown.