Jeffrey Wells

The Trump-Hitler echoes are fitting together. Any psychologist will tell you that Trump’s insistence the other night that there’s “no problem” with the size of his gross animal member is a schoolyard bluff tactic — that only those with concerns boast about such matters. (The same psychology prevails with people in a work environment who constantly throw around sexual double entendres– the more you joke about it, the less you’re getting.) Couple this with a 2.22.16 Telegraph piece that referenced a claim, made in a 2015 book called “Hitler’s Last Days, Minute by Minute“, that Adolf Hitler’s anger and aggression was compensation for having had a micro-penis (“a rare condition called penile hypospadias“). He also had only a single testicle. Last night Bill Maher referenced a 1990 Vanity Fair piece (by way of the Weekly Standard) that claimed “Trump kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.”

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The Disney guys offered several invitations to catch Byron Howard and Rich Moore‘s Zootopia. I read and understood their emails, of course, but emotionally and psychologically I rejected the idea so fast I didn’t even see the puff of smoke. I don’t care how “mildly progressive” Zootopia‘s political message is — I will not submit to this thing. Yes, I sat through Inside Out at last May’s Cannes Film Festival and intellectually appreciated its values, but it was hellish all the same. Yes, it’s a bright and insightful woman’s film and a landmark head-trip movie, but I hate, hate, HATE that peppy energy. It’s like snorting bad cocaine.

On a certain level I believe that family-friendly corporate animation is almost demonic in that it has a subversive agenda. It delivers family narcotic highs when your kids are young, but it acts as a kind of childhood sedative that leads to placated thinking and zombie lifestyles. Corporate animation is mainly about injecting and reenforcing blandly positive, middle-class consumerist attitudes and values. Watch corporate animation as a kid, live your tweener and teenaged life in malls, sign a college loan that will keep you in a kind of jail for half your life, and eternally invest and submit to American McMansionism — an Orwellian system if there ever was one.

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William S. Burroughs said the above at some literary gathering I attended in midtown Manhattan around ’80 or thereabouts. It came back to me as I read Charlie Savage‘s half-fair, half-dismissive N.Y. Times review of Owen Gleiberman‘s “Movie Freak“, which I riffed about on 2.18.

There’s only one churlish paragraph, really, but I was quite bothered by Savage laying into Gleiberman for…well, the crime of being honest. Which isn’t a crime, of course. Not in my book, at least. Writers have to be self-exposing at all times and under all circumstances, especially when recalling their own checkered histories. Even if this involves confessions that aren’t entirely flattering.

Gleiberman’s critiques has always laid things plain on the table, and it’s this quality, I feel, that makes “Movie Freak” a livelier, more engaging read than, say, some dry recounting that focuses only on the job or the reviews.

Let’s examine the pissy paragraph. Portions of “Movie Freak” “are often off-putting,” Savage writes. “With inconsistent self-awareness, Gleiberman writes about himself like a patient talking to his therapist, but readers are not being paid $200 an hour to empathize as he tells story after story.” Except Gleiberman is a gifted writer, Charlie, and that plus the confessional aspect is what tends to float boats. Or mine, at least.

Savage conveys annoyance at Gleiberman mentioning that at one point his “very being…had been formed to a degree by pornography” and that during a certain period he spent “as much time as possible hitting on women in the office.”

Yep, somewhat embarassing, but if you don’t admit to this kind of thing (especially if it’s the real thing) what does a memoirist have to show? The last time I looked amplified hormonal urges were fairly prevalent among most younger fellows. If you ask me younger women should avoid 20-something jackrabbits altogether and instead focus on guys in their 30s. Or, you know, guys who’ve managed to grow a little compassion and sensitivity and learn how to keep things in check.

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The sound-synch problems that I wrote about in mid February were apparently not the fault of my Samsung 60-inch plasma nor the Oppo Bluray. It was the apparent fault of my dusty old Samsung sound bar, which I bought at a Westwood Radio Shack four or five years ago. So I went down to Best Buy and inquired about a similarly-priced (maybe a slightly higher priced) sound bar, and a sales guy from their Magnolia Home Theatre section sold me on a Sony HT-CT180 Sound Bar System, for which I paid $240 including tax.

After bringing it home I paid a freelance guy to install it (I wanted to be 110% sure that it would work and sound perfectly as I’m a genius at fucking things up when I do it myself) and guess what? It’s a moderately sucky system and not worth the coin.

The Sony HT-CT180 has decent treble levels with moderately effective bass but it doesn’t have half the sound power of the now-junked Radio Shack Samsung sound bar, which cost around $175 and change. No balls in terms of volume. You have to turn the Sony up all the way to level 50 to achieve sound levels that the old Samsung delivered when it was cranked between halfway and two-thirds.

This is all my fault. I was too lazy and impatient to do the research. And so now I have to lug the Sony HT-CT180 back to Best Buy and give the Magnolia sales guy shit for selling me a weak-ass system (just for the fun of it — the guy who really deserves to get reamed out is me) and demand a better one. Or just get a refund.

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It’s been nearly 25 years but remember the following: (1) Anita Hill (Kerry Washington in HBO’s Confirmation) didn’t come forward to try and torpedo Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings — she was summoned by the Judiciary Committee after a private FBI interview was leaked to the press, and therefore had no choice; (2) Four female witnesses were ready and willing to support Hill’s testimony, but they were not called due to what the Los Angeles Times described as a private, compromise deal between Republicans and the Senate Judiciary Committee chair Joe Biden (Gregg Kinnear in the film); (3) Hill took a polygraph test and passed with flying colors; Thomas declined the test. Remember that moment in Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise joked that he was afraid of sounding like Clarence Thomas? Does anyone recall how Judiciary Committee member Ted Kennedy (Treat Williams in the film) more or less excused himself from asking Hill questions at the the hearings, given his own alleged indiscretions? Wendell Pierce portrays Thomas.

N.Y. Times reporters Ian Lovett and Katie Rogers have gotten confirmation from an LAPD spokesperson what TMZ reported last night (technically at 1 am this morning), which is that Los Angeles police are examining a rusty folding buck knife that was found buried on O.J. Simpson‘s Brentwood property when his home was being demolished in 1998…but not turned over to them until “late January” of this year, according to TMZ.

An anonymous L.A. traffic cop was given the knife by a construction worker who said it had been found underground on the Rockingham estate — i.e., apparently buried. Rather than turn the knife over to authorities, the cop in question (now retired) kept it at his home. Found treasure. What luck!

Seriously…what kind of police officer, presented with hard evidence that might conceivably provide final proof of guilt or innocence in the most notorious murder case of the 20th century…what kind of sociopathic opportunist says (a) “Oh, cool…I can maybe sell this to a collector some day for several thousand dollars!” or “Oh, cool…I can frame this and hang it on a wall in my den and…you know, show it to my friends!”

Even if the knife offers absolute proof of O.J.’s guilt, he can’t be tried twice for the same crime. He skates. Question: Before theoretically burying the knife, wouldn’t O.J. have taken the precaution of washing it down and wiping it clean? Just to be on the safe side?

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Variety and other publications are reporting that Donald Trump really does get infected with AIDS at the very end of The Brothers Grimsby (Sony, 3.11). Brent Lang‘s Variety piece, posted two or three hours ago, says that the Trump AIDS-infection sequence “occurs during the film’s end credits and has received a raucous response from European audiences.”

Not that raucous, it would seem. Louis Letterier‘s film opened in England on 2.24 so why is this Trump story breaking only just now? Leslie Felperin’s 2.22 Hollywood Reporter review doesn’t mention it. Mark Kermode‘s 2.28 Observer review mentions “a supremely unfunny, endlessly repeated riff [about] HIV-infected blood,” but not the Trump connection.

Lang notes that while Sony has “included a disclaimer that explicitly states Trump wasn’t involved in the movie”, a Huffington Post story by Ryan Grim is claiming that the studio “pressured Baron Cohen to remove the scene over fears that the litigious Trump will sue the company.”

Lang quotes Sony spokesperson Jean Guerin denying that pressure was being placed on Baron Cohen to make cuts. “The report of a dispute with the filmmaker is absolutely ridiculous,” said Guerin. “We are 100 percent supportive of the filmmaker and the film.”

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In a 3.1 HE piece about black-focused or racial-themed 2016 films (“Don’t Expect A More Diverse Oscars Next Year“), I forgot to mention Amma Asante‘s A United Kingdom, a 1940s period drama about a controversial interracial marriage between Prince Seretse Khama of Botswana (David Oyelowo) and a white woman from London, Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike).

Which means, of course, that later this year we’ll be grappling with duelling interracial-marriage period dramas — Kingdom and Jeff Nichols‘ Loving, a late ’50s drama about an interracial union that briefly resulted in Mildred and Richard Loving (Ruth Negga, Joel Edgerton) being sentenced to prison in Virginia. Both films are partly British-produced.

There are three other racially significant films due later this year — Nate Parker‘s The Birth of a Nation, Gary Ross‘s The Free State of Jones and Barry Jenkins‘ Moonlight.

David Gordon Green and Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Stronger, a Boston bombing drama about a guy who lost his legs in the Boylston Street blast but put himself back together, won’t be a 2016 award-season contender. I knew it wouldn’t shoot until the early spring, but a chat with Gyllenhaal about this project a few months ago indicated there was an interest on the part of Lionsgate, the distributor, in releasing it before year’s end. Now a Jeff Sneider Wrap piece reports that it’ll most likely be a 2017 film. But another Lionsgate-distributed Boston bombing drama is stepping into the breach. Sneider is reporting that Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg‘s Patriot’s Day, a crime-and-capture drama about cops tracking down the Boston bombers (Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev), will open on 12.21.16 before going wide in early ’17. But you want to be a little careful here. Berg and Wahlberg, who teamed on Lone Survivor, are invested in the mythology of plain-spoken, unpretentious working-class guys standing up and fighting the enemy and doing the right thing, etc. I’m sensing a certain formulaic inclination but let’s see what happens. If the Berg-Wahlberg project focuses on the Tsarnev brothers as much as the good-guy cops, maybe.