Jeffrey Wells

When Dervish-like Speed Demon Met The “Stupefied Languor of Anomie”

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Eureka! Late last night I watched the first three episodes of Rebecca Miller’s Mr. Scorsese, and I felt so roused and super-engaged I didn’t even notice that episode #3 (which ends with the rightwing hate that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ in ‘88) ended just after 2 am.

We’re all fully familiar with the frenzied, 60-year, up-and-down-but-mostly-up saga of the career of Martin Scorsese, of course, but there’s something primal and alive and almost cleansing in the fissures and textures of Miller’s five-hour doc.

Why did it hold me so? Because it didn’t just feel like Scorsese’s story but my own. At every juncture I was “there” in real time, communing with each and every film — emotionally, instinctually, aesthetically — and I mean going all the way back to Boxcar Bertha, which wasn’t much (after seeing it John Cassavetes gave Scorsese a fatherly hug and said “you’ve just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit”) but at least had one good sex scene.

In a phrase Mr. Scorsese is really great stuff. First-rate, up close and searingly personal. It reminds you that Scorsese led a very anxious and shadowed and haunted life for at least his first half-century on the planet. No bowl of cherries, no walk in the park.

I’m thinking now of an on–camera Paul Schrader quote about how Travis Bickle, the proverbial Underground Man, was speaking to “no one” in the early ‘70s…the isolation was all but total back then.  Now almost the same kind of guy is online, and he is legion…the solo Underground Man thing has become an online community…the “Internet Man”.

Please re-read Pauline Kael’s 2.9.76 New Yorker review of Taxi Driver.

Friendo: “The persistent sneers of dismissal that now frequently greet Pauline’s name are one more sign that 2025 film culture has lost its marbles.”

DeNiro Was Always Better When Playing Eccentric, Wackazoid, Cut-Loose Characters

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Being a highly skilled thesp, Robert DeNiro has always been able to play mellow or solemn or soft-spoken. He’s performed in this vein more often than not.

But except for five low-key, major-value performances — his Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II, Jack Walsh in Midnight Run (full of inner conflict, regret about past mistakes), the inwardly chilly, mostly pragmatic Neil MacAuley in Heat, timid Chicago cop Wayne Dobie in Mad Dog and Glory, and that super-moderate, restrained, gentle-feeling performance that he gave in Nancy Meyers’ The Intern — DeNiro has generally failed to make truly vivid impressions unless he’s played characters with some kind of manic vibe or a violent impulse thing or, you know, a loose screw aspect.

The more “normal”, sensible and schlubby his characters were, the less effective DeNiro has been. The more “ruled by inner demons” they were, the better he was.

Those five perfs aside, DeNiro was born to play edgelords.

Think about it — Johnny Boy in Mean Streets (hyper nutter), Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (animal), Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (psycho with a messiah complex), Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (delusional would-be comedian), Satan in Angel Heart, Al Capone in The Untouchables (fiendish, baseball-bat-wielding, Prohibition-era monster), Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas (Brooklyn mob sociopath), Max Cady in Cape Fear (evil psychopathic pervert), Louis Gara in Jackie Brown (stupid lowlife criminal), Jack Byrnes in Meet The Parents (obsessive psycho-dad), Pat Solitano in Silver Linings Playbook (obsessive Philadelphia Eagles gambling junkie), Frank Sheeran in The Irishman (contract killer).

These twelve performances are where the DeNiro gold is…twelve edgelords…twelve sociopaths or obsessives…twelve lit fuses.

Bald As Fuck

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Luca Guadagnino‘s exceedingly thin thatch looks naturally pleasing and fine all around, but Bing
Crosby‘s mostly hairless crown always looked like a bad idea. Surely Crosby knew that and yet he rarely wore a rug. Why was that?

Please Don’t Inject This Gloom Into My Head

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With all due respect, I really, really don’t want to watch a film about George Clooney withering away from the plague condition known in certain circles as “Al Z. Heimer”.

Ditto Annette Bening, playing Clooney’s wife who arranges, at Clooney’s earnest request, to send him off to the next world.

First, a Clooney-type guy would never be married to a woman who’s more or less his age. (He and Bening are both in their mid 60s.) A Clooney-type guy would have tied the knot with…I don’t know, some kind of slender, 20-years-younger, dark-haired, uptown fox.

Second, I might accept or find some way to tolerate Clooney arranging for Bening to buy the farm, but not the other way around…please! Bening has played several morose, beaten-up characters over the last couple of decades, but Clooney is too slender and vital…too much the bon vivant smoothie. He’s Jay Kelly!

Third and finally, this Paul Weitz project is obviously (dare I say nakedly ambitious?) awards bait.

I don’t want Clooney or Bening to die. I want them to…I don’t know, fall into an adventure of some kind. Drive down to Central America and then Venezuela out of boredom and maybe get involved in the drug trade for extra cash. Okay, I’ll accept an accidental death (eaten by a shark?) but no Keverkorian action.

Coarse Hit Job

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Even the matinee-handsome JFK, arguably the most attractive Oval Office resident in U.S. history…even JFK was impressionistically presented as some kind of hulking Quasimodo figure for a 1962 Time magazine cover. The painter was Pietro Annigoni.

Anyone can look diminished or even grotesque if captured by the wrong painter or snapped from the wrong angle.

I’m certainly no Trumpalo admirer or defender but he’s obviously been torpedoed by Time’s photo editors. They wanted him to look like a balding, Porky Piggy, saggy-faced animal and they certainly achieved that result.

With all his dough Trump could have easily taken care of his neck wattle problem. My Esthe Plastika Prague guy could have fixed him right up.

Accepting But Mystified

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A few days ago I agreeably chatted with a nice, friendly, 50ish Connecticut woman about…well, not much but briefly about films.

She and her husband are hardly movie hounds, she confessed. They watch a lot of sports. “So no films at all?” I gently inquired. She said they’ve enjoyed streaming Tulsa King, the Sylvester Stallone / Paramount + series. (My interest in continuing our conversation dropped precipitously after she said this.)

I asked if she’s seen Anora, 2024’s Best Picture Oscar winner. She not only hasn’t seen Sean Baker’s edgy Russia-Brooklyn comedy, she told me, but before I pitched my question she’d never even heard of it. So much for the influence of the Academy Awards.

Repeating for posterity: Before her encounter with the living, breathing embodiment of Hollywood Elsewhere, this gracious, soft-spoken woman had never once HEARD of Anora.

She and her husband have, however, not only heard of but watched Edward Berger’s masterful Conclave, which is HE’s second most admired 2024 film (right after Anora). Alas, they zoned out and turned it off after an hour or so.

Whoa. I said “okay” to indicate that there’s nothing wrong or worrisome about not liking this or that film. But the silence that followed this admission — the silence between us, I mean — was deafening.

I was going to suggest that she and her husband might enjoy seeing Sentimental Value when it opens in November, but after considering their lack of rapport with Conclave I thought better of it.

Anyone Who Says This Or That Movie “Changed My Life”

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…is buying into a fairly silly or pretentious idea.

What exciting movies do to young, impressionable types is often a combination of three things. One, they turn on a light bulb. Two, they light a fuse and, if the impressionable youth is lucky, ignite a spiritual chain reaction. And three, they inject you with one of those “aha!” or “eureka!” realizations (i.e., “wow, really good films can reach deep inside and amount to much, much more than just entertainment”).

Okay, I’ll share a “changed my life” reaction to a film. The explosive, cannon–like sound of the six-shooters in Shane, which I saw on a sub-run, years-later basis at some kiddie matinee when I was nine or ten. I had never heard that kind of primal roar from any machine or device or living thing before. It shook my soul in a way that never quite left my system or even faded.

Model Veronica Webb in Hofler’s book:

I Am Sorta Kinda Max Von Mayerling

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In Billy Wilder Sunset Boulevard (‘50), the regal, curiously old-world, organ-playing, stiff-necked Max von Mayerling (Eric Von Stroheim) is not just Norma Desmond’s chauffeur. He is also her ex-husband and a once-powerful Hollywood director.

In the 1920s and early ‘30s Stroheim himself was a major, auteur-level Hollywood director (Greed The Merry Widow, Queen Kelly), which is why the snickering, smart-assed Wilder cast him as Max — a “wink wink” meta thing.

Like Von Mayerling, Von Stroheim’s imperious manner, exacting standards and creative arrogance had led to his being elbowed out of the elite circles of Hollywood power before he was 50.

I was never a filmmaker, of course, but I was undeniably an influential and consequential industry reporter and freelance commentator, print-wise, in the ‘90s, and then I became a major columnist, opinion-monger and “Oscar whisperer” when Hollywood Elsewhere took flight in ‘04 until…oh, roughly ‘21 or thereabouts, which is when I was Twitter-torpedoed by the Stalinist wokezoids, and by the femmebot-trans contingent in particular.

I hadn’t “done” a damn thing — it was all about my not-woke-enough or anti-woke views and opinions.

The 2025 version of HE is just as perceptively snap-dragon and on-target and lusciously well-written as it was in my Clinton-Bush-Obama-early Trump heyday.

But supplemental-income-wise I have become, in a sense, a Max Von Mayerling variation, chauffeuring Fairfield County swells to the four NYC-area airports while radiating a certain worldly, “oh, I’ve been around and done a few little things in my time” mentality or attitude, although always with a wink and a smile.

On top of which after his fall from grace Max Von Mayerling wasn’t a well-read, Bhagavad Gita-fortified columnist who annually attended the major film festivals (Cannes, Telluride, Venice) by way of crowd-funding and the kindness of certain friends.

In a certain light I’ve sorta come full circle. The first really cool job I ever had was driving for Checker Cab in Boston (’70s), and all the while I was a secret genius.

Von Stroheim never accepted the humiliation of becoming his ex-wife’s chauffeur, but he certainly suffered an industry-mindset comedown in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s. He was only 72 when he died in 1957.

Son of Sullivan Travels (i.e., Keaton Inspired)

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Posted seven and a half years ago:

Most of yesterday afternoon was about hiking in Sullivan Canyon, a leafy, horse-trail community just west of Mandeville Canyon.

We defied the posted warnings and parked on Old Ranch Road, about 1/2 mile north of Sunset. We walked up a cloppy horse path to Sullivan Canyon trail, which goes on and on. By the time we were back to the junction of Sunset and Old Ranch we’d hiked five miles.

We also checked out Diane Keaton’s super-sized, industrial-chic home, which was written about last October in Architectural Digest. Keaton also published a book about it — “The House That Pinterest Built.”

We only scoped out the exterior, of course. It’s magnificent and exacting, so beautifully textured and all of a piece in so many ways, but at the same time (here it comes) so immaculate that it feels more like the workspace of an enlightened, forward-thinking company (it reminded me a bit of J.J. Abrams‘ Bad Robot headquarters) than what most of us would call a “home.”

Homes need to feel imperfect and lived in and just a little bit ramshackle — a tad sloppy and messy with the scent of white clam sauce and sliced lemons, and maybe a hint of cat poop. A good home always has magazines and books and vinyl LPs all over the place, not to mention flatscreens and blankets draped over couches and at least three or four cats and dogs hanging around.

Keaton’s place might feel homier inside, but the exterior seems a bit too precise.

Oh, and there’s hardly any tree-shade in the front yard of Keaton’s place. Warren Beatty once said that great-looking hair constitutes 60% of a woman’s attractiveness; by the same token a great-looking home needs great trees (sycamores, jacaranda, lemon eucalyptus, pin oak) to drop a few thousand leaves and shade the place up.

6:15 pm update: I just ran into Warren Beatty and Annette Bening at Le Pain Quotidien on Melrose…honest! I told him I loved the quote about hair constituting 60% of a woman’s beauty or appeal, and he said, “I don’t think I ever said it.” Huh. “You read this somewhere?,” he asked. Yeah, I said. In an article about Diane Keaton or about her home, and just this morning. I definitely didn’t invent it, I emphasized, but I love the observation regardless.

Diane Keaton’s spacious, self-designed home, just around the corner from Old Ranch Road and exactingly designed like nothing you’ve ever seen.

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