Jeffrey Wells

If you haven’t yet watched, here it is. But please also revisit my two-year-old (7.6.21) article, titled “Diverse Exorcist & Torturing of Ellen Burstyn.”

My Detroit references are few and far between. Urban decay. Bankruptcy in 2013. The first act of Tony Scott and Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance (‘93) happens in the grubby downtown area. Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. The MC5. Martha and the Vandellas. Michael Moore‘s Roger and Me…wait, that was set mostiy in Flint, right?

You’d never know Detroit was originally settled by French colonists, I can tell you that. As you approach downtown everything looks a bit blighted, undernourished, down at the heels. Flat landscape. Blah architecture. A cinder-block strip club or two. Empty lots with overgrown grass and tall weeds.

Suburban Detroit is like a thousand other sprawling areas in the Midwest that are largely defined by…nothing. Okay, by the general draining of spirit. The scourge of soul-less corporate commercialism.

Downtown Detroit is even worse. You can feel the enervation and the lethargy. This must be what Berlin or Nurnberg or Dresden felt like in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Detroit is one of those cities that present three choices — become a heroin addict, commit suicide or pack up and leave.

And then you go across the Detroit river to robust and well-tended Windsor, Ontario, and it’s like a breath of fresh air.

5:20 pm: Anyway I’m well out of Detroit and on a Flix bus heading east to Londön. I’ll be visiting a friend in Grand Bend, a bucolic lakeside village in Ontario, for six days. I’ve never seen Lake Huron before.

…who mumbles and gulps and swallows dialogue with a haunted look on his face, Caleb Landry Jones has it all goin’ on.

“Hurricane Billy” Friedkin has been ducking press inquiries about the notorious and ignoble French Connection censorship matter, but if he attends the ‘23 Venice Film Festival to promote his latest film, The Caine Mutiny Court–Martial, which will play out of competition, we’ve got him! He won’t be able to wiggle or slither or sidestep his way out of it.

Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance and Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar will also screen in Venice a few weeks hence…yay!

The Telluride Film Festival is in the best position of all the early fall film festivals as it has no red carpet or paparazzi presence, and so the SAG/AFTRA strike won’t be as much of a hindrance as it will be for the Venice and Toronto festivals.

I’m not 100% certain what this Duncan Crabtree-Ireland statement (from Sean McNulty’s 7.24 Ankler column) means but it seems to indicate that there might be a little leeway in the matter of actors promoting product at fall festivals, at least as far as “independent” films (like Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance?) are concerned.

Jordan Ruimy informs that Telluride had been planning a special Annette Bening career tribute, which would have included a special screening of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin‘s Nyad, a “you go, girl!” drama about 60ish long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, which Netflix will distribute. Nyad will apparently debut at Telluride, but no Bening tribute unless the strike is settled. Jodie Foster (as Nyad’s partner Bonnie Stoll) and Rhys Ifans costar.

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As HE commenter Kristi Coulter noted a few hours ago, Chris Nolan’s Oppenheimer has been, in fact, dishonestly sold and promoted. Because it’s basically a bait-and-switcher.

It’s not some kind of awesome, slam-bam-whammo atomic bomb film. It’s not a tale of acute scientific obsession or about a fine, fevered, steadily building madness. And it’s not a WWII horror film about the becoming of death and the destroying of worlds or even cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Instead it’s a dialogue-driven saga of a blindingly brilliant but conflicted and finally self-crippling Jewish physicist who oversaw and guided the building of the world’s first atomic bombs (Fat Man and Little Boy) but was mainly out to punish Nazi Germany…his European kin will have vengeance!

But when that quest ended and Japan became the target the physicist didn’t feel the fire as much, and then, in the wake of the deaths of tens of thousands, he turned into a “crybaby” (Harry Truman’s term) and a kind of squishy, under-motivated turncoat in the matter of the H-bomb’s development, and as a result he wound up being persecuted and devoured by Robert Downey, Jr. and the D.C. wolves in 1954 and thereby lost his “security clearance.”

That’s it — that’s what the movie is. The saga of a slender, pipe-smoking, genius-level candy-ass with cold blue eyes. A guy who built the bomb but didn’t want to know or even think about it after the task was completed. Treated unfairly and with cruelty, for sure, but who would argue he didn’t make his own bed?

And who believes that Cillian Murphy’s Oppie was able to feel sexual desire, or was even capable of attaining stiffie-hood? I didn’t buy it for a second, especially in the company of the stocky, short-statured, moon-faced and rather morose Florence Pugh.

On top of which my trapped legs were killing me in that third-row-center seat.