Jeffrey Wells

And yet Elon Musk’s assessment of the current state of things (“woke mind virus”) is essentially correct. I wouldn’t say that civilization is edging towards “suicide”, but I know for a fact that the occasional surges of joy and even transcendence that I got from movies for so many decades have become fewer and farther between over the last six or seven years, and that this is largely due to (I need to occasionally refresh my doomsday terminology) the influence of the Maple Street seed pod monsters, and the chickenshit corporates who are afraid to show a little backbone.

It’s an occasion for a kind of mourning (i.e., my own) when a film that sent me fleeing after 90 minutes has bagged $321,770,596 domestic and $279,200,000 overseas for a total of $600 million and change.

I know exactly how it feels when a film is doing everything just right and thereby building trust and affection with an audience. Or at least is up to something exceptional. I’ve experienced it hundreds of times over decades, and the first 90 minutes of Wakanda Forever (I couldn’t tolerate any more than that) definitely wasn’t doing this. A director friend told me “you missed the best part”, ands I’ve no reason to think otherwise. But dear God in heaven…who are we? What is our life when an obviously mediocre film like this is celebrated as a great “success”?

On 12.13.22 a much larger audience will have access to Martin McDonagh’s family-friendly, bloody-finger-stumps drama, and obviously in time for the year-end holidays.

If I were to tell you that this is a nice Anglo Saxon barista who works at a nearby Starbucks, would that be okay? I’m sitting at a Starbucks right now, and the top guy has a beard and longish hair. I don’t know if they have Starbucks outlets in Jerusalem, but if they do I’m certain the guy at the counter wouldn’t resemble a cheerful Connecticut WASP.

I’ll catch an occasional film at a nearby AMC plex, but I never seem to remember to arrive 20 to 25 minutes late so I can avoid the torture of watching bubbly, extra perky Noovie personalities Maria Menounos and Perri Nemiroff, not to mention Nicole Kidman’s “we come to this place” AMC movie spot. Aaaagghh!

Each and every time these three lightweights and their respective shpiels send me into a pit of total depression.

It makes you wonder which paying customers out there are shallow and stupid enough to feel even faintly amused by this crap?

Pet Kidman peeve: “That indescribable feeling we all get when the lights begin to dim…” Indescribable on what planet? It’s easily describable. It’s the feeling of illogical, stupidly hopeful anticipation. Most of us know or at least strongly suspect that whAt we’re about to see will be an overlong, submental piece of shit, but when the lights go down we still revert to our seven-year-old selves and think “maybe…maybe.”

She Said is a very trim, smart, efficient, adult-angled journalism drama in the tradition of Spotlight and All The President’s Men. So what went wrong? Too downish? Joe and Jane don’t care that much about the appalling sins of Harvey Weinstein?

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I’ve assembled this list with full respect and total affection, but here are the nine Scorsese films that have left me feeling at least somewhat gloomy, faintly angry, unsatisfied, vaguely bored, brought down and under-nourished (and not necessarily in this order):

Hugo, Silence, Bringing Out The Dead, Kundun, The Age of Innocence, The Aviator, Shutter Island, Cape Fear and New York New York (“an honest failure”).

All the others are total winners.

 

When off-key singers have murdered the “happy birthday“ song, I’ve also been reduced to tears. But the singing wasn’t that bad earlier today.

My intuition is that the Harry Styles-Olivia Wilde relationship, which began during filming of Don’t Worry Darling in October of ‘20, was strongest in the early stages (like all relationships) but faltered when various pressures and complications began to weigh heavily. (Not to mention the ten-year age difference.) My sense was that the current had all but petered out by the time of Darling’s debut at the ‘22 Venice Film Festival. A two-year relationship means there was genuine spirit and substance. No harm, no foul.

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It’s morbid and a bit grotesque to even ask, much less speculate, about which big-name director is allegedly facing The Big Sleep, and that’s not what I’m doing here. I’m just sorry if the rumor is true, and I really hope it’s not a certain fellow I won’t name.

Update: It’s not Clint.

In his 11.15 review of Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, NewYorker critic Richard Brody says that Spielberg’s core filmmaking aesthetic is about “[putting] the emotional world of prime-time television into the form of classic Hollywood cinema.” Which is interesting.

But as with all concise definitions of complex journeys, there are exceptions. 96% of Schindler’s List, I would say, is enticingly theatrical — it’s the ending that feels television-ish. Ditto War of the Worlds — Tom Cruise‘s son having survived intense combat with the Martians plus Gene Barry and Anne Robinson joyfully welcoming the family into their Boston brownstone at the finale.

What other instances of Spielberg films that generally play by theatrical rules until their endings?