Jeffrey Wells

Banks Feels As I Do About Real-Life Cocaine Bear

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In an 8.1.22 HE story called “Au Hasard, Cocaine Bear,” I conveyed a certain degree of loathing for what Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear (Universal, 2.24 23) appeared to be about. Here’s what I said:

A while back Banks sat for a Variety cover story, written by Adam B. Vary. A passage reads as follows: “Most crucially, when Banks looked into the real story, she came away with what she describes as ‘a deep sympathy for the bear.'”

Banks: “I really felt like this is so fucked up that this bear got dragged into this drug run gone bad and ends up dead. I felt like this movie could be that bear’s revenge story.”

The below image was stolen from a “New Rules” segment on Real Time with Bill Maher.

Bury My Heart and Soul in Quantum-ville

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8:01 pm: I walked out of Ant–Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with approximately 30 minutes left to go. My soul was screaming with boredom. Make that boredom-fueled rage. I felt sick, poisoned.

It’s one of the most corrupt and sickening wastes of time I’ve ever submitted to, and that’s saying something.

I can’t believe that Peyton Reed, the guy behind the original glorious Ant–Man (‘15), has so completely sold his soul to the devil. For it was Reed, a twisted, perverse, black-hearted jackal if there ever was one, who decided to set the whole damn thing in the micro-sized Quantum realm, an “exotic” green-screen George Lucas visual disease land by way of Fantastic Voyage and the Star Wars prequels, complete with dopey exotic monsters amid super-lavish sets and bullshit CG backdrops that obviously cost a shitload.

Reed “did” this movie to me…he created it and suffocated and killed me tonight…his doing, his fault…and he should be hung upside down and dipped in a vat of boiling oil.

I nonetheless feel obliged to praise Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang Bang, the Sam-The-Sham Conqueror of the Kingdom of Self-Loathing. It was good enough to prompt me to imagine him one day playing Macbeth or Othello at the Old Vic.

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“Sometimes There’s God, So Quickly”

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Yesterday trans-allied bully signatories of that two-day-old GLAAD protest letter to the N.Y. Times were basically told by management to pound sand…hah!

The message could be reasonably translated as “individual Times employees are hereby advised that further protests against Times management under the aegis of an outside political agenda org will not end well for them…do not mess with us in this fashion again.”

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Fear & Suffocation Are Enemies of Great Art

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The last 72 words of Amy Holden Jones’ Facebook post, which appeared within the last couple of days, are stark and true and sad. The passage begins with the words “but help me.”

HE to Amy: “Here’s a pretty good answer to ‘what the hell happened to cinema?’ It comes from not just my own thoughts and observations but those of a few others, and it’s called “Don McLean’s ‘The Day The Academy Died.” It was posted on 9.25.22.

Gregg Moscoe and Alex Simon also stirred the pot:

Final HE thought: “Vote for that Riseborough!”

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HE Puzzle-Gamed By “Knock At The Cabin”

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Last night I finally saw M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock At The Cabin. It’s more of a mystifying situational conceit than what most of us would call a movie or even a campfire tale. It’s based on Paul Tremblay‘s “The Cabin At The End of The World,” which I haven’t read. But the screenplay, co-authored by Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, feels like a surreal dream (i.e., arresting impressions minus a compelling narrative) that was never developed into the kind of thing that most films need — i.e., a story that coheres.

Is it okay to defy conventional storytelling logic in order to create a conceptual horror film version of a Luis Bunuel film (i.e., a kind of Exterminating Angel set in a woodsy cabin)? Yeah, you can do that, sure. But guys like me don’t have to like it, much less recommend it to their readers.

There’s a fanciful notion here — i.e., a couple of guys being asked to sacrifice one of their lives in order to stop a worldwide apocalypse — and I’m telling you it doesn’t pay off or hang together. Not even a little bit. I realize I’m obliged to at least consider it as Bunuel-influenced but my gut still wants to call it precious bullshit.

And how, by the way, does a gay couple’s experience with homophobia from all sides….how does this connect with a global apocalypse or, for that matter, an invading foursome (Tankbod Ripplehead, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn, Rupert Grint) who are described near the end as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

Which reminds me: Has anyone even thought of, much less seen, Vincent Minnelli‘s The Four Horsemen of the Aoocalypse (’62)? A MGM release that ran 153 nminutes, it costarred Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin (they exchanged fluids off-screen), Charles Boyer, Lee J. Cobb, Paul Lukas and Yvette Mimieux. I’ve never seen it, but I presume it was problematic

Boiled down, Knock At The Cabin is just a single-location “who dies and who lives?” thing, fortified or ornamented with a series of spooky end-of-the-world panoramas.

The best performance by far comes from Kristen Cui, who plays the adopted daughter of Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge‘s married couple.

Speaking as a serious fan of Groff (especially his starring performance in Mindhunter, which is only five or six years old), I was horrified to notice that he’s losing that young-guy physique and is becoming a bit stocky…no! What’s next — he grows a beard, puts on another 10 or 15 pounds and becomes a bear?

After Cabin ended I bolted upright, walked out to the lobby and immediately read the Wikipedia synopsis to see if I’d missed anything. I hadn’t. There’s a term for a movie like this — burn.

Why is it called Knock At The Cabin? Why isn’t it called A Knock At A Cabin? Why isn’t it called Tankbod Has An Axe?

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