Jeffrey Wells

Fair Point About Riseborough

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Invaders From Mars restoration hotshot Scott MacQueen following special Sunday screening at Bedford Playhouse. (My hair is significantly darker than it appears here. Weird lighting.)
Apologies for posting my favorite Gina Lollobrigida photo. I would presume that to Millennials and Zoomers Lollobrigida, who’s just passed, seems like the same kind of mythical sexual figure that, say, Theda Bara or Vilma Banky or Clara Bow were to boomers and GenXers

See What I’m Dealing With?

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I didn’t say what this bespectacled neckbeard says I said. I didn’t say that the only people who swear by EEAAO are those “who go to the movies.” I said this infuriating film has no friends outside the hermetic realm of Millennials and Zoomers.

Can You Imagine Being So Banal

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…as to actually write about Glen Powell having over-exerted himself during the celebrated Top Gun: Maverick beach football scene? And then having the audacity to call it “breaking news”? Can you imagine?

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike — that Hollywood Elsewhere would never, ever write such a thing.

Ke Huy Quan Aside, “EEAAO” Critics Choice Wins (Best Picture, Director) Don’t Count; Fraser Best Actor Win Also Questionable

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The Critics Choice voters are total woke lemmings — they’ve gone over the cliff (i.e., are lacking in good taste) and are no longer predictive of the Oscars, and that’s final. And where did Brendan Fraser’s win come from? How did he muscle aside Colin Farrell and Austin Butler? HE applauds Cate Blanchett’s Best Actress win for Tar, of course.

Veteran producer friendo (i.e., burdened with a sense of taste): “It’s criminal that Everything Everywhere All At Once took Best Picture at the Critics Choice Awards. And RRR for Best Foreign? Get outta town.”

Sarah Polley’s Women Talking script (essentially a barn-dialogue primer about women standing up to white male sexual assault) winning the CC’s Best Adapted Screenplay trophy is curious, given the obviously superior investigative pedigree of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s She Said screenplay.

The CC ceremony was some kind of award season glitch, a belch, an anomaly.. Voting the woke party line (sacralization of race, gender, sexuality plus focusing on emotional core issues over an instance of morbid self-destructive obesity) means NOTHING in this context.

Cate Blanchett’s Tar win aside, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Critics Choice voters lining up like stooges and voting a straight woke party ticket and, say, Democratic trade unions voting for Richard Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine ticket back in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Wokeism is a cult and a scourge — its followers are indistinguishable from those obedient, red-book-waving Mao lapdogs during China’s “great cuitural revolution.”

Things That Oddly Stick In Your Mind

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I don’t know why I’ll always remember Captain Meathead, but somehow this late-night Park City encounter (1.17.14, or almost exactly nine years ago) has taken up residence. Probably because I loved the late Lynn Shelton’s Laggies (‘14) and…I don’t know. All seemed right with the world back in ‘14, and I was very happy for Shelton that night. Happy all around. I’m very sorry…well, for a great many things.

Cat’s Cradle

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It was the cat. It’s always been the cat. The cat had to be in Dylan’s lap and looking at the lens.

Sally Grossman passed on 5.11.21 at age 81. She led an engaged life as honcho of Bearsville Records following the 1986 death of husband Albert Grossman, but nothing she did or said after the April ‘65 release of Bringing It All Back Home could rival the iconic power of that red pants suit, lit cigarette and neutral-bordering-on-chilly expression.

Oates Disses Spielberg

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Joyce Carol Oates, author of “Blonde: A Novel”, isn’t altogether wrong about Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, and there’s no arguing that in terms of delivering a tough, unsparing biopic within an artful impressionistic realm, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is a lot more probing and less inclined to turn the other cheek. But almost everyone dislikes Dominik’s film for its heartlessness, and that’s always the bottom line. Heart always wins.

Posted on 10.7.22:

The Night David Bowie Died

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On 1.10.16, four lads at a Golden Globes after-party in Century City — (l. to r.) Roger Durling, Deadline’s Pete Hammond, myself, Kris Tapley. 2016 was the last semi-normal year before the woke plague began to descend.

Golden Globe Apologies…Okay, Publicists?

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11:18 pm: Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans has won the Golden Globe award for Best Motion Picture Drama. It’s a reasonably good film, but it doesn’t radiate what I would call exceptional jazz and it doesn’t knock the ball out of the park….it really doesn’t. But congrats to all.

10:59 pm: Best Dramatic Actor TV series winner Kevin Costner (Yellowstone) can’t attend the ceremony because he’s “sheltering in place” in Santa Barbara (technically Carpinteria). Very funny, but I’m about done. It’s 11:04 pm….Jesus.

Thank God that the Golden Globe award for Best Screenplay has gone to Martin McDonagh and his Banshees of Inisherin script and not to…well, you know…thank God in heaven!

HFPA to Tomris Laffly: “Please forgive us, Tomris! Give us another chance…puhleeze?”