Jeffrey Wells

An 8.12 Variety story by Jazz Tangcay reported that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (‘98) was the first battle film to use an accidental shot with small globs of splattered blood on the camera lens in the finished film.

I’m not disputing this claim, but I’ve watched Ryan at least four or five times (twice theatrically, two or three times on Bluray) and I don’t remember any such globs or blood splatters sticking to the lens.

The first time I noticed this kind of unintended effect was in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (‘06).

At first I figured I had forgotten the Saving Private Ryan lens splatter, but I went searching for either a YouTube clip or a frame capture of same, and found nothing…zip.

Does anyone recall such a moment in Spielberg’s film, and if so can the splatter effect be specifically described? And have they seen a video clip or frame capture that proves it actually happened?

Here’s Armond White’s full review of An Officer and a Spy, but I love his use of the term “dismissible embarassments” in the first sentence.

We all have stand-out, less-than-becoming physical traits of one kind or another. Myself included.

Way back when a girlfriend joked that I had “bird legs”…not my thighs as much as my calves. She wasn’t wrong. They’re also called stork legs. I was born with them…couldn’t do much about that. Still can’t.

You know who else had bird legs and didn’t feel good about it, and didn’t want to wear swimming trunks before movie cameras out of shame? Paul Newman. He admitted this once in an interview about The Drowning Pool (‘75), for which he was obliged to wade into a large Louisiana lake (or the Gulf of Mexico) during an Act Two scene.

The late Israeli actress Dalia Lavi clearly had bird legs.

So for myself, Newman and Lavi, a common trait was acknowledged.

In one of my 2024 Poor Things riffs I wrote that Emma Stone had “large, slender, shovel-like feet.” Was I blaming her for this? Of course not —just observing a physical fact. No biggie. Join the Greta Garbo club.

It’s a universal rule that actors and actresses and foot close-ups are a must-to-avoid. Directors never go there. Nobody wants to be tagged for having funny-looking or less-than-attractive feet, which applies 98% of the time. Man-peds…no!

If anyone ever comes up and says, “You’re no one to talk…you have bird legs, for God’s sake!”, my response will be “yup…guilty.”

The Rotten Tomatoes verdict on Scarlet Johansson‘s Eleanor The Great (Sony Picures Classics, 9.26) is “okay, it feels fairly conventional as a ‘what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive’ story, and it certainly could’ve been better, but it’s at least worth the price for June Squibb‘s lead performance. Not a winnning success, but not a failure either.”

I’m sick to death of movies that portray this or that white guy as the proverbial villain — deplorable or weak or impossibly selfish or, you know, some kind of primal seed of evil. I’m sick of this shit…sick of it, sick of it, sick of it.

Some kind of real-world hacked ticket from a seemingly deranged gremlin posing as a Trenitalia rep arrived last night in my inbox:

But if you read Anthony D’Alessandro’s 10.12 Deadline story…ahh, feck it, too complicated and overqualified. Just give us a nice, simple, black vs. white story about bureaucratic cowardice without mucking things up with a torrent of ninny-nanny particulars.

Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson has suffered a bullet in the back of the head, Goodfellas or Sopranos-style. Ditto VF contributors David Canfield and Anthony Breznican…zotzed, cut loose…”oh, no!”…kerflop on the linoleum floor.

It’s all part of a strategic revamp by VF editorial director Mark Guiducci to TikTok-icize VF content by cutting film reviews, trade stories, and in-depth industry-centric whateverism.

Guiducci basically wants to lighten things up or, if you will, dumb things down by catering to the jizz-whizz ADD mentality of Zoomers and younger Millennials, or something like that.

HE is sorry about Lawson, Canfield and Breznican taking it in the neck like this. I’ve been there. I know what it feels like. It hurts.

You’d think it would be no big deal to pay a tourist fee and fill out a tourist form, but HE’s Venice hosts are withholding the links until…who knows?…later this week or next week. Here’s the Castello place.

Everything is arranged and in-place. I leave 11 days hence — Saturday, 8.23

The only peripheral dingle-dangle are those HE comment-thread twats who’ve complained that since I crowd-funded the air fare, the rent and the festival fee that I shouldn’t fly to Milan and train to Venice….they judged this to be impure, louche, cavalier, not spartan enough. I have a paying job and chose to travel this route because it seemed like the right spiritual thing to do…period.

In the late summer of ‘24 Emma Stone totally shaved her head for the making of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, which will world premiere at the Venice Film Festival about two weeks hence (Thursday, 8.28). So we’re looking at roughly a year’s growth here.

Of all the hated big-studio franchises, Guy Ritchie and Robert Downey, Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes films (and there were only two, thank God, released in 2009 and 2011) delivered the most anguish.

I was dropped or ghosted with such regularity by girlfriends of the ‘70s and ‘80s that I decided that “seeing” two or even three women simultaneously was the wisest…okay, the safest policy because the inevitable abandonments would be easier to cope with that way.

“Always nurture one or two back-ups” was the general motto.

And no pearl-clutching or moralistic finger-pointing either. Many women back then played their cards this way.

A couple of times in the ‘80s I was literally told “I like you and you’re promising, but no sex for the time being because I’m seeing two guys right now. But don’t lose hope! When one of them drops out you’ll be out of the bullpen and the recipient of all of my pleasurings, and I’m worth the wait…trust me.”