Jeffrey Wells

This will sound funny coming from me, what with my constant contempt for spoiler whiners since this column launched 21 years ago. But you really, really don’t want to read any reviews of Zach Cregger ‘s Weapons before seeing it.

It follows that the community conversation is sure to spill over and spoil. Stay away from X and Reddit chatter and just hightail it down to the plex. I’ll post a deeper-into-it piece sometime tomorrow or maybe Sunday.

I saw it last night in a fairly virginal state, and “blown away” is a reasonably accurate, non-hyperbolic description of my reaction.

I wasn’t just gripped and fascinated by the radical strategy of shifting POVs with occasional plot-point overlaps. I was almost completely unable to guess what would happen next, and you really don’t want to ruin things by reading discussions. And the finale…amazing!

I hate low-rent horror, and Weapons certainly isn’t that — it’s fucking elevated, man! I haven’t been this knocked out by…let’s call it a “horror exercise” rather than a mere horror film…by any thing in this realm since The Babadook.

Except Cregger isn’t just a grade-A horror film guy…he’s a grade–A filmmaker.

All hail Variety’s Peter Debruge for comparing Weapons to a classic, sporadically horrific Grimm Brothers fairy tale (remember the bear slicing open his own stomach? Hansel and Gretel munching on the witch’s fingers?). Totally spot-on.

And an extra-hearty bro hug for Josh Brolin, who has the lead male role but also executive produced this fucking thing. Weapons is absolutely one of the wowser highlights of Brolin’s career, right up there with No Country for Old Men.

When my 6:45 pm Weapons showing ended, a guy sitting behind me clapped and went “whoo-whoo!”

Even when people like a film, they rarely ever clap. This film is masterful…a landmark thing.

Jordan Ruimy agrees with my take and wouldn’t be surprised, he said this morning, if it generates Oscar buzz.

If I, an audience member, never watch a depiction of a 19th Century public hanging in which the condemned (a dude) not only experiences sexual arousal but jizz-spurts in front of onlookers as he succumbs to strangulation…if I never sit through such a spectacle (let alone one in a reputedly grotesque Emerald Fennell film) it’ll be too soon.

Compassionate hangman to condemned man: “Do you want to die with your britches on or off? I ask because you may want to maintain a vestige of dignity during your final moment of life. What’s that? To hell with dignity? You want your britches off and your fully tumescent schlong in full view of the citizenry…women, children and nuns?”

The Bear’s Ayo Edibiri is obviously surging career-wise. She’s a first-rate actress as far as the Emmy voters are concerned, and her performance as an ambitious academic type in Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt, premiering later this month in Venice, will certainly intensify her brand.

And I’m talking about internals here. All the Lido critics and hotshots, trust me, will be fixating on her character’s personality, character, integrity. This is key.

There is nonetheless a sexual aspect to consider (her character alleges that she was assaulted), and even with a general understanding that sexual assault has relatively little to do with an alleged victim’s basic allure, it still has something to do with it…c’mon.

There has to be a non-inflammatory way of saying that whatever Edibiri is thought to possess or radiate as a respected actress, hetero hottie vibes are not part of the package.

Am I allowed to state the obvious, which is that Ayo is no Gugu Mbatha-Raw, no Lena Horne, no Lupita Nyongo, no Whitney Houston, no Diahann Carroll, no Iman, no Rihanna, no Janelle Monae, no Beyoncé, no Zendaya, no Cassie Ventura? Or is this a verboten thing to mention?

Friendo: “Because she’s black and queer and a good actress, she’s the perfect virtue signal.”

Pauline Kael review of Vincent Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town:

…which launched in ‘93 and then went belly-up sometime around 2010 or thereabouts. I loved this showbiz bible…bought each new edition as quickly as I could, wanted the online edition to succeed. But it didn’t.

In Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (‘59) James Stewart and Ben Gazzara were about as opposed and disparate as they come.

Gazzara was an urban, method-y, dark-eyed “ethnic” type with a sassy, laid-back personality, and Stewart was an American heartland beanpole type (i.e., tall, corn-fed, blue-eyed, non-ethnic) with an upfront manner and an improvisational, half-gawky manner of speaking.

And yet the curiously named KJ Apa, a half-Samoan Gazzara look–alike from New Zealand, has been cast to portray Stewart in a forthcoming feature.

Stewart in heaven after reading Marc Malkin’s Variety story: “All right, now wait a minute, just hold on…this swarthy Apa guy just isn’t my type…hell, I grew up in Pennsylvania and never even visited Samoa…he doesn’t even look like a cousin of mine…plus I was 6’ 3” and he’s 5’11” so there goes the beanpole resemblance. Plus he has a heavy beard-stubble thing going on.”

Contrary to what you may have heard or assumed due to his representation by Henry Willson, Guy Madison (aka the star of the hit TV series Wild Bill Hickock between 1951 and 1958) was straight. Madison was no one’s idea of a gifted actor, but he did a little better, career-wise, than Rick Dalton. His only serious A-level film was David O. Selznick and John Cromwell‘s Since You Went Away (’44). Madison died from ephysema in 1996, at age 74.

A few hours ago THR’s Mike Barnes posted a report on the death of director Jonathan Kaplan, whose finest feature was and always will be Over The Edge (‘79), a fact-based teen crime film that included the screen debut of Matt Dillon.

The subhead of Barnes’ story acknowledges Over The Edge, but the article doesn’t mention this 46-year-old film (made when Kaplan was 30 or so) until paragraph #16, and even then in a no-big-deal, keep-your-shirt-on fashion. That’s not cool. It’s also derelict. Over The Edge is historic…drills it down, wakes you up.

It strikes me as vaguely odd that for the filming of Lolita (‘62), director Stanley Kubrick chose to build a sizable sound-stage set for a simple daylight scene in Shelley Winters’ suburban backyard.

This seems like an awful lot of trouble and expense for a boilerplate dialogue scene that might last 50 or 60 seconds.

It’s interesting, however, to discover stills of James Mason and Sue Lyon chatting in this backyard — presumably from a cut scene that follows the initial first-glance or “cherry pies” scene between Mason, Lyon and Winters.

But Rodney Dangerfield in shorts and open-toed whatevers (they’re not sandals)…no, man…just no…can’t unsee this either.

2005 Emmons Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11235 (shuttered now). Late ‘70s, maybe ‘80 or so, judging by the bell-bottoms.

HE strongly suspects that a majority of the haters who saw red yesterday and went crazy toxic over a mild-mannered notion that Liam Neeson ought to take certain measures in order to look 63 again…

HE strongly suspects that many of these meltdown cases haven’t even caught one of Neeson’s finest films ever, 2024’s In The Land of Saints and Sinners, much less urged their friends to see it or talked it up on HE or whatever.

Some may have seen and admired it, I’m guessing, but the others need to wake the fook up.

In The Land of Saints and Sinners is “a Liam Neeson movie,” and we all know what that means. It means adherence to a certain slow-build formula.

Repeating for the record: To a steady and stalwart Neeson fellow who’s not looking for trouble and in fact would like to back off into a shelter or backwater of some kind, shit inevitably happens.

A slow burning, a gradually tightening situation, implications of tough terms, bad people up to bad stuff (including the threat of serious harm to a couple of innocent characters as well as to Neeson’s guy) until it all blows up in the end.

But the story, set in rural Ireland in the mid ’70s, pulls you in bit by bit, and the script has been carefully and compellingly written by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.

In The Land of Saints and Sinners began shooting in Ireland (County Donegal, Dublin) in March ‘22. It premiered 18 months later at the 2023 Venice Film Festival. Netflix began streaming it on 4.26.24.

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