Jeffrey Wells

A couple of days ago the Sheffield Doc/Fest screened th World Premiere of Mark Levinson‘s Particle Fever, which is basically about (I think) six scientists who managed to precisely identify and define the Higgs Boson or “God particle” — a subatomic element that informs the size and shape and contour of all physical matter, the missing cornerstone of particle physics. Its existence was proven with “the most expensive science experiment in history” in which the Large Hadron Collider was launched.

When HB was first eyeballed last July I wrote that “this is almost like the discovery of the black monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yet it’s been there all along. The supreme scientific equation…proven.” But listen to Murch talk about the topic — he puts you to sleep! If I didn’t know what this doc is about I would avoid it like the plague after watching this Murch interview. I intend to see it, of course.

Where’s the God/mystical stuff? The mention of intelligent design? The Kubrick angle? My eyelids are drooping, Walter…you’re killing me.

“The ‘intelligent design’ crowd is celebrating this all across America, you bet. I despise what Christianity has become in this country, but I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.

Most of the people you call your “friends” are not going to tell you what you need to hear. Most of them would rather support and good-vibe you, which makes them fair-weather friends by my yardstick. “Friends” are people you like and trust as far as it goes, and with whom you share stuff on the phone and whom you invite to dinners or parties or screenings…or vice versa. But if you’ve begun to look like a beefy, middle-aged lesbian due to compulsive carb indulgence and nightly drinking and not working out enough, your friends will never say “you’ve begun to look like a beefy, middle-aged lesbian — you need to change your program.”

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Two days left in Prague after today (i.e., Saturday), two and a half more in Paris and then back to New York City on Thursday. I’m not doing any tourist shit — strictly working, hiking around, eating grapes, tangerines and apples. Tonight I’m finally seeing Now You See Me, which opened yesterday or the day before.

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Mike Figgis‘s Internal Affairs (’90) has been Bluray-ed, but won’t be out on disc until 10.8. It’s apparently viewable right now via Amazon Prime but all streaming downloads (AP, Netflix, HBO Go) are blocked in Europe. This is precisely the kind of cop drama — character-driven, psychologically layered, smartly written — that the big studios have more or less abandoned and the indies have trouble doing with any pizazz or flair. It’s hard to believe it came out 23 years ago. Richard Gere‘s performance as the psychopathic Dennis Peck is certainly one of his career peaks and Andy Garcia‘s self-righteous, internal-affairs prig is arguably his all-time best. (Garcia is 57 today — he was about 33 when the Figgis film was shot.)

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Lynn Shelton‘s Touchy Feely “is utterly devoid of narrative energy,” I wrote during last January’s Sundance Film Festival. “I started to develop an idea that it’s meant to be a piece of sly self-criticism and as such a parody of a Lynn Shelton film. (And I’m saying this as a big fan of Humpday and one who was mildly okay with Your Sister’s Sister.) I felt narcotized and worn down by Touchy Feely — it slowly vacuumed out my life force. It’s about what happens when somewhat ordinary Seattle types (i.e., people who resemble Shelton or her friends) are either suddenly gifted with exceptional powers or talents or suddenly left without them. It tries to get by on a faintly quirky Seattle sensibility, and I just sat there and slowly counted the minutes and napped for five-minute stretches.”

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Following a debut at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, Lake Bell‘s In A World will play the Los Angeles Film Festival on Saturday, 5.15 — tonight. I haven’t seen it, but the trailer conveys the difference between mainstream movie-star faces and personalities and the faces and personalities that tend to populate indie-world. Bell and her costars (Demetri Martin, Fred Melamed, Michaela Watkins, Ken Marino, Rob Corddry) are intriguing and “attractive” as far as it goes, but they’re more average-looking than movie stars. Their lights don’t burn as brightly. Their faces, no offense, are metaphors for accepting and living within limits. They’re smart but somehow less vivid and engaging than their mainstream cousins.

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On 8.26.12 I ran a piece about The Newsroom‘s Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) calling the Tea Party “the American Taliban” — an assertion that is 110% correct. But let’s remember also that British documentarian Adam Curtis pretty much owns this analogy, having presented a version of it in his 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares.

The Tea Party and the Taliban share the following traits and/or beliefs: (a) ideological purity; (b) a pathological hatred of the U.S. government; (c) a regarding of education as a problem and in some cases a dark force as it tends to undermine the teachings of the Lord/Allah; (d) a need to control women and their bodies; (e) a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism; (f) a denial of science, unmoved by facts, undeterred by new information, a hostile fear of progress; (g) a regarding of compromise as weakness; (h) a tribal mentality; (i) severe xenophobia; and (j) intolerance of dissent.

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“The most interesting thing about the popularity of superhero movies is that they are insanely expensive to make, yet they spring from a plebian, populist artform,” The Guardian‘s Joe Queenan wrote two days ago. “Comic books, at least until recently, were cheap. They were beautifully drawn and exciting, but they were still basically cheap. That was the point. Movies are not cheap, especially not in 3D. Comic-book heroes, like football players, have lost all contact with their proletarian roots.

“Some people will read all this and say: ‘You’re over-intellectualizing. You’re reading too much into it.’ This may be true. But these charges are always made by people who never over-intellectualize anything, who never read too much into things. They are made by people who want you to take the X-Men seriously, as legitimate fiction. And then when you do, they say that you are over-intellectualizing.

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My heart skipped a beat when I first glanced at Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s Bluray.com review of the new 12 Angry Men Bluray from the UK branch of MGM/20th Century Fox. I thought for a second that this transfer might not look as grainy as the Criterion Bluray version. I find pronounced grain distracting; always have, always will. You want to see a version that looks really good without any noticable grain? Watch the free YouTube version. I’m serious.

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A clear indication of the weakened state of the 1.85 fascist cabal is their odd silence about the 1.66 aspect ratio used for the just-released Bluray of Peter Bogdanovich‘s At Long Last Love (’75). As I believe in 1.66 as an eternal idea in the mind of God, I’m naturally delighted that this notorious clunker has been released in this format. The boxier the better, I say; especially for a film that sought to revive the spirit of 1930s musicals, when 1.37:1 was the rule. But I’m not aware of any historical justification for 1.66 being used for this 1975 film. Every stateside film was being shot in 1.85 in the ’70s except when otherwise specified (Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon, etc.) and/or in the case of European films, and by ’75 every theatre in the U.S. was working with 1.85 aperture plates.

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To most people, Elysium (TriStar, 8.9) sounds like another Oblivion. Similar sound, four syllables, futuristic. Tom Cruise precedes Matt Damon, Joseph Kosinski precedes Neil Blomkamp. Chilly, survivalist, dystopian. Swells live in orbit above earth, mongrels barely surviving on spoiled/abandoned terra firma. My money’s on the Blomkamp because (a) it seems more visually complex and action-driven than Oblvion, (b) on some level it reminds me of THX-1138, and (c) District 9 was cooler and smarter than anything Kosinski has ever made or is likely to make.

As I first observed last March after catching an early trailer for Let Me Explain (Summit, 7.3), comedian Kevin Hart is into connecting with the masses. He loves making people laugh, being applauded, cheered, recognized. But he doesn’t seem all that funny. And I’ve been laughing for years with/at Chris Rock, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, etc. Is Hart the Gallagher of black comics? In the new redband trailer there are six or seven cutaways to urban types laughing at Hart’s material…we get it, we get it.

Oh, and the bit about being chased by a howling “deerbra” (half-deer, half-zebra) is unfunny because it appeals to the low-rent mentality of shopping-mall habitues. Nature! Nature’s comin’ after me, gonna take a bite out of my leg!

Last March: “Kevin Hart standing before a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden and being adored like God…they love me! Hart’s narration says Let Me Explain is about the joy of making people laugh. The footage, on the other hand, shows how deeply insecure he is, and how much he needs to fortify his ego. The cheers, the crowds, the adulation…Ceasar!

“A press release announces that Hart’s 2012 ‘Let Me Explain’ concert tour made $32 million. Leapin’ lizards…that’s a lot of money! I’ll bet Kevin can afford to buy a shitload of stuff now, right? Let Me Explain must therefore be really funny. After watching this trailer I wouldn’t see Let Me Explain if Hart personally paid me $100 to do so. Which he could afford.”