Jeffrey Wells

Jeffrey Wells to Roger Ebert: Are you going to weigh in on the Shane aspect-ratio brouhaha? Team 1.37 needs guys like you to stand up and do the right thing. Too many political-minded people who know better are saying “well, maybe the 1.66 version will look good!” and “George Stevens Jr. is such a wonderful and gracious and respected man that maybe it’s okay if he helps to suppress or restrict his father’s original vision.” The thinking seems to be that if you’re a member of the family it’s okay if you let the matter of original artistic intent fall by the wayside. Do you agree, Roger?

Let it never be said that Roger Ebert isn’t a brave and classy fellow who knows how to negotiate the ups and downs of life and play whatever cards he’s been dealt like Steve McQueen in The Cincinatti Kid. Always be doing, always be closing, always the task at hand…work, engagement, up and at ’em.

The venerated critic announced yesterday that he’ll be cutting back on his reviews (which will mean…what, 100 or 125 more reviews over the next nine months considering that he wrote 306 last year?) because his cancer has recurred and he has to adapt and do the best he can.

Which is a pretty good deal in a certain sense. “I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing,” Ebert wrote on his website, “[which is] reviewing only the movies I want to review.” Which means only the prime-cut films and then only the ones he really loves or hates. Which is pretty much how I play it, come to think.

I recognize, however, that you can’t be too picky and choosy (which is what I’ve been telling my friend and colleague Sasha Stone all along). You have to routinely submit to the smell of shit in order to fully appreciate the really fine bouquets. “80% of everything is crap” and “taste is a result of a thousand distastes.” — Francois Truffaut.

Ebert also announced that he’ll be buying Rogerebert.com from the Chicago Sun-Times and relaunch the site.

“And I continue to cooperate with the talented filmmaker Steve James on the bio-documentary he, Steve Zaillian and Martin Scorsese are making about my life,” Ebert wrote. “I am humbled that anyone would even think to do it, but I am also grateful.

“At this point in my life, in addition to writing about movies, I may write about what it’s like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you,” Ebert wrote. “It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital. So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.”

As always, Ebertfest will continue at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Ebert is also launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring At the Movies back to television. Oh, come on! That dog won’t hunt any more.

In a 3.12 riff about the poster for Mad Men‘s upcoming sixth season, I wrote that “sooner or later Don Draper is going to have to start growing his hair a little longer, or at least the beginnings of modest sideburns. By ’68 even straight-laced ad execs had started to loosen up and unbutton from the early ’60s button-down style, which was half-inherited from the JFK attitude and half from Sloan Wilson‘s The Man in the Gray-Flannel Suit.”

Well, I watched the two-hour Mad Men opener last night, and I don’t mind revealing that my comment was spot-on. It’s now late 1968 (as last season ended in mid ’67) and Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is suddenly in the throes of a sideburn explosion. And I mean every last male in the agency…Roger Sterling, Pete Campbell, Harry Crane…everyone has a new set of executive chops. Everyone, that is, except for repressed, fucked-up, constipated, cigarette-smoking, vaguely pissed-off Don, who’s still wearing his hair like it’s 1958.

And the younger guys in the agency have really gone over the waterfall with their hair. Moustaches, frizzy-ness, granny glasses…everything but love beads. I was thinking “Jesus, these guys look like the Strawberry Alarm Clock.” I was also thinking of Jack Bruce‘s hair on the cover of Disreali Gears.

It’s exciting to think that as all this is happening, Phillip Roth is struggling in his Manhattan apartment with one of his last drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint, and the general culture, of course, has no idea that the idea of anal will soon be launched among millions of middle-class men and women who have never gone there before.

Otherwise the most intriguing (one could say haunting) thing to be used in the two-hour debut is a prop. A small device made of metal and used for a specific purpose. A device that sorta travels from Korea to Vietnam (in a sense) and then to Honolulu and finally to New York…and then, we’re led to presume, back to Vietnam. It means something, this little device. I swear to God it does.

Update: Even if season #6 is happening in ’69 I still felt compelled to buy the digitally remastered Disraeli Gears today.

Arthouse Cowboy‘s Moises Chiullan reported today that Warner Archive Instant is up and running and open for business to the U.S.-residing public. Hundreds of Warner Bros., MGM, RKO and Allied Artists features and TV shows for $9.99 a month, but for now you need a Roku Player to get HD-quality. (Web browser playback is standard definition only.) No way am I buying a Roku Player, but presumably WAI will be available down the road via Apple TV and other devices.

This could be part of the solution to the Shane aspect-ratio problem. Presumably Warner execs will eventually come out from behind their castle walls and agree to make the 1.37 version of George Stevens’ classic available via Warner Archives, but if they get their act together it could be made available concurrent with the release of the much-reviled 1.66 version on June 4th. But I’m not watching anything on an effing Roku Player — eff that.

Fox Searchlight will open Steve McQueen‘s Twelve Years A Slave on 12.27 — a default Oscar-bait slot. McQueen, screenwriter John Ridley and costars Chiwetel (a.k.a. “Chewy”) Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, Sarah Paulson, Alfre Woodard and Paul Giamatti will surely deliver the goods. But this will probably land a Best Picture nom on the strength of its moral fibre alone.

It wasn’t enough that Django Unchained reminded us last year that slavery was a very bad thing. We need to go there again, methinks, and perhaps several more times.

From a distance this feels like another Cold Mountain with a little dash of Amistad…another movie about a guy walking through the woods (metaphorical and literal) but this time in chains, enduring terrible ordeals on the long road back to freedom as he longs for the love of his wife and children.

Based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 tale (published a year or two after Harriett Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), McQueen’s film is set in pre-Civil War United States (1840 to ’53), and is about Northup (Ejiofor), a free African-American from upstate New York, being abducted and sold into slavery. Fassbender gets to play a Simon Legree-like ogre and twirl his moustache as Solomon “struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity.” This, of course, is what Chewy has always done to perfection.

The synopsis implies that deliverance finally comes when Northup meets up with a Canadian abolitionist (Brad Pitt). Twelve years a slave but freed at last by the Moneyball guy!

Vikram Jayanti‘s The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector, an excellent doc which I’ve been writing about off and on for almost three years now, airs tonight on BBC America at 9 pm Eastern. (Also tomorrow at midnight.) If you’ve seen Al Pacino‘s rendering in David Mamet‘s Phil Spector, you need to meet the real guy.

In a 3.19 Newsweek/Daily Beast article, Jayanti revealed/reminded that Spector’s case is being reviewed by a judge under the terms of federal habeas corpus. Spector’s two attorneys have argued that the judge in Spector’s second trial was biased in favor of the prosecution and that Spector’s rights as a defendant were trampled upon. A decision is expected within hours/days/weeks.

Mad Men producer-creator Matthew Weiner has written a letter that requests all journalists reviewing the two-hour premiere of season #6 to stay clear of five spoiler topics, which I will not name here. But I get it. And I will somehow navigate my way around these restrictions. I’m about to pop it in.

I finally saw Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers last night. I didn’t believe a frame of it but then I’m not supposed to, right? It’s such a thoroughly cliched erotic fantasia about crazy-ass hot-bod chicks (three Tarantino-dream-fantasy sluts and one half-sensible lapsed Christian) and gun-fellating and orgiastic Fellini Satyricon boning and snorting around and Florida gangstas flashing their guns and braggin’ ’bout their “sheeyit”…I mean, like, uhhm…why? Oh, I get it. Don’t ask.

I was imagining a Godzilla-sized Charlton Heston dressed as Moses, rising hundreds of feet out of the ocean and blotting out the sun and pointing at these skanky, well-toned scumbags and bellowing “whoa unto thee…!!!” Or maybe Jim Hutton as Moses.

I wasn’t bored but I was wondering if Korine had anything in mind other than trying to create fantasies about where college-age kids are at these days in order to…I don’t know, imply something about how slippery and nihilistic it’s all become out there and or to vaguely get himself off in the vein of Larry Clark?

He clearly hasn’t the slightest interest in trying to assemble a film that might reflect how it would really be if four sociopathic lassies in their late teens or early 20s were to somehow scrape some dough together and drive down to Florida, etc. Most women I know like to pick and choose and not just drop to their knees in front of their first ape they see. As best I can tell Korine is having himself a whimsical wank, and we’re meant to get off as best we can or at least laugh along the way or whatever.

James Franco is clearly laughing at the asshole he’s playing (his character is named Anus or Asswipe or something like that), especially during that scene in which he sings a Britney Spears song. Scarface playin’ on his flatscreen in a continual loop…”mah sheeyit!” I was kidding about the name — he’s called “Alien.”

If there’s some kind of subliminal, half-sincere social commentary woven into this thing it’s suspended between “look at these impossibly stupid empty chicks and the things that really matter to them” and “look at the bods on these girls and how they’re into standing on their heads in motel hallways and how they’re all ready to swallow salami at the drop of a hat.” Or something like that.

Spring breakin’ as a lifestyle, a constancy, a never-ending place in your head, a philosophy…somewhere between a duel and a place in the sun.

At least it has one great sequence — two masked girls going into a diner and screeching and waving a gun around and taking everyone’s money, but shot from the POV of the getaway driver as the camera watches the action through windows and with the sound muted as the car slowly drives around.

Remember when 15 or 20 Columbians attacked Tony Montana‘s Miami fortress with automatics and shotguns? It was quite a battle but eventually the Montana forces lost. These days you don’t need 15 or 20 Columbians to wipe out a drug gang. All you need are two college girls with two big-ass pistols and super-size magazines just blastin’ away, expending hundreds of rounds and never catching a bullet themselves.

Pacific Electric’s Red Car trolley system “was the largest electric railway system in the world in the 1920s,” as anyone who’s seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? can tell you. The western district alone connected Hollywood, Burbank/Glendale, San Fernando Valley, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Venice, Playa Del Rey, etc.

West Hollywood’s Red Car terminal was located where the Pacific Design Center is today.

Somewhere near the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. and Fairfax Ave., facing northeast.