Jeffrey Wells

If you’re flying to Europe on the reasonably-priced Scandinavian Airlines (SAS), you’ll have to accept a stopover in Stockholm, Oslo or Copenhagen. So on my way to the Venice Film Festival (the outgoing JFK red-eye leaves late Saturday afternoon, 8.23) I’ll be staying in Copenhagen for 25, 26 hours…something in that vicinity.

But the next day I won’t be flying straight to Venice’s Marco Polo airport. Just for the eye-filling splendor of it all, I’m flying instead from Copenhagen–Kastrup to Luca Guadagnino’s Milan (haven’t stood before the Duomo since ‘92) and then taking a late-Monday-morning train to Katharine Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi’s Venezia San Lucia. Just for the visual-sensual-spiritual-atmospheric aspects.

I’ve visited Venice as an X-factor traveller-tourist six or seven times, and have never stayed for more than two or three days. Next month’s visit will last 12 days.

I’ll be hitting Milan for nearly a full day on my way back

Released within industry circles in mid-July of 1995, Windows 95 was open for Average Joe purchase on 8.24.95. It sold for $209.95, or roughly $440 in 2025 dollars. Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator (which initially surfaced in ‘94)…I can already feel a headache coming on from the memories alone.

An operating system from hell, Windows 95 was a steep, craggy mountain that I struggled daily to climb. Ropes, pick-axes…a real motherfucker.

I recall hanging out at a computer retail place on Pico Blvd. back then and asking advice from guys who worked there about some of the gnarlier tech issues. Quote: “Windows 95, man! Better men than I have been beaten down by it. Do not take that operating system lightly!”

I’ve been a Mac guy since ‘09 or thereabouts…what a comparative breeze. Because I grappled and fumbled and sweated within the Microsoft realm for the better part of 15 years or more. I don’t want to think back on those times, but it was rough going. The viruses alone.

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Late last week a local man with “issues” — some temperamentally distracted, possibly mentally unbalanced fellow — attracted the attention of the citizenry in HE’s very own Wilton, Connecticut.

And then the cops got wind and eventually this poor soul was led away and driven to a nearby hospital.

Alas, the readers of Good Morning Wilton, which is written and edited by the socially obedient Heather Borden Herve, were told a somewhat different story.

The disturbed guy with issues was given an upgraded description, for one thing — he became “an individual in crisis.” And the episode was sanitized to a fare-thee-well. Herve decided to forego any physical descriptions — not even the approximate age of the poor guy.

What Herve wrote and posted was bad reporting, plain and simple. Regimented police-blotter stuff. And an insult to the art and the challenge of good writing.

That would’ve never worked. Too ivory tower, too playwright-ish…a name that pines for dignity. The combination of “Billy” and that Polish-German accent was perfect. Billy sounds playful, mischievous, maybe a bit wicked.

…of Mrs. Bryan Cooke, painted by George Romney in the late 1780s, I can’t help you.

…about poor Ozzy Osbourne. Never plugged into the utter, low-rent shallowness of Black Sabbath. Biting off the head of a bat…get outta my life. Never watched The Osbournes during the Dubya years. I tried to find that whimsical “Ozzy contemplates life as an older guy” song, but it wouldn’t come up.

Friendo: “First democracy and now Ozzy. I can’t take any more.”

It’s who they are, what they do. The studios snap their fingers, and the whores fellate superhero flicks on cue.

It’s apparently not playing Venice and perhaps not even Telluride, but James Vanderbilt’s Nuremberg (Sony Classics, 11.7) will have a gala premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, and it’s a hot ticket, I’m told.

Me to Friendo: “If Nuremberg is so good why isn’t it premiering in Venice or Telluride? Why launch it at TIFF, which is but a shadow of its former self?

Vanderbilt did an excellent job with Truth (‘15), which he wrote, directed and produced.

If the buzz is correct, Nuremberg could be a great comeback vehicle for Russell Crowe, who plays overweight Nazi luftwaffer commander Hermann Goring. A good get for costar Rami Malek also.

…a “sexually candid, open relationship comedy” starring these two mooks? The guy especially. I wouldn’t even want to imagine this bear-like beardo in any vague state of intimacy or arousal or even, God forbid, with his shoes off….ugh!

The social-media response to Coldplaygate (i.e., a playfully roaming kisscam exposing an apparent affair between former Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and the company’s not-yet-fired chief HR officer Kristin Cabot) took an exceptionally cruel turn when some in the chorus referred to Cabot as Byron’s “sidepiece.”

What kind of vulgar crap is that? What do these jackals know about it? Maybe Byron and Cabot had been gradually, seriously falling in love — the head-over-heels, what’s-wrong-with-me?, real-as-it-gets kind — and, given the tendency of some lovers to succumb to barking insanity…maybe this crazy feeling of theirs led to that incredibly bone-headed decision to be openly demonstrative that night. Who knows?

All I can tell you is that I’ve been there. (A People magazine affair between early ‘98 and late ‘00.) I know how it feels to have wings on your heels, and so did Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Maybe….make that probably the sex between them was amazing, breathtaking, heart–stopping, etc. It’s really extra shitty of YouTubers and Instagram-ers to cynically imply that the Byron-Cabot affair was just some kind of rip-roaring fling…one of those brief, self-destructive manifestations of ridiculous teenage hormones between consenting 50somethings…a guilty blowjob in Byron’s parked car on the company lot after hours…pure impulse, no plan, no poetry, no heart.

Well, that’s a seriously cheap and rancid thing to say, assholes. At least speculate positively. Have a little faith.

Byron and Cabot have only one play in this social media maelstrom, and hiding out and hoping it’ll blow over is not it. They should co-author a short novelette about the affair..,how it began, how they completely and gloriously lost their minds, how long they knew deep down that their mutual lust and longing was unsuppressable…how long it simmered, how long they fought it, A real-life Damage or Betrayal or a combination of the two.

Once the book has been written or even while it’s being written, the movie rights should be sold, and I mean to a classy, A-level producer…the reformed and semi-exonerated Scott Rudin, say, or somebody in that realm. Persuade the great David Cronenberg (he really knows how to shoot first-rate, deliciously perverse sex scenes) to direct it. Hire Vincent Cassel to play Byron, and…I don’t know, maybe Jennifer Aniston to play Cabot. Shoot the film quickly but earnestly. And put the film into select theatres or least into a grade-A streaming feed within a year or less .

Sinners (a Samuel Z. Arkoff vampire + cunnilingus + Delta blues + ghost of Robert Johnson film just doesn’t warrant Best Picture hoopla) + Wicked For Good (enough! go away!) Plus I’m nursing doubts about Hamnet because of the dreaded Paul Mescal factor.