Jeffrey Wells

Whenever a heated disagreement erupts on a political talk show, the hosts and the sideliners always say “all right, tone it down, take a chill pill.” MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “Romney’s birther joke…was awful. It’s an embarrassment to your party to play [the] ethnic card.” RNC chairman Reince Priebus: “I’m not going to get into a shouting match with Chris so you guys can move on.” Matthews: “Because you’re losing, that’s why.” Priebus: “Garbage, garbage.” Matthews: “It’s your garbage.”

I was feeling a little bit sour and pissed off during some of today’s Oscar Poker recording. Mainly because of a view expressed by Box-office.com‘s Phil Contrino that 2016: Obama’s America, that hit-job doc that made $6 million this weekend, is…I don’t want to talk about it. But if you’re really disillusioned by Barack Obama then maybe he’s just as bad as Romney…right, Phil? Same difference?

And 2016 director Dinesh D’Souza and producer Gerald Posner are playing the same one-sided game that Michael Moore plays…right? Peas in a pod.

Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

By the way, Joan Prather, the Malibu-residing costar of Michael Ritchie‘s Smile (’75), is a Tea Party member.

Toward the end of tonight’s Newsroom season finale, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) accuses Tea Party wackos of being RINOs — Republicans In Name Only — and runs down a list of traits and beliefs that define them as such. But he was really describing most of the Republican party these days, which has pretty much become all wacko all the time.

Rightie nutters embrace (a) ideological purity; (b) compromise as weakness; (c) a fundamentalist belief in scriptural literalism; (d) denying science; (e) being unmoved by facts; (f) are undeterred by new information; (g) have a hostile fear of progress; (h) a demonization of education; (i) a need to control women’s bodies; (j) severe xenophobia; (k) tribal mentality; (l) intolerance of dissent; and (m) a pathological hatred of U.S. government.

“They can call themselves the Tea Party,” says McAvoy. “They can call themselves conservatives. And they can even call themselves Republicans, though Republicans certainly shouldn’t. But we should call them what they are — the American Taliban.”

Quite true, but British documentarian Adam Curtis owns this analogy, having presented it eight years ago in his documentary The Power of Nightmares.

In 2004 I wrote the following about Curtis’s film: “[It] weaves together all sorts of disparate historical strands to relate two fascinating spiritual and political case histories, that of the American neo-conservatives and the Islamic fundamentalists. The payoff is an explanation of why they’re fighting each other now with such ferocity (beyond the obvious provocation of 9/11), and why the end of their respective holy war, waged for their own separate but like-minded motives, is nowhere in sight.

“That’s right — the Islamics vs. the neo-cons. You might think the United States of America is engaged in a fierce conflict with Middle-Eastern terrorists in order to prevent another domestic attack, but what’s really going on is more in the nature of a war between clans. Like the one between Burl Ives vs. Charles Bickford in The Big Country, say, or the Hatfields vs. the McCoys.

“It’s not that Curtis’s doc is saying anything radically new here, certainly not to those in the hard-core news junkie, academic or think-tank loop, but it makes its case in a remarkably well-ordered and comprehensive way, which…you know…helps moderately aware dilettantes like myself make sense of it all.

“The film contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.

“It says, in other words, that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have a lot in common with Osama bin Laden. It also says that the mythology of ‘Al-Qeada’ was whipped up by the Bushies, that the term wasn’t even used by bin Laden until the Americans more or less coined it, and that the idea of bin Laden running a disciplined and coordinated terrorist network is a myth.

“Nightmares doesn’t trash the Bushies in order to portray the terrorists in some kind of vaguely admiring light. It says — okay, implies — that both factions are too in love with purity and consequently half out of their minds.”

Within the last week I have, in a certain way, crossed over. I’ve resisted digital downloads on my ’50” monitor (not sharp enough, too VHS-y) and I’ve never considered watching films on anything smaller. But I’m now down with watching Netflix and Amazon Prime films on my recently bought iPad 3. Their apps allow for easy choosing and watching without any bothersome bullshit and the iPad3 resolution is excellent.

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A week ago trailers for Premium Rush were being laughed at by audiences and Sony wasn’t expecting much of a reception. Then the critics weighed in and the majority liked it — a Road Runner movie, etc. So how did it play with ticket buyers this weekend? How did the rooms feel? And why has it died so decisively (an estimated $6,300,000 in 2255 screens) with the word-of-mouth being rather good?

That double-breasted, peak-lapel suit recently worn by Leonardo DiCaprio during filming of Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street is…what’s the precise term? Vulgar? Grossly dated? Too much? “Yecch”? David Letterman wore these awful suits on his show for years and years, and I used to say the same thing when he came onstage… “good effing God.” They were popular during the Clinton era, I realize, but moviegoers want magic, not realism…and there are very few things less magical in 2012 than gray double-breasted suits with peak lapels.

If I was Scorsese I would can the costumer right now, just to be safe. Costumer: “But Marty, this is what they were all wearing back then! I’m just following the styles of the ’90s.” Scorsese: “I don’t care. You’re making my star, Leo, look like a schmuck, and I can’t have that. Sorry but you’re done.”

Why has Leo dyed his hair black? Because the guy he’s playing, “Wolf of Wall Street” author and former financial scammer Jordan Belfort, had dark hair. Got it!

Late last night I revisited one of my all-time favorite ’90s films — John McNaughton and Richard Price‘s beautifully written, superbly acted Mad Dog and Glory (’93). Shot by Robby Muller and cut and scored to perfection. And the kind of movie, to re-state the obvious, that big studios abandoned ages ago — the intelligent, adult-angled, middle-budget dramedy. Smooth and handsome with stars and finesse and a discernible theme that’s been developed and rendered just so…bingo.

I recorded two scenes from this mini-classic this morning and uploaded them to YouTube, and Universal’s brilliant legal department defaulted right in and blocked their usage. Really smart, guys. I’m just trying to give a little friendly attention to a forgotten Universal film.

Everybody looks so young in this thing. Robert De Niro, 49 during filming but looking more like 40, is Wayne, a.k.a. “Mad Dog” — a timid, lonely Chicago cop who specializes in forensics and crime-scene photographs. Bill Murray, 42 at the time, is Frank “the money store” Milo, a Chicago mob guy who becomes a big brother and “friend” of Wayne’s after the latter saves his life. David Caruso, 36, was never better as Mike, a fellow cop and Wayne’s best friend. And Uma Thurman, 22, delivered one of her best early-phase performances as Glory, a cocktail waitress who falls in love with Wayne (and vice versa) after Frank (“the expediter of your dreams, pal”) brings them together.

Here’s how I put it ten years ago, give or take:

Murray is settled and confident in the skin of his very unhappy bad guy. Frank is a tough loan shark who’s a lot like Murray in many ways, except he’s not. He’s lonely and doesn’t really like himself or his friends or his life. He wants to be somewhere else. He’s seeing a therapist to try and deal with his hostility issues, and he performs a stand-up comedy routine at a place called the Comic-Kaze Club, which he owns. But he doesn’t want to lose the gangster life either.

Frank and Wayne’s connection begins when Wayne — joshingly called “Mad Dog” by his cop pals due to his passive nature — saves Frank’s life during a grocery store holdup by calming down a jittery holdup man and sending him away without risking bloodshed.

Frank is initially appalled (“You’re a cop?” he says to Wayne right after the incident). But the next evening, realizing what Wayne actually did and starved for a friend, Frank tries to reciprocate by getting friendly over drinks. The next day he sends Glory, a pretty working-class girl who works at the Kamikaze Club, over to Wayne’s place, the idea being for her to stay with him and take care of whatever for seven days.

The wrinkle comes when Wayne and Glory fall in love, and Wayne decides he doesn’t want her being Frank’s “favor girl” any longer. But Frank won’t let her go (Glory has offered her services in order to save her brother from being killed over a debt) unless Wayne coughs up $40,000….which Wayne can’t raise.

The theme of the film is, basically, “no guts, no glory.” That sounds like macho crap, but it’s well sold, believe me.

I don’t know where Price’s script ends and Murray’s improvs begin, but Mad Dog and Glory is full of little Murray doo-dads. There’s his lounge-lizard rendition of “Knock Three Times,” casually crooned at the beginning of a tense scene. His addressing De Niro as “ossifer” (“officer” with the consonants reversed…an expression I hadn’t heard since I was a kid in New Jersey). The way he holds an air bugle to his lips and does a cavalry-charge bugle sound when De Niro’s cop friends come to his rescue at the finale.

There’s a scene in a diner in which Frank’s intellectually challenged top goon, Harold (Mike Starr), who’s sitting nearby with a supermarket tabloid, points at a middle-aged man sitting at the counter and whispers to Milo, “Hey, Frank? Isn’t that Phil Donahue?” A shot of the guy in question proves otherwise. Murray half turns in his seat and says, “Put the magazine down, Harold, before you hurt yourself.”

You want pathos? Consider the melancholy in Murray’s eyes after his fight scene with De Niro at the finish. This is a bright, sometimes funny guy who wants out and knows he won’t get there. He pulls a loose tooth out of his mouth, gestures at the gaudy Cadillac he’s sitting in and the gorillas he’s riding with, and says with a look of pure disgust, “This is my life .”

And Caruso’s Mike is his best feature-film riff ever. Mike is a sarcastic hardass, but a good man and loyal to the end. He has a bravura scene in which he faces down a bigger guy in a bar over a domestic abuse issue (the basher is another cop) and makes him back off. It’s a total classic. You can see why he had a lot of heat coming off this.

The film also has a couple of great Louis Prima tracks (“Just a Gigolo,” “That Old Black Magic”) that turned me into a fan.

Wayne: It’s the first time I pulled out my gun in 15 years. I pissed on myself.
Mike: You know why? Because you’re a sensitive, intelligent indivdual.
Wayne: You ever piss yourself?
Mike: Look, I woulda walked in there and drilled the rat-eyed little bastard, and that’s just the way I am. On the other hand, if I ever had an intelligent thought it would die of loneliness so it all evens out, you know what I mean? (pause) Look, if it ever happens again…? The best thing is sex. You’re all adrenalized? You go off like a rocket. If it was me, I’d be on the phone with every girl I knew [that] wasn’t related by blood. Listen, don’t kid yourself — that was balls-up what you last night.

Either the festival fathers (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) have Brian DePalma‘s back out of age-old loyalty or Passion, his remake of Alain Corneau‘s Love Crime (2010), a corporate potboiler about rivalry between two ambitious women, is half-decent or even good. It’s very hard for me to accept that possibility. In my mind DePalma’s last decent film was 1998’s Snake Eyes.

The Passion trailer is telling us that DePalma has emphasized a lesbo current …fine.

In Corneau’s film Kristin Scott Thomas played the older, dominant, more jaded executive and Ludovine Sagnier played the young go-getter. In DePalma’s film Rachel McAdams has the Thomas role (seven years ago she was the hot new actress and now she’s playing older woman roles?) and Noomi Rapace has the Sagnier part.

I need to get rolling on a list of movies that just “are.” Movies that never tip their hand. They stand their ground and make you come to them. Movies that don’t tell stories or “pay off” or build to third-act crescendos or any of the usual stuff. Movies that lay it on the table, that show but don’t tell. Whatever they’re on about, you’ll get little if any help. Either you get it or you don’t.

Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis.

Films in this vein would be (and I’m coming right off the top of my head): There Will Be Blood, Cosmopolis, The Master (to go by all those people saying they need to see it again), Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis (the early ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene flick due sometime next year), Michelangelo Antonioni‘s L’Avventura, L’eclisse…tip of the iceberg.

Yeah, I know — nobody’s seen Inside Llewyn Davis. But I read the script a few months ago and it sure seems like one.

“I loved the script…the totality of it” I wrote. “It reads like a real Coen Bros. film. When you’ve finished it you know you’ve tasted the early ’60s and that atmosphere and that kick-around way of life, and that you’ve really become familiar with Llewyn Davis’s loser lifestyle. It’s something to bite into and remember. It has flavor and realism, but it has no story to speak of, really. Shit just happens. I don’t think the Coens are trying to deliver anything message-y. The script seems to have been written with a precise intention of not ‘saying’ anything.”

There’s something vaguely analagous between take-it-or-leave-it, no-explanation films and Tom Wolfe‘s explanation of art pour l’art in The Painted Word, to wit:

“In Europe before 1914, artists invented Modern styles with fanatic energy–Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Orphism, Supermatism, Vorticism–but everybody shared the same premise: henceforth, one doesn’t paint ‘about anything, my dear aunt,’ to borrow a line from a famous Punch cartoon. One just paints. Art should no longer be a mirror held up to man or nature. A painting should compel the viewer to see it for what it is: a certain arrangement of colors and forms on a canvas. The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact.”

That’s what I’m taking about here. Movies that aren’t interested in reminding you of some basic observational truth that you’ve absorbed by reconstituting it in cinematic terms, but are just balls-out confident, if not bordering on obstinate. Standing their ground, take it or leave it, slamming it down.

Let’s take a moment and give it up for this 1975 Michael Ritchie film, an example of the kind of social satire that has pretty much disappeared from movie theatres — a kind that doesn’t exaggerate, deals plain but clever cards, favors subtlety over hammer blows and treats its characters with dignity, or a semblance of. But Karyn Kusama says it better:

In his 10.9.75 review, N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby called Smile, which focuses on an annual Junior Miss beauty pageant in Santa Rosa, California, “a pungent surprise, a rollicking satire that misses few of the obvious targets, but without dehumanizing the victims. It’s an especially American kind of social comedy in the way that great good humor sometimes is used to reveal unpleasant facts instead of burying them.”

If you were a sincere churchgoer, would you go to a Sunday service with a nice pleasant buzz-on from a glass or two of wine? The Lord Almighty would surely be offended. By the same token no serious moviegoer would want to watch a film half-sloshed or even a wee bit “happy”…right?

When I was drumming for The Sludge Brothers, a no-account Connecticut blues band, our lead singer-guitarist used to tell the crowds, “Remember — the more you drink, the better we sound.” But alcohol and cinema don’t mix. Really. You should drink a cappuccino or a Red Bull or green tea before a film. Or do Zen breathing exercises. Alcohol always takes things in a downmarket direction. It certainly diminishes the spiritual.

This hasn’t stopped Robert Redford‘s Sundance Cinemas and the iPic theatrical chain from deciding to offer alcohol in their theatres. An 8.23 Wrap piece by Steve Pond says that the Sundance-refurbished version of the old Laemmle Sunset 5 (Sunset and Crescent Heights) and iPic’s renovated theatre in Westwood (i.e., site of the old Avco) are going to serve beer and wine.

These chains are also looking to attract upscale types with plush seating and astronomical prices that will presumably discourage attendance by low-lifes.

I have a friend who’s a devoted fan of Broadway plays, and sometimes he’ll see a play or a musical after slurping down a double vodka so what do I know? I’ll tell you what I know. I know that movies theatres are not amusement environments — they’re churches, and you should hold off on the libations until after the film is over.