Jeffrey Wells

I was actually planning to post this yesterday (4.29) but odd thoughts and incidental crap interfered.

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…is almost as good as that early, half-approving Waterworld opinion that popped through before critics had a chance to see it — “It doesn’t suck”

The most eloquent pan by far:

Pay no attention to the whores…

“Nobody in this corner is the least bit confused or thrown over Sinners. I’m not even occasionally scratching my head over the cultural currents that Ryan Coogler’s film has seemingly stirred. I know exactly and precisely what this super-expensive excursion into early 1930s rural Mississippi Blackitude is (an unabashedly heterosexual Samuel Z. Arkoff popcorn horror film with cunnilingus detours and transportational music sequences) and what it’s tapped into over the last two weeks. Rarely has an exploitation flick connected in such a primal, across-the-board way.” — HE comment-thread retort below yesterday’s “Has Sinners Become An Online Political–Cultural Moment?”

Initially posted in 2011: “It was the early ’90s, and I was tooling along Santa Monica Blvd. on a nice, sunny afternoon in my relatively new but not quite super-hot Nissan 240 SX. But the car looked and felt pretty damn good, and I was in a pretty good mood. An atypical thing as I’m usually sullen, but every so often life feels like a sparkling proposition.

“A ’60s muscle car of some kind (a yellow ’65 Mustang convertible?) with whitewall tires pulled alongside. It had a 4 SALE sign without a number in the rear window. A very pretty…okay, hot girl was at the wheel, and her passenger window was rolled down.

“I pulled up at a red light, smiled at her and said, ‘How much?’ This sounded like a double-entendre, of course — I should have said ‘what’s the asking?’ Either way she took one look at me and my wheels, waited a beat or two, shook her head slightly and said, ‘Too much.’

“Fragile as this makes me sound, on a certain level I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from this…the most withering L.A. social putdown I’ve ever suffered in my life. That’s Los Angeles in a nutshell…the attitude that runs it. And the fact that I let that remark hurt me means that I’d bought into this mentality as much as she had. A 60-40 deal.”

A Facebook gush about Paul McCartney duet-ing with Neil Young, a testament about how wonderful this musical moment was…

It happened yesterday (midday by the Pacific clock). Tail-end wrap-up sequence.

Carolla’s sardonic, regular-guy skepticism plus his standard-issue loathing of woke derangement syndrome meshes well with Sasha’s traumatic saga of ‘24 (incoming missiles launched by THR’s Rebecca Keegan led to a significant award-season income plummet) and her continuing discomfort with left-instructional content (i.e., all women, POCs and LGBTQs are glorious, all straight males are kinda bad), which I regard as healthy. The discomfort, I mean.

Did they discuss Sinners? Well, they might have but Sasha still hasn’t seen it. Did they get into the over-and-done-with Anora Oscars? Did they kick around Minecraft or Adolescence or season 2 of The Last of Us? Or…whatever, the upcoming Cannes or Venice film festivals? Naaah, too elitist…too fringe!

Carolla boiled down: “Stop force-feeding us your woke shit!”

I’ll watch a Super Bowl game now and then, but am otherwise indifferent to the comings and goings of big-time football (NFL or college). I barely glance in its direction.

And yet even I know who the legendary Bill Bellichick is, and that he’s 73 and part Croatian and that he wears eight Super Bowl rings. And that his foxy girlfriend of two-plus years, Jordon Hudson, is 49 years younger. (Hudson’s previous boyfriend is around 40 years older.)

I say (a) “if they’re happy, fine,” (b) “it’s none of my damn business” and (c) “live and let live”.

But Bellichick’s maroon or burgundy sport jacket is utterly impossible. No one of any taste comes within 100 yards of burgundy or maroon anything.

THIS RIFF CONTAINS A SPOILER if you live in a deep, dark, wifi-free cave…:

I explained a few days ago that I’d pretty much decided to shine The Last of Us, largely because I’m flat-out repelled by Bella Ramsey’s “Ellie”…feral eyes, frosty “they/them” vibes, bunned hair. “Pretty much” meant there was, at most, a one-in-five chance I might watch it again. But now that Pedro Pascal’s Joel has been shot, golf-clubbed and stabbed to death, we’re stuck with Ellie as the lead character and that, to me, is death. I really hate this show, and if Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann…okay, I won’t say it. But I’m definitely flushing it. Get outta my life.

Speaking as a skeptical non-Catholic and, of course, a 2025 cinephile, HE’s easiest and most immediate understanding of the inner finaglings and political struggles of Vatican politics stems, of course, from Edward Berger’s Conclave (‘24), which ended with the choosing of a kind of woke Pope, aka the intersex, Mexican-born Cardinal Benitez, who chose to be called Pope Innocente, played by Carlos Diehz.

And yet the 88 year-old Pope Francis, who suddenly passed last night in Rome, was a bit of an anomaly — a compassionate progressive who had reached out to gay Catholics and, in Conclave terms, was staunchly opposed to the strict conservative dogma of Serge Castellito’s Cardinal Tedesco. Nonetheless Francis spoke out against woke fanaticism and cancel culture, and in so doing presented himself as a fair-minded and well-principled fellow.

A Jesuit from Argentina, the kindly Jorge Mario Bergoglio was, it seemed to some of us, a real-life version of Benitez, minus a certain physical characteristic.

I knew Francis was a good egg when Sarah Palin frowned and harrumphed when he was chosen to be Pope in March 2013.

And now, in a manner of speaking, Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence will once again be summoning cardinals to Vatican City to select a new pontiff. Who will be Papa Francesco’s successor? Another Benitez or…who knows?…Stanley Tucci’s Cardinal Bellini, Castellito’s Tedesco, John Lithgow’s Cardinal Tremblay, Lucian Msamati’s Cardinal Adeyemi, or perhaps even Lawrence himself?

If I was running the show, I would urge the choosing of a contemporary Pope Joan.

The discussion of “Inconvenient Stats That Journos Would Be Wise To Ignore” (4.15) was apparently shut down by socially concerned persons within the WordPress matrix. This may have been incited by the posting of 2022 crime statistics from the City of London website. Or not…I wouldn’t know. I know it wasn’t me.