Jeffrey Wells

On HE’s list of the best 25 films of 2007, Charlie Wilson’s War ranks 22nd. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with Aaron Sorkin’s whip- smart screenplay or Mike Nichols’ directorial finesse or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s fine performance as that cynical, cigarette-smoking CIA guy (he’s actually magnificent).

The (admittedly slight) problem is Tom Hanks’ casting as the droll titular character. The real-life Wilson, a cunning, well-liked Texas Congressman in his day, was a libertine (fucked women, slurped booze, snorted coke), and as smooth and charming as Hanks is overall, there’s just no believing his Wilson is a party animal with a hard-on. He can’t sell it. There’s no erasing that Hanksian modesty, decency, reserve.

Nor am I a huge fan of Julia Roberts’ performance as real-life Texas socialite Joanne Herring…too poised and brittle, overly conspicuous acting…she won’t stop saying lines.

As all semi-intelligent people know, the natural, all-encompassing current of unity and cosmic splendor known in some quarters as “God” doesn’t project or deal in earthly, garden-variety emotions. It is of zero consequence whether you love or fear or feign indifference to “the force”. It’s been the primary thing since forever and will continue to rock out a billion years hence so…whatever.

A bit less than three months ago (3.26) I sent $2K and change to Tommaso, my Dorsoduro-residing Airbnb host. That was the tab for 13 days in his spacious one-bedroom apartment (8.25 thru 9.7) during the Venice Film Festival.

It was all locked in — no worries, not too pricey, friendly messages from Tommaso and his dad, Valentino, etc. And a really nice neighborhood.

Yesterday (6.19) I asked Tommaso about the two beds, and he replied as follows around midnight:

Roughly nine hours ago Airbnb told me Tommaso had cancelled the booking. My Citibank app said Airbnb had sent a full refund — the money will be liquid and usable on Tuesday, 6.24. The fuck?

Nearly three months of soothing Tomasso vibes, and suddenly I was Joe Pesci in his final Goodfellas scene…pop and flop.

Tommaso may have blown me off because somebody offered him more dough for the place. If so, that was unethical, shitty, inconsiderate, dishonorable…all of that stuff.

I immediately reserved another place on VRBO, a little smaller but close to the San Zaccaria vaporetto stop and oh, yeah..,about $900 more expensive than Tommasso’s rental.

You fucked me in the ass, Tommaso. Left me high and dry. Uncool, dude…you cost me and it hurts.

HE to vast int’l readership: Beware of Tommaso!

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…but all I experienced were the dry heaves.

Bill McCuddy to HE after seeing Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and Anthony Dod Mantle’s 28 Years Later:

“Terence Malick has made a zombie movie under the name Danny Boyle. This is a thinking man’s running dead movie. When I say Malick I mean it’s beautifully shot and deals with family, survival and death by way of a poignant, non-zombie subplot. It has a little Children of Men vibe going on to but you may not want to reveal that.

“Ralph Fiennes arrives at the three-quarter mark…a nice bump.

“And Aaron Taylor Johnson fans eager to see the ‘maybe James Bond’ may be disappointed to learn he’s not really in the film all that much.

“The story is mainly about ATJ’s son (Alfie Williams) and wife (a sickly Jodie Comer) departing a semi-safe island compound in search of Ralph Fiennes, playing a doctor of sorts. It’s never really clear why anyone would risk leaving said compound but you kinda have to go with that.

“I liked it and am recommending, but I don’t know how commercial it will be. It’s smaller than even the first film — a walking road picture with mother and son. Plenty of blood and manic action. In some ways this is the best of the franchise. But it’s not a blockbuster. It’s just good. Will that be enough?”

HE to McCuddy after catching this well-made if godforsaken film early Thursday evening:

“What’s wrong with you? What do you mean you ‘liked it’? I wasn’t expecting all that much, but I was somewhere between appalled and truly, deeply repelled. I remember being positive on 28 Days Later way back in ‘02, although my all-time favorite zombie flick is still Dawn of the Dead. But this…! The instant judgment is ‘artistically honorable but mostly indigestible.’”

McCuddy to HE: “I should have known when Perri Nemiroff liked it you’d hate it.”

HE to McCuddy: “I HATED, HATED, HATED this film.  I hated the futility and hopelessness, the blood and gore and goo-glop-slime, the sickening grunge, the stench, the puddles, the cheap shock cuts, the yelling, the all-but-impenetrable accents, the obese corpses, the vomiting, the cancer, the rage, the fury, and the worms, flies, rats and insects…the brutal slam cuts, the incessant howling, the tower of skulls, the endless supply of arrows…the sudden, left-field use of subtitles when a small crew of soldiers appears when subtitles were clearly required throughout most of the film…the relentless, all-but-vomitous spewing and spraying of blood, blood, blood and slithery, odious, Chicago stockyard pig organs…arrows, chest shots, head shots….guts, guts, guts.

“28 Years Later is probably the most skin-crawling, the least engaging…let me start over…the filthiest, emptiest, most repellent and nihilistic film of this sort and…oh, hell and damnation and repulsion…almost certainly the most physically disgusting film of any kind that I’ve ever seen in my life.

”Yes, it is partially redeemed toward the end by Fiennes, whose dialogue is actually understandable (as always, his elocutionary skills are admirable) and who has a delightful moment when he recalls a famous Hamlet line…but let’s not get too carried away.”

I could’ve seen 28 Years Later this afternoon, but I don’t care that much about undead plagues and all that icky jizz-whizz stuff. I’m seeing it this evening out of respect for director Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland, dp Anthony Dod Mantle and the esteemed cast (Jack O’Connell, Aaron-Taylor Johnson, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes). I’m waving away Alfie Williams — I don’t like kid actors as a general rule.

Donald Trump talks a tough game, but deep down he’s a fat pussy…a twitching, fluttering. sabre-rattling, falsetto-voiced twinkle toes…and the Iranians know this.

Posted an hour ago (1:45 pm) by N.Y. Times staffers:

Sweltering temps begin today. I love 92 in the shade in the dry lower desert, but not so much in muggy-ass Connecticut or Manhattan.

As a veteran of countless back-and-forths between Fairfield and Westchester counties and NYC-area airports (JFK, LGA, Newark), I’m acutely aware of how agonizing and soul-draining congested highway travel can be (particularly on the 678 through the Bronx and Queens).

Don’t buy any bureaucratic b.s. about the massive JFK reconstruction project proceeding at a reasonable pace — month after month the seeming absence of churning machinery and busy-bee workers by the roadside has been obvious — it’s mostly a slow-motion exercise in urban hellscape obstruction.

Take a train to Manhattan and then grab a Howard Beach-bound A train plus the JFK Air Train (the fare will be cut this summer by 50%!)…only way to travel.

Only in the N.Y. Times could you find a nod to the trans community in a sentence about the growing presence of women within the F1 fanbase.

In an F1: The Movie fan–review piece by Luke Smith and Madeline Coleman (“Fast, Loud, Very Hollywood — But Will Race Fans Love It or Hate It?”), a parenthetical appearing inside the second sentence in paragraph #36 reads as follows: “Around 40 percent of the F1 fanbase identify as women”.

In other words, Smith and Coleman are allowing for the possibility that this particular fanbase is composed of biological women (almost certainly the majority congregation) as well as an unspecified percentage of biomales presenting themselves as women…right?

Paragraph #14, by the way, contains a major spoiler about Damson Idris’s Pearce character.

Almost everything was awful in ‘20, ‘21 and early ‘22…peak wokeism + the pandemic…the dreariest and darkest years of our lives.

One of the lowest, most despairing episodes in my industry-covering life was watching the beyond-awful Union Station Soderbergh Oscars — people still shudder at this memory, an epochal event that convinced the moviegoing public that progressive filmmakers were giving the finger to ticket-buyers …that they were committed to the guilt-tripping, misery-spreading business like never before.

But then three months later (July ‘21) along came David Lowery’s The Green Knight…a dank, sodden enterprise that stood up to the Soderbergh lethargy and said “hold my beer….you don’t know what a misery pit is.” And then Leos Carax’s Annette opened a month later, plunging movie culture into an even blacker realm.

Lo, a swirling devil cloud had descended, and only now can we understand that it was this four-month nightmare (April to August ‘21) that more or less slit the throat of the movie industry…that convinced Joe and Jane Popcorn that modern cinema was up to something menacing and awful and deeply insane.

Posted on 8.19.21…

Like a strange virus I had absorbed but hadn’t yet settled into my system, I could feel my latent loathing for David Lowery‘s The Green Knight early on. I didn’t watch it when it first came out because I “knew” (i.e., strongly sensed) I would hate it.

I finally streamed this fucker late last night, and I felt smothered in thick, swamp-like boredom within seconds. Drugged, oxygen-starved, submerged in medieval muck, and facing a terrible two-hour slog.

I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, “first-rate” creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.

The Green Knight is a sodden medieval dreamscape thing — a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering (not my idea but the film’s) the idea of your own decapitation.

What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…

It’s a kind of Christmas movie or, if you will, about a game of strange beheadings. Dev Patel‘s Gawain is one of the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table — a drinking, whoring fellow who sweats a lot and often smiles when spoken to and regards much of what he sees with his mouth half open.

It must be said that Gawain splashes water onto his face and hair a lot…he’s often dripping.

The film more or less begins with the Green Knight, a intimidating ghostly figure, appearing at King Arthur’s court on Christmas Day and declaring — bear with me here because this makes no sense — that anyone can cut his head off as long as the head-chopper will agree to let his own head be sliced off by the Green Knight a year later, at the Green Chapel.

What kind of blithering moron would say “okay!” to a suggestion this ridiculous?

Why is Patel, the son of British-residing Indian Hindus, playing Gawain, a medieval Englishman with the usual Anglo-Saxon characteristics? You could just as well ask why Patel was cast in the lead role in Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield (’20). Because in today’s realm it’s cooler to embrace “presentism” than to adhere to any sense of general historical reality, or at least the historical reality that filmmakers tended to prefer before anti-white wokester Stalinism became a thing. Call it subversive casting, if you want.

Everything that happens is dream-logical. None of it adds up or leads to anything else. You could claim that Lowery’s film is about character and morality and karma and facing the consequences of one’s own actions, and I would say “okay, sure…if that works for you, fine.”

There’s a talking fox. There are giant bald women seen in the misty distance. Patel’s head explodes in fire at one point…whoa.

Barry Koeghan, an Irish actor with tiny rodent eyes and a deeply annoying swollen nose, plays a scavenging asshole of some kind. Alicia Vikander plays two roles, a commoner with a Jean Seberg-in-Breathless haircut, and a married noblewoman who has sex with Gawain at one point. You’re thinking “gee, she’s bringing Patel to orgasm…am I supposed to give a shit one way or the other?”

DECAPITATION SPOILERS: There are three beheadings in The Green Knight, and a promise of a fourth. The big ugly Green Knight (played by Ralph Ineson) loses his head early on. A ghost character named Winifred (Erin Kellyman) loses hers at the midway point. Patel’s Gawain, the ostensible hero, loses his at the end. And then he wakes up and realizes he’s been dreaming, but then is asked to submit to an actual beheading…this is presented as some sort of satisfying ending.

The finale is a complete failure, a wipe-out. It’s so completely off and miscalculated that it inspires you to mutter “seriously….that‘s the ending?”

Five minutes after The Green Knight began I understood why Average Joes have generally given it poor reviews. It’s obviously a visually inventive, high-style smarthouse thing about ultra-peculiar realms, made by a director who believes in imaginative leaps of fancy and fantasy, but watching it makes you feel fucking awful.

I can’t tell you how depressed I was at the half-hour mark when I realized I had 100 minutes to go.

Film critics generally don’t acknowledge audience miserablism. For most of them visual style is 90% to 95% of the game. If a director shoots a film with a half-mad, child-like sense of indulgence with a persistent visual motif (i.e., everything in The Green Knight is either muted gray or brown or intense green)…bathing the viewer in mood and mystery and moisture (filmmakers like Lowery adore mist, fog, rain, mud, sweat, rivers, streams)…that’s it and all is well.

There are dozens of details I could get into, but I’m not going to because what’s the point?

I had read several reviews, of course, but before watching Lowery’s film I read the Wiki synopsis of the source material, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” a 14th Century epic poem. Right away I was muttering “dear God…no, please.”

I’m completely mystified why British film director Stephen Weeks would make two films based on the Sir Gawain legend — Gawain and the Green Knight (’73) and Sword of the Valiant (’83).

Friendo: “The best reviewed movies of the year so far are The Green Knight, In the Heights and Pig. We are fucked. American cinema is dead.”

The new Bond just has to be British…that’s the main thing. I’m okay with Aaron Pierre, 31, filling the slot. He’s an above-average actor (admired him in Rebel Ridge) with great eyes and a buff bod.

But nobody cares about the Bond franchise, do they? The concept of a stand-alone Bond film has been all but terminated with Amazon intending to strip-mine 007 for all he’s worth.

I think the current was destroyed when (a) Daniel Craig was killed for absolutely no reason, and then (b) the toxic, deeply loathed Jennifer Salke stalled the development process interminably.

I’m not saying we need incontrovertible proof that IndieWire’s cinematic soothsayers are living on a separate rarified planet…I think most of us have absorbed this repeatedly over the years, particularly since Team IndieWire went wacko wokey starting in the late teens….

But if you want proof of this, read no further than their “100 Best Movies of the 2020s” rundown, which posted yesterday (6.16).

I’m not going to nitpick the entire list, and yes, I’m either agreeing or am largely comme ci comme ca with a fair amount of their selections. These guys are nutty but not completely untethered

But at the same time they’re saying with a straight face that Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (which plague-dogged us wih the insufferably sensitive weepy-ass Paul Mescal) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Red Saab (primarily an ode to Parliament cigarettes)…they’re saying these films deserve third- and ninth-place rankings. C’mon!

They’re also declaring that Jordan Peele’s Nope (#12), Jane Campion’s stifled, soul-draining (if visually handsome) The Power of the Dog (#14) , Martin Scorsese’s colossally miscalculated Killers of the Flower Moon (#29), The Daniels’ mostly infuriating Everything Everywhere All At Once (#36), David Lowery’s all-but-unwatchable The Green Knight (#45) and the Wachowski’s 100% unbearable The Matrix Resurrections (#49) deserve special consideration among the top 50 films…lunacy!

They’re also saying that these eight migraine-inducers are better than five incontestably superior releases from the same era…Janicza Bravo’s Zola (#59), Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (#62). Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby (#77) and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things (‘88)..

I’m going to slap together HE’s own roster of the best films from the first half of the ‘20s. Give me a couple of hours.