Jeffrey Wells

Director Magggie Gyllenhaal and actor Jessie Buckley finished The Bride! (Warner Bros., 3.6), a social-justice re-imagining of The Bride of Frankenstein which began filming in March 2024.

Soon after wrapping Buckley flew to England to begin work on Hamnet, which began lensing in July 2024 (London, Herefordshire and the village of Weobley).

Gyllenhaal’s horror musical-slash-revenge saga takes place in 1930s Chicago but was shot in New York City.

The Bride! was originally set to open on 9.26.25 and then 10.3.25, but then Warner Bros. distribution apparently freaked and bumped it into a 3.6.26 opening.

The Bride! will probably be applauded by feminist wokey lah-lahs, but it’s obviously going to tank theatrically as far as Joe and Jane Popcorn are concerned. That spilled-inkwell tattoo on Buckley’s right cheek…nuff said.

Will HE’s Kristi Coulter bend over backwards to praise it, or will she bring out the tough love?

Read more

I always avoided the 42nd Street grindhouses like the plague.

In my mid teens I would grab a Westfield-to-Port Authority bus on Saturday mornings and then roam around Times Square and maybe catch an afternoon show, but I almost always restricted myself to the first-rate, reserved-seat houses — Criterion, Loews State, Rivoli, Capitol, DeMille, Warner.

Okay, except for now-and-then visits to the Paramount, Astor and Victoria, which were regular popular-price theatres.

When I look at the grindhouse marquees I think mostly of older gay guys accidentally bumping into me and copping a feel.

If she’s still with us, the blonde in John Lennon’s arms is probably around 80, give or take. If Mark David Chapman hadn’t come along, Lennon would be 85 today.

Notice the almost total lack of similarity between the very young Paul McCartney (born in June 1942, 22 when this shot was snapped in March ’65) and the about-to-turn-30 Paul Mescal, who has a hawk nose, a pointy chin and tufts of gray in his hair.

The Marietta hotel (Ringstrasse 8, Obertauern, Austria) is still a going concern, although it’s now called [PLACES] Obertauern by Valamar.

John Lennon quotes from his 12.70 Rolling Stone interview, eight months after the Beatles broke up:

“The circle around the band was a portable Rome of money, sex and drugs…when we hit a city we really hit it, and everyone wanted in.

“Don’t take away our portable Rome, where we can all have our houses and our cars, our lovers and our wives, and our office girls and parties and drink and drugs.”

“If we couldn’t land groupies, we hired whores…whatever was going.

“There were photos of me crawling round on my knees coming out of whorehouses in Amsterdam with people saying ‘good morning, John.'”

Read more

Written this morning: I haven’t yet seen The Rip (Netflix, 1.16), but it’s certainly interesting that topliner and co-producer Ben Affleck costarred a few years ago in a vaguely similar action thriller — J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier.

Basic-concept-wise, Triple Frontier is fundamentally The Rip’s older, south-of-the-border brother — struggling working-class, loaded-for-bear professionals who stumble upon a huge pile of criminal cash that’s been stashed in a home.

This in itself is quite striking.

HE was a huge instant fan of Triple Frontier, a Netflix show which opened in March 2019. Since then I’ve re-watched it a good five or six times.

Read more

A 1.14.26 Pamela McLintock THR story says that Marty Supreme–ola has earned more domestic coin than One Battle After Another.

It’s also on track to beat the b.o. total of Everything Everywhere All At Once, she reports.

Marty Supreme has shattered one record after another since opening over the holidays. Its latest box office milestone came Tuesday when it passed Leonardo DiCaprio’s rival Oscar contender One Battle After Another to end the day with an estimated cume of $72.27 million, according to A24.

“From director Paul Thomas Anderson and Warner Bros., One Battle After Another has earned slightly north of $71.6 million to date domestically (unlike Marty, it’s already playing in the home as its theatrical run winds down.) Internationally, One Battle is still far ahead, earning $154.5 million at the foreign box office for a domestic total of $206.1 million.

“But Marty Supreme is only now beginning to roll out in earnest overseas, where it has earned nearly $10 million to date from just a few markets, including a best-ever showing in the U.K. for an A24 pic with north of $8.4 million. Based on early returns, box office experts believe Marty Supreme could do substantial business overseas and end up north of $170 million to $180 million globally, if not higher.

“And it is now just days away from overtaking Oscar best-picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once ($77.2 million) to rank as A24’s top-grossing film domestically of all time. Marty will also become Chalamet’s top-grossing original film this weekend at the global box office when passing up last year’s Oscar contender A Complete Unknown, which grossed $75 million in North America (the Bob Dylan biopic’s global total was $140.4 million).”

Who’s the actor who played the bald moustache Globe Motors salesman in “Everybody Hurts“, the 45th episode of The Sopranos?

The salesman who tries to interest James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano in a Mercedes, I mean, but who quickly jettisons this idea when Tony inquires about Annabella Sciorra‘s Gloria Trillo. The salesman gives Tony the lowdown — i.e., that Trillo, a former Globe salesperson, is not only deceased but by her own hand.

I’m asking because he’s terrific, this guy. A gravelly New Jersey voice, plain-spoken but a bit sleazy, and yet nakedly honest as far as it goes. And you can tell at the end of the scene that he knows Tony was somehow involved with Gloria.

Directed by Steve Buscemi and written by Michael Imperioli, “Hurts” aired on 10.20.02.

I haven’t yet seen Joe Carnahan, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s The Rip (Netflix, 1.16), but some snarky comment-threader who’s apparently seen it…he/she wrote this morning that it’s okay but no great shakes…a morally conflicted, slightly-better-than-generic programmer.

I’m tapping this out from memory as I can’t find the URL, but the guy basically said that The Rip is “intriguing at first but soon devolves into a generic Netflix thriller, somewhat in the vein of the last Artists Equity boilerplate crime flick, The Instigators.”

The problem with that dismissive remark was that the latter film, produced by Damon and Affleck’s Artists Equity and streamed by Apple, was and is a totally first–rate stand–alone feature.

The comment-threader was wrong, make no mistake, because The Instigators, a downbeat Boston noir comedy, is no boilerplate ho–hummer! On 8.18.24 I called it “a true American original —- The Friends of Eddie Coyle meets deadpan screwball fatalism.”

The only thing that doesn’t work about The Instigators, I said, is the humdrum title. If it was my show I’d have called it I’ve Been Waiting All My Life To Fuck Up Like This — yes, a line stolen from Karel Reisz and Robert Stone‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain? (’78).

Essence of my review: “Despite the downish tone of this heist-gone-wrong ensemble chase thriller, it’s fundamentally a low-key noir comedy…sardonic sarcasm meets ‘fuck our lousy luck and Jesus, have we fucked things up or what?’ meets a kind of loser Keystone Cops mentality.

“It’s basically about the oafish shenanigans of a squad of half-assed, not-smart-enough but not altogether disreputable guys, principally played by Damon (who produced through Artists Equity) and Casey Affleck (who co-wrote the script with Chuck Maclean). Their performances are sweet, sublime, spot-on.

“I was truly delighted by this existential crime sitcom, which is darkly hilarious without ever quite announcing that it’s a hah–hah ‘comedy‘. It’s certainly too smart and cool for the idiots out there who hate the idea of mixing humor and loser-stamped noir. It almost delivers the same kind of tonal balancing act that Pulp Fiction was about.

“And the supporting cast is aces — Hong Chau, Paul Walter Hauser, Michael Stuhlbarg, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones, Jack Harlow, etc.”

…for being a malevolent, homophobic, old-school, white-guy oppressor and a general all-around pig. Because that’s what woke Zoomer kids do. Bring the whip! Apply the lash!

No, I haven’t seen The Rip yet.

Tuesday, 1.13, 2:15 pm: Between public GoFundMe and private Venmo, the Cannes/Venice campaign has raised $3000 after four days…certainly a good start. That’s only about 40% of the target goal ($8K), and yet the pace of accumulation feels…well, a wee bit sluggish.

True, there’s plenty of time to get there — 2026 has barely begun — but I’d ideally like to see this campaign come to a happy conclusion by, say, this time next month, or certainly by March 1st.  (Wouldn’t you if you were in my position?)

I’m looking to raise $4K per festival or $8K total. Rent, air fare, train fare, low-rent meals, cappucinos, baguettes, etc.

Please remember that I’m not “begging” for dough, as a few haters have claimed. I’m simply attempting to attract donations in a different, far less draining manner than the monthly method used by other webzines and columnists. I’m just asking for a one-off gimmee of $25 or $50 and whatever feels right. HE stopped paywalling this site a couple of years ago, and so the regularly refreshed content is entirely free and wide open, and this — this! — is the only pitch I’m making.

I’ve shed buckets of spiritual blood for this site over the last 21 and 1/2 years. Buckets.

Again, $25 or $50…. whatever’s affordable. Oh, and if you’d rather keep your donation anonymous, please send it to my Venmo account — @gruver56.

Special offer to haters: No name-brand Hollywood columnist has had more darts, steak knives and horse manure flung in his/her direction over the last eight years or so. (Except for poor Sasha Stone — she’s been taking it in the neck since the summer of ’24.)  I’ve been routinely shot with thousands upon thousands of sharp arrows by woke fanatics, and boy, do they lay it on! If there are such places as heaven and hell, the HE haters, trust me, will be roasting on a spit in the immediate wake of their demise. This, therefore, is their chance to free their souls. One decent donation and I, for what it’s worth, will offer a measure of charitable forgiveness in the usual…uhm, saintly, turn-the-other-cheek way. The haters may roast anyway because of other (many?) transgressions, but HE-wise their consciences will be clean.