Jeffrey Wells

Personal HE plea to Academy members: Don’t follow through with crowning Emilia Perez. Joe and Jane Popcorn hate this film (especially in Mexico!) and you’ll just be spitting in their faces if you give Jacques Audiard’s film a Best Picture Oscar.

How would you process an Audiard/Netflix win if you were among the Rotten Tomatoes naysayers? “Whee, goodie!”? 70% of the mass audience isn’t feeling the Perez love, and your response is going to be…what, “suck on it because we know better?”

Please step outside yourselves and your identity-above-all, “send Donald Trump a message” agenda…cinematic transportation over wokeism…begging on my knees.

1.25.25 update — posted this morning in comment thread:

The idea behind this post is not hate per se. I was mostly okay with Emilia Perez, remember, when I first saw it in Cannes eight months ago, and I don’t hate it now. But it certainly DOES flirt with mediocrity during the second half. And the bottom-line truth is that if not for the trans signpost factor, Perez would simply not be a Best Picture nominee. This is a plea for Academy voters to emerge from the cultural woke cocoon of the past six or seven years, and to finally put aside sexual-identity or gender issues as deciding criteria. Enough with the social justice warrior crap. Please consider voting for the Best Picture nominee that doesn’t do the woke two-step (please give that nagging “revolutionary” ethos a rest) while actually fulfilling and delivering a kind of high on its own emotional and cinematic terms. Which is what Anora, Conclave and A Complete Unknown manage to do. 

Joe and Jane Popcorn voted for Trump in order to get rid of the wokey or at least tone it down. For the love of God, smell the coffee. The woke point has been made, and now it’s time to set that bird free.

Consider the opening paragraph of David Rooney’s Sundance review of Jimpa. It contains a word that gave me pause. Correction — vaguely pissed me off.

Jett Wells’ Best Picture preferences:

HE’s Santa Barbara crib (2.5 thru 2.12).

Temps below 20 degrees make me miserable. They darken my attitude, lead me into feelings of gloom and nihilism. The blacktop roads turn frosty gray at night, and it just makes you feel godawful.

This is weather that could theoretically kill you. At least it’s not windy…small comfort.

I’d rather be bike riding in Key West or, better yet, Turks and Caicos. Or in Dr. No Jamaica, mon. Or in Montserrat.

Herewith is a spirited chat I had with the cooking-with-gas, bell-bottom-wearing, hippie-haired John Carpenter in either late 1979 or very early ‘80 to promote The Fog (Avco Embassy), which opened on 2.1.80.

It should be noted for posterity’s sake that when I recorded this interview at the Sherry Netherland (I’m fairly certain it wasn’t the Carlyle or Waldorf Astoria) that IndieWire’s Anne Thompson, then a PMK publicist, monitored the conversation.

Inspired by my “Oh, My Beloved” riff about Donald Trump summoning the spirit of Laurence Olivier’s “Mahdi”, I watched the generally tolerable, flirting-with-mediocre, Ultra Panavision 70 Khartoum last night.

Basil Dearden’s 1966 film ends with Olivier reacting with anguished disapproval when his triumphant followers, exuberant after the fall of Khartoum and the death of Charlton Heston’s General George “Chinese” Gordon, arrive at his tent with Gordon’s head on a tall pole.

Brief footage of Heston’s head was reportedly shot and included in the film, but an extremely negative audience response reportedly led Khartoum producers to axe the footage in favor of a quick fade-to-black.

It struck me this morning that the head-on-a-spike fate of Thomas More’s (i.e., Paul Scofield’s) severed eyes, ears, mouth, nose and throat in A Man For All Seasons was also a thing that year.

At no other time and in no other films was the fate of a lead character’s head a topic of interest, but it happened twice in ‘66.

Fred Zinnemann’s film ends with narration that says More’s head sat atop a spike on London bridge before his daughter retrieved and buried it. It would have been vulgar for Zinnemann to show a replica of Scofield’s head in any context, of course, but…well, nuff said.

Khartoum premiered on 6.6.66; AMFAS opened on 12.12.66.

Average Joes and Janes hate you for ushering in an age of progressive ideology in movies (now rapidly drawing to a close, thank God)…a social-cultural spasm that destroyed the mystique of transportational cinema, which had sporadically been in relatively good health until ‘17 or thereabouts.

So given this lingering loathing and a belief that H’wood is a crawling hive of woke wackazoids, do you really want to re-enforce that notion by giving the Best Picture Oscar to a mostly mediocre trans musical in order to send a “blow it out your ass” message to Donald Trump? Do you really want to dig into that hole all the deeper?

Remember when ideology wasn’t the Academy’s ne plus ultra…remember when certain movies and performances delivered profoundly or at least assuredly on their own terms (i.e., Gene Hackman’s bravura inhabiting of a racist New York detective in The French Connection, a performance that would be shouted down today by the wokeys)…do you want to continue living in that woke ditch or do you want to move on?

I’m bringing this up because yesterday the HE community didn’t say jack squat about the final paragraph in “Oh, My Beloved,” my response to Donald Trump’s holy-roller inaugural address.

The snowflakes are so tiny they’re barely visible, but there are trillions upon trillions of them. Six to eight inches of accumulation is far from historic, but it’s noteworthy. I love the quiet…the hush that always accompanies a decent blanketing. (Stuart Terrace, West Orange, NJ.)

Friendo: “Jeff, can you explain the All The President’s Men screw-up on that H.R. Haldeman confirmation call? The guy says ‘hang up, right? Got it straight now? Everything okay?’ But after the story blows up Bernstein explains to Ben Bradlee that the guy ‘thought I said hang on when I said hang up’ or some such shit.”

HE reply: “Hoffman/Bernstein says VERY CLEARLY that if the Haldeman story is wrong, the guy he’s talking to will hang up before Hoffman/Bernstein finishes counting to ten. Only a drooling idiot could have misunderstood what the deal was. Hang UP if we’re wrong.”

What’s the basic idea behind Sly Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight serving as Donald Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood?

To try and…what, urge the suppression or perhaps even the eradication of the woke virus? To offer incentives to those looking to make features that aren’t social values tutorials…that don’t try to instruct viewers about the power and the glory of progressivism? That might try and stamp out absurd presentism in historical films? To halt the advancing Best Picture Oscar campaign of Emilia Perez?

I don’t want to sound like a coarse, thick-fingered troglodyte, but I don’t have problems with these goals. No more films like Josie Rourke’s Mary, Queen of Scots? Yes, please, thank you.

Not that any industry hardcore types will offer these old, crusty, well-past-their-prime guys any kind of serious attention or deference. Blah, blah, handshakes, bullshit facetime, whatever. Passing fart fancies in the wind.

“Liking” a film isn’t a matter of feeling good vibes from it. I don’t need a film to soothe or caress me, or to alleviate my fears.

It’s a matter of whether or not a film is bullshitting you or not…whether or not it’s conveying some kind of a full or fair understanding of the basic realities of life…whether or not it’s passing along a certain proverbial truth…whether or not it’s projecting a perceptive, fully considered sense of how things really are out there…kind or radiant or ungracious or brutally unfair…the take-it-or-leave-it rules of the game.

If I know one effing thing in my life right now, it’s that The Brutalist doesn’t do this.

One of my ideas of hell is living in (i.e., being trapped inside of) a world that’s been created, ordered and defined by Brady Corbet.

But hey, it runs 3 hours and 35 minutes and includes an overture and an intermission so it must be on to something…right?