Jeffrey Wells

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.

…who was born exactly 100 years and one day ago.

I know which Steiger performances I’m expected to praise, of course. On The Waterfront’s Charlie, the original lonely butcher in Delbert Mann’s televised Marty, Sergio Leone’s Duck, You Sucker, Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, the cultured serial killer in No Way To Treat A Lady (my second favorite), and, of course, the Dr. Pepper-sipping bohunk sheriff in Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night.

And yet the Steiger performance that always comes to mind first and foremost is the cynical, perverse, sophisticated and ruthless Victor Kamarovsky in David Lean’s Dr. Zhivago.

I chatted with Steiger during a press schmooze at the ‘97 Montreal Film Festival (late August). A man of vague sorrow, unassuming, meditative, dressed in black. The death of Princess Diana (8.31.97) so upset Steiger that he got up and delivered an impromptu scolding that night about the motorbike paparazzi who had chased her and Dodi Fayed. Hey, man, don’t look at me…I’m Otis Ferguson with a touch of Neal Casady.

Here’s a Joe Leydon tribute, just posted.

The devastating news about Nicky Katt’s suicide broke earlier today. Katt’s last professional gig was in 2018. Terribly sad.

A person who doesn’t love dogs or cats has, I’m certain, something missing inside. An absence of compassion, warmth, empathy. And that’s an Orange Plague thing.

During last night’s “book report” about his 150-minute dinner and White House tour with Donald Trump on Monday, 3.31, Bill Maher quoted the 47th president as saying that “a lot of the presidents had dogs for political purposes.” Maher said, a tiny bit testily, “No, people love dogs…that’s what that is.” And Donald Trump replied, “Yeah, okay, that’s true.”

The real Donald Trump, who is undoubtedly a sociopath and a morbid narcissist, is the guy who’s never had a dog (or, as far as I know, a cat) and suspects that certain dog-owning presidents were putting on a show.

The sociopathic Trump, the one who performs at the drop of a hat and plays people for his own gain (a trait shared by 97% of film industry types and even, truth be told, myself from time to time) was the “yeah, okay, that’s true” guy.

Maher’s book report was plain and straight as far as it went, but deep down this half-Irish, half-Jewish dude from a middle-class upbringing in northern New Jersey had to feel flattered and turned on by being respectfully received and treated obligingly by a White House occupant.

And yet he surely understands that Trump was playing him that night (just as Maher himself, a pothead charmer and a sharp, moderate-mannered politician in his own way, was surely playing Trump for his own gain), and that Trump wanted Maher to pass along the “hey, he plays a MAGA tyrant on camera and during contentious press interviews, but he was a decent, occasionally chuckling guy and a gracious host with me” thing. And he got that last night.

We’re all adults on this forum, and are generally well educated so I don’t need to post boilerplate definitions of sociopathic behavior, especially as it concerns high achieving types.

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