Jeffrey Wells

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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Over the last few days I’ve been on a Brooke Hayward jag. Okay, a Brooke Hayward-and-Dennis Hopper thing…quite a pairing + the lore of ‘60s Hollywood and Joan Didion-ville…the counter-cultural turnovers, upheavals and whatnot.

This led yesterday to Mike Rozzo’s “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy”, a 2022 book about the fraught but exciting eight-year marriage (‘61 to ‘69) between Hayward, author of 1977’s “Haywire”, one of the better torn-and-frayed Hollywood memoirs, and the eccentric Hopper.

I initially wrote “nutso” to describe the late Easy Rider director and Blue Velvet costar. This might sound unkind but it takes one to know one. Not the druggy stuff, mind, as I never went down that hole. I meant it as a like-minded compliment, actually, because a paragraph in Rozzo’s book about a seminal moment in Hopper’s Kansas childhood reminded me of my own.

I didn’t feel that my childhood was less “real” than the realms I sank into when I began to catch films as a kid, but it was far less attractive. If anything it was too real.

All I wanted in my tweens and teens was to obtain parole from the repressive suburban gulag I’d been raised under and thereafter blend into (taste, know more intimately, in some way contribute to, anything) the extra-level pizazz of movies.

My Hayward dive began with an opening lecture scene in Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (‘73), in which the mid-30ish Hayward, whose ‘60s acting career never took off, asks George C. Scott about governmental dolphin research.

Hayward is one of three female questioners in this scene, but she seems like the most knowledgable and grounded on some level…there’s a whiff of character and conviction in her WASPy features and confident tone of voice…you can feel it. On top of which she’s quite beautiful.

I’ve also been flipping through the almost half-century-old “Haywire”, which digs into Brooke’s Hollywood vs. northeast corridor upbringing and her turbulent young adulthood.

The late Buck Henry, an old friend who wrote the screenplay for The Day of the Dolphin and was probably instrumental in getting Brooke that cameo, wrote a forward intro for a 2010 re-issue of “Haywire”. It ends with this line:

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And Chevy Chase thought so too, according to legend.

“The Giant Garden Slug Blows Eddie Murphy While John Candy Watches”…check.

HE’s GoFundMe reboot reached a comfort–level goal as of late yesterday, and I’m once again thanking those who stepped up…bottom of my heart.

Sam Mendes’ decision to cast four 30-ish (or nudging 30) actors as the 20something Beatles in their mid-to-late-‘60s prime is, for me, a leap too far…28-year-old Harris Dickinson as John Lennon-if-he-was-a-basketball-player, towering over the hawk-nosed, pointy-chin-chinned Paul Mescal, 29, as Paul McCartney…the wicked, warlock-eyed Barry Keoghan, 32, as Ringo Starr, and the fair-skinned, ginger-haired Joseph Quinn**, 31, as the dark-eyed, non-gingered George Harrison…casting calls that seem not just reachy but three-quarters doomed (Dickinson might pan out)…and the four films (one about each Beatle) won’t be released until April ‘28…three years of gestation.

** You know who Quinn closely resembles? Prince Harry of Montecito.

Quinn is going to be as much of a bad-acid-trip George Harrison as the absurdly miscast Mescal is sure to be a weak-tea McCartney, a would-be inhabiting that can’t hope to persuade, much less transcend. (“Hey, Hawk-nose…why don’t we do it in the road?…everyone will be watching us.”). If Quinn had been around in the early ‘70s, he might have been regarded as a poor man’s Ryan O’Neal. Would Stanley Kubrick have even met with him during the Barry Lyndon casting process? Okay, he might have been cast as the younger roadside thief (i.e., the son of Captain Feeney).