Jeffrey Wells

For the last two or three years I’ve only been able to attend the Telluride Film Festival through the grace and charity of Sasha Stone, who’s been renting a large, centrally located three-bedroom condo. I’ve been on the couch, and gratefully so.

Alas, Sasha has decided against attending Telluride next September (she’s miffed about not being invited last year to the Patron’s Brunch) and so I’m out also. Even if I was bringing in a reasonable income the off-the-charts Telluride greed factor would make it impossible to rent on my lonesome.

And so after 14 years of attending glorious, soul-nourishing Telluride (my debut visit was in 2010) I’m planning on attending the Venice Film Festival for the very first time — 7 and 1/2 months hence. 

I’m also half-persuaded that I can’t do Cannes this year. We’ve lost our Old Town, Napoleonic-era, rue Jean Mero apartment and the local greedheads are just as bad as their Telluride counterparts.

I don’t think that early-bird viewings of Paul Thomas Anderson and Terrence Malick’s latest will be worth the pain. I’d still like to attend, of course, but I have no choice but to accept, etc.

Venice won’t be cheap either, of course. I’ll be once again passing the GoFundMe hat. As HE is entirely Patreon-free and wide open now, I’m hoping that the same generous followers who pitched in last year for Cannes ‘24 will repeat the favor. Excepting those whom I wished cancer upon, of course. I understand their reticence.

It appears as if it might make more financial sense to stay in Dorsoduro (my favorite Venice district) and each morning take the vaporetto to the Lido, and the return to Dorsoduro in the mid evening. 

Does anyone know anyone who plays it this way? A freelancer who pays his/her own way and has stayed in the city? I’ve been to Venice six or seven times over the last quarter-century but I’d like to ask them some questions. 

I’m not against staying on the Lido, mind, but it seems a lot pricier.

The Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki-like obliteration in Pacific Palisades over the last five-plus days has been so severe and traumatizing that people are probably emotionally incapable of accepting rational-sounding explanations for the fire-hydrant failures of last Tuesday and Wednesday.

Average Joes (especially the MAGA variety) don’t want to know from calm, plain–spoken assessments. They want to see heads lopped off and bouncing down the courthouse steps, and particularly those belonging to Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass. It ain’t fair and they don’t care.

Meteorologist Jodi Kodesh, however, has offered a simple tutorial that explains what went wrong. It’s not complex rocket science. The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have reported the same observations and conclusions.

What went wrong in the higher Pacific Palisades regions, Kodesh, WaPo and the WSJ say, was the sudden, massive drainage of the lower altitude trunk water line on Tuesday during the daylight hours, which in turn quickly lost pressure and couldn’t re-fill the three higher-elevation reservoirs.

The system simply couldn’t stand up to a maelstrom of this size and strength…the largely unprecedented wind-blown ferocity of the Palisades firestorm.

Even if the upper reservoirs hadn’t been drained the wildfire would have still overwhelmed.

The structure and system in place simply couldn’t stand up, to re-phrase, to the enormity of the fire…to the perfect storm of eight months of remote, bone-dry hill growth that should have been cleared…an overgrown tinderbox environment consumed by a massive inferno that tore through PP last Tuesday, starting in the mid-morning.

It’s also being claimed that there was a crucial six-and-a-half-hour delay last Tuesday on the part of Mayor Bass (who was then in Ghana) and acting mayor Marqueece Harris-Dawson in requesting federal assistance. The request allegedly wasn’t made until Tuesday at 5 pm. I’m not certain how sturdy or reliable this analysis of an alleged dereliction may be.

Then there’s the fire department budget cuts that were approved by Bass, coupled with an apparent administrative dispute between Bass and Fire Dept. chief Kristin Crowley.

…but she can’t hide.

This is exactly how the words have always sounded to me…and how they sounded to me five minutes ago when I listened to Sam and Dave’s r&b classic.

“Comin’ to ya on a death road / Good lovin’ I got a ton-load / and when you get it, you got somethin’ / So don’t worry ‘cause I’m comin’

“I’m a soul man / I’m a soul man / I’m a soul man / I’m a soul man.

“Got what I got the hard way / And I’ll make ya nervous each and every day / So huh-honey, don’t you fret / ‘Cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.“

Posted earlier today on Awards Daily:

Without a permit or even a great deal of preparation, photographer Robert Sebree shot this legendary Sunset Boulevard snap of Farrah Fawcett, 52, on a warm morning in 1999.

What kind of crew did Sebree have? What was Farrah standing on? What painting was it based upon? What kind of stretch wrap? How was it lighted? How long did she pose? Any trouble with gawkers? In a 4.7.14 essay about working with Fawcett, Sebree reveals no technical shooting details at all.

Fawcett passed 10 years later from cancer, aged 62.

Read more

Thursday update: The Sunset fire has been reportedly contained — no spreading into Laurel Canyon or the flats of West Hollywood. Thank goodness.

Last night: I’m on the other side of the country, but it feels as if this effing fire is coming for me.

Earlier this evening I finally watched the new 4K Searchers. No more complaints. Among the most beautiful VistaVision restorations ever created, and certainly equal to the recently released North by Northwest 4K disc. All hail the great Winton C. Hoch. The 70mm projected version I saw last summer at the MoMI in Astoria was nothing compared to this. Wowsah. Yowsah.

Last night at 11:14 pm I wrote the following apoplectic paragraph:

I’ll tell you what happened. Netflix spent and spent and spent some more. A whole lot more. And the Globe voters just kind of folded…whatever.

From Variety’s morning-after-the-Globes-Emilia Perez-embarrassment story by Elsa Keslassy and Alex Ritman:

The 19-word sentence that concludes the very last paragraph of Ernest Hemingway “A Farewell to Arms” is, I’ve always felt, a thing of immaculate beauty. The paragraph that contains it is also phenomenal

Was it because both critics and ticket-buyers have rated Anora much higher than Emilia Perez, and so the Golden Globe journalist voters, unhappy with this disparity, decided among themselves that they had to “correct” these mistaken opinions by putting their GG thumb on the scale?

Does it mean anything to anyone that Anora has a 94% RT critic rating vs. Perez’s 76%? Joe and Jane Popcorn have given Anora a 90% rating while dismissing Perez with a 66% score. Do these assessments mean anything to anyone?

What happened last night was sickening, not just when it cane to Anora vs. Perez but the howling, Psycho-shower-shrieking, dog-barking absurdity of handing three major awards — Best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor — to The Brutalist, Brady Corbet and Adrien Brody, respectively.

Where is the sanity in this? The Brutalist is a shot of arthouse heroin into the forearm. It makes you slumber and sink into your seat…hell, collapse inside. It’s an epic slogathon, a thoughtful downer, a punishment flick, a psychological ordeal-and-a-half if I’ve ever endured one.

Last night Corbet boasted that “nobody was asking for a three-and-half-hour film about a mid-century architect on 70 millimeter.” And that’s still the case!

But after last night’s vote of GG affirmation, we’re all waist-deep in the mud of it…stuck with this great leaden load of big-movie pretentiousness…overture, intermission, a Lawrence of Arabia-type length …a godforsaken behemoth that takes much more than it gives.