Jeffrey Wells

Rutles Minus The Satire

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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).

Why Wouldn’t “F1” Debut in Cannes Six Weeks Hence?

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It doesn’t make basic sense that Joseph Kosinski ‘s F1 (Warner Bros./Apple), opening worldwide on 6.25, isn’t debuting in Cannes in mid-May.**

Because it apparently won’t be.

Even with Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (Paramount, 5.25) allegedly locked down for a Côte d’Azur premiere, F1 is the hotter, louder ticket. We’re all familiar with the M:I brand…same old bing-bang-boom. Not to mention the eternally stationary Ving Rhames again.

Is there some kind of ironclad rule that within a given Cannes Film Festival there can only be one U.S.-produced blockbuster? Did Paramount and Tom Cruise insist on a no-competition clause or something?

Jordan Ruimy was told a while back that F1 producers “opted instead for a world premiere in Monaco.” Because of the annual Grand Prix, of course. The only problem is that Monaco is a really shitty place for a world premiere. It’s an architecturally ugly, super-corporate city (I was repelled during my last visit) and it attracts the worst (i.e., shallowest) people in the world.

** Patrick Brzeski and Scott Roxborough’s THR prediction piece is two weeks old, granted.

Knowing Maher’s Non-Adoring Views, Trump Is Ambivalent At Best About This Week’s Sitdown

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Orange Mussolini has curiously acquiesced to Kid Rock’s idea of a White House dinner with Bill Maher this week, but he’s clearly uncomfortable with the fact that Maher isn’t a devotional boot–licker.

The meeting wouldn’t have been scheduled in the first place, of course, if Maher hadn’t earned a certain respect from righties for having routinely trashed woke lunatics over the last few years, and yet the authoritarian-in-chief still feels antsy…what a fragile child.

What About Fickle?

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Whimsical is pretty much synonymous with capricious, and post-Days of Heaven Malick has shown himself to be nothing, creatively speaking, if not “given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood and behavior.”

Again — ask Adrien Brody about this. Ask the late Chris Plummer. Ask Geza Rohring, who plays Jesus in Malick’s STILL unfinished The Way of the Wind, which shot principal photography in 2019 and has been subject to Malick’s tossed–salad, elusive–butterfly editing aesthetic (you can’t call it a process) ever since — five and a half years as we speak.

“Sudden and unaccountable changes of mood and behavior” = the man does not know his mind, or is so engrossed in the mystical that there can be no destination. “The farther one travels, the less one knows” — George Harrison, “The Inner Light.”

One could adopt a brusque attitude and conclude that Malick has no sense of decency or fundamental follow-through when it comes to post-production.   How about them apples?

Love & Marriage

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I HATE guys who make a big egoistic show of this…who brazenly perform for the crowd by dropping to their knees in order to propose marriage to their beloved. “Look at what a loving, open-hearted fellow I am! Actually look at the two of us!”

You’re appalling, Monsieur Douchebag, and you don’t even know it.

Madness Spillover

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The title of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (11.7.63) was allegedly finalized early on, but a few working titles were considered before that. One was One Damn Thing After Another.

Kramer’s over-emphatic comedy enjoyed two full weeks of play before JFK’s murder. It nonetheless ended up with $46 million domestic, $60 million worldwide.

This appears to be a possibly fake re-issue one-sheet. Notice the “73” in the lower right-hand corner — that’s a re-issue date.

Santa Rosita was the location of “the big W”.

Mickey Rooney got the short end of the stick here; Buddy Hackett was also made to seem minor. Jonathan Winters, Milton Berle and (fat) Sid Caesar ruled.

I remember a review that questioned the suitability of using super-sized Cinerama as it provided several unwelcome close-ups of its aging cast…pink eyes, sagging cheeks and wrinkled brows.

Episode 6 of “White Lotus” Drops The Ball

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“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting.

I was told the story strands were going to begin to tighten up, but they’re just lying there in repose. Flaccid, lazy.

Two more episodes to go, and if episode 7 is as weak as 6 was tonight, everyone will say the whole thing was a bust.

SPOILERS FOLLOW: Before episode 6 began, series creator Mike White had only three hours to go. It’s obviously time to up the drama and intensify things (David Chase knew how to gradually turn the screws and tighten the strands in The Sopranos, not to mention deliver occasional dramatic crescendos) and he’s basically pissing away the time. In episode 6 White essentially says one thing: “I’ll deal with all this stuff later.”

When is Jason Isaacs going to finally DO something? Or at least BLURT SOMETHING OUT? His character is a terminally boring fraidy cat, enveloped in silent anguish, hopelessly inarticulate, buried in self-loathing. I’ve been watching this shallow-ass guy lie to his family as he shudders and trembles inside for five episodes now.

All White does is (a) show us two fatalistic shooting fantasies (it was interesting that he imagined killing Parker Posey before shooting himself) and (b) asks the spiritual guru guy what it’s like to die, and is curiously moved by the Buddhist cliche about life being a fountain and we’re all drops of water, etc. Who hasn’t heard that one?

It’s actually a line from a joke I heard back in the ‘70s. A spiritual seeker endures a long and arduous journey in trying to find the hallowed and supreme guru and thereby divine the essential secret of life, and when he finally finds him is told “my son, life is a fountain.” The seeker is stunned, outraged. “That’s IT?”, he barks at the guru. “I’ve spent months trying to find you, enduring all kinds of pain, danger, exhaustion and hardship, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?” Supreme guru, taken aback: “You mean life ain’t a fountain?”

And Parker Posey has been married to Isaacs for…what, 25 or 30 years and she can’t intuit that he’s seriously melting down and going to hell inside over something very scary? She can’t confront him about stealing her pills? She can’t put two and two together and deduce that something has gone horribly wrong with his investment portfolio? All she can say to Isaacs over and over is “what’s going on?” How many times has she fucking asked him that? A financial shark or hotshot of some kind, Isaacs has presumably been up to some sketchy, slippery stuff and knows, being the cagey type, that the regulatory authorities might conceivably get wind of this or that financial crime, and he hasn’t figured ways of hiding assets and socking away cash in hidden foreign bank accounts on a just-in-case basis?

What’s he looking at…several months or a year or two in a country-club prison? And he can’t get started again after serving his term? He doesn’t have friends and allies who might rally round and help him out? All he can do is think about killing himself because his wife is a fragile, drug-addled zombie? Pathetic.

There’s no insight or articulation or imagination in Isaacs’ character. His frozen-in-fear, “I can’t move or even breathe” psychology is dramatically suffocating, and hanging out with this guy is driving me nuts. I’ve really and truly run out of patience.

No Questions Allowed During “Being Maria” Quad Discussion

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Following Thursday evening’s 7:15 pm screening of Jessica Palud’s Being Maria at the Quad, HE was 100% prepared to get into the whole Being Maria vs. Last Tango in Paris vs. Bernardo Bertolucci accuracy dispute.

I was cranked and ready to go into my shpiel about the content of the original Last Tango shooting script and how a sizable portion of the sexual assault scene was on the page, etc.

But the ginger-haired moderator of the Being Maria discussion restricted participation to herself, costar Matt Dillon (who plays Marlon Brando) and producer Marielle Digou. No questions from the schmoes!

After it ended I caught up with the moderator (didn’t catch her name) and asked why questions weren’t permitted. “I don’t know,” she replied, adding “Are you going to blog about this?” I wasn’t sure what she meant but I said, “I already have.”

I later told her about the original shooting draft, etc. She said she’s also read the original Tango script but she was mistaken — she’s actually read a published dialogue transcript of the 1972 film.

I also buttonholed Dillon, who was loose and cool, and asked if he had read the original script and he said nope. I explained about the sexual assault scene, etc. I also told him I thought his Brando performance was first-rate, which it is.

I recorded almost everything. I’ll upload the mp3 when I get around to it. Probably late Friday.

Gyllenhaal’s “Bride” Drop-Kicked Into 3.6.26 Release

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Earlier this month Jeff Sneider passed along loose talk about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride (Warner Bros., 9.26.25), a woke-feminist re-imagining of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (‘35). And with musical interludes!

Sneider had heard the film is “pretty weird.” He might have added “too weird for the room” — a judgment indicated by WB distribution having given The Bride a new release date — 3.6.26.