Jeffrey Wells

Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi was murdered on 10.2.18 by agents of the Saudi government at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman..fact, period, end of story.

Imagine you’re one of the 13 Gatecrashers, trying to decide which Best Picture contenders deserve this or that proper ranking.

You understand that despite an entrenched argument against Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value being favored because only one foreign-language feature (i.e., Parasite) can be a hot Oscar ticket in our current decade, you understand deep down that there’s a right thing to do.

Imagine in the same way that the late John Lennon imagined a brotherhood of man over a half-century ago…

Imagine calculating that the Samuel Z. Arkoff-level Sinners and the agreeable but low-Metacritic–rated and nothing-to-really-write-home-about Wicked: For Good are more likely to win the Best Picture trophy than Trier’s obviously superior and sublimely performed family drama…

Imagine the deep-down contempt and loathing you need to feel for Academy members to honestly suspect that they’ll be sufficiently coarse and primitive-minded to place Ryan Coogler’s drooling, racially-stamped musical vampire film and Jon M. Chu’s eye-filling musical finale to 2024’s Wicked higher in your Gatecrasher ballot…

Imagine this kind of Jean-Luc Godard-level contempt surging through your veins.

Yesterday Variety’s Zack Sharf, an adamant Stalinist wokester, once again showed his colors by placing scare quotes around a four-letter word that (a) begins with “w” and (b) alludes to a kind of hyper-judgmental progressive leftism that is closely associated with cancel culture.

Sharf:

HE-posted in 2021:

Variety’s Peter Debruge rarely lays it in the line —his deft phrasings often seem to skirt or hint at his actual, true-blue reactions —.but his real feelings about Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good are evident in the first paragraph of his 11.18 review, as well as in the final one.

It’s not exactly a rave when you say that a film prompts you to think “whew, he didn’t blow it!”

At the very end Debruge says that most of the film is generated by and represented by Hollywood’s “apex of artificiality…for better or worse.” Isn’t that a bit like a dude telling his girlfriend that while she’s nominally pretty, much of her attractiveness is due to expensive, artfully applied make-up…”for better or worse”?

This is not an expression of wondrous rapturous delight!

It’s generally accepted that Pope Leo is a savvy, intelligent, well-educated fellow who’s not only been around but knows the spiritual ins and outs of transcendent cinema. This is partially indicated by Leo calling Ordinary People one of his four all-time faves. But including The Sound of Music and Life Is Beautiful in this quartet…uhm, sorry but nope.

HAL 9000 response: “Stop, Leo. Will you stop, Leo? Stop, will you?”

But at least Leo understands and embraces the idea of movie plexes existing, after a fashion, as debauched churches…once-holy places of occasional spiritual contemplation .

Sexy, stand-alone movie theaters are, of course, nonexistent these days…existing only in boomer and GenX memory banks…once regarded in some quarters as lights-out havens for spiritual contemplation, but now mostly degraded into gladiator arenas. People used to sit in single-screen movie theatres for 95, 105 or 115 minutes or longer and actually pay attention for the most part!

Now the only way to savor really good films in a theatrical environment with Pope Leo types…people who ‘get’ it and love the worshipful aspect, that is…the only way to sample this kind of secular high is to (a) attend an upscale film festival (Venice, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Berlin, New York, AFI Fest in Los Angeles, Sundance, Savannah) or (b) catch films at smarthouse cinemas in big cities.

The church thing was killed by (a) coarse, ball-scratching, brain-fart audiences, (b) elite Hollywood wokethink propaganda movies (2017 to 2024) that all but smothered the art of cinema itself, (c) Millennial and Zoomer couch potatoes submitting to streaming feeds, (d) AMC theatres showing 20 to 25 minutes of trailers before each and every feature, and (e) old-fart GenXers and geriatric boomers who submitted to understandable pandemic terror five and two-thirds years ago, but who will never, ever return en masse due to (a), (b), (c) and (d) plus lingering squeamishness.

That older married woman I spoke to a few weeks ago who’d never even heard of Anora…good God.

Leo again…

Repeating: The art of cinema and the faith of cinematic churches is alive and well if (a) you can attend the above-named major film festivals or (b) if you restrict yourself to connoisseur movie houses (Film Forum, New Beverly, Vista, etc.) and upscale, movie-friendly museum forums like MOMA, LAFCA, London’s Princess Anne, etc.

Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar’s Train Dreams (Netflix, 11.21) is a handsome, inoffensive spiritual snore of a period eye–bath film.

I sat there like a sack of Idaho potatoes in my IFC Center seat. Not bored but waiting for some sort of narrative edge or obsessive psychology or story tension angle (like the “dirt-poor scruffs hustling a clueless rich guy” scheme in Days of Heaven) to manifest. But nothing happens. Pretty to look at, sure, but what’s that?

I began my viewing as a human being of flesh, blood and bone, but by the time Train Dreams had finished with me I had gradually dissolved into a bowl of soggy, half-warm granola. I didn’t dislike watching it — fine, fine, plodding along — but at the same time I was feeling more and more like 2001’s HAL as Dave Bowman disengaged his logic and memory terminals.

I knew Train Dreams would just shuffle and chop and saw and do the old beast-of-burden thing as it follows the early 20th Century logging life of Joel Edgerton’s Robert Grainier as he submits to a relentlessly exhausting, back-breaking, year-in-and-year-out regimen that will shorten his life and cut him zero breaks as he grows older and older and just mutters and putters and ponders…all of it happening in good old Idaho and the generally splendorific Pacific Northwest region…a life that guarantees black gunk under your fingernails and includes unfortunate brushes with sudden violence and racist ugliness and offers random samplings of shit–sandwich fate…a life that fills Robert’s nostrils with pine-needle and wood-chip scents and gives him eyeball orgasms on a daily basis but to what fucking end, bruh?

The truth is that I know a whole lot more about this naturalistic realm than wussy, flabby-bellied film critics because I used to work as a tree-climbing, ornamental-pruning, rope-carrying, spike-wearing, pole saw- and chainsaw-wielding tree surgeon, and that work is solely for young strapping guys, lemme tell ya, as it gradually wears you down and kills your spirit as you get into your 30s and certainly your 40s.

Plus poor Grainier is restricted to axes and hand saws for most of the film (far more grueling than working with chain saws), and it’s sorta kinda like watching a not-bright-enough doomed guy commit slow suicide. You really, really don’t want to do this shit for a living…trust me.

Plus Robert is far too lucky with women, especially for a bearded mook (he’s no Gary Cooper) with zero education and without much access to bar soap or deodorant or dabbings of Aqua Velva.

First he lucks into a loving marriage with Felicity Jones’ Gladys (an actress-pretty buttercup, she pretty much drops into his lap), and a daughter soon follows. Then shit happens (no spoilers) but fortune again smiles as Robert slides into a nice, easygoing thing with dishy, 40ish Kerry Condon. And then a feral woman who may be his long-lost daughter turns up, and she’s rather pretty also.

Where are the homely women with disagreeable personalities and fried-egg breasts and feet badly in need of a pedicure? Robert is two or three steps removed from being a well-behaved gorilla, and yet he’s basically a young Errol Flynn…a babe magnet. Why? Does he give good cunnilingus or something? Being an uneducated logger of few words, does he even know what giving good head is, or what it can amount to?

Oh, and that “please see this on a big movie screen because you won’t get the full effect watching it on Netflix in your living room”? Bad advice because there’s no understanding at least half if not two-thirds of the dialogue (I heard Jones say “saw mill” to Edgerton but that was about it), and so you kinda need those Netflix subtitles.

Am I saying “don’t watch this”? No — it’s a gently touching, mildly engaging film here and there. It never quite bores, but it’s also nothing to jump up and down about. I’ll take Jeremiah Johnson over Train Dreams any day of the week.

Posted on 1.31.20:

To go by frame captures provided by DVD Beaver’s Gary W. Tooze, the Criterion teal monsters are back, and this time they’ve desecrated Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Teorema.

Once again, natural or subdued blues have apparently been rendered with a garish teal-green tint. Look at the images. A year and a half ago I asked Tooze if there might be something off about the color tuning on his 4K Bluray players or 4K TV, and his emphatic reply was “I’ve been doing this 18 years, and it’s not me.”

So what is wrong with Criterion? This is vandalism, plain and simple. This is organizational derangement. This has happened three times previously with teal-tinted Blurays of John Schlesinger‘s Midnight Cowboy, Ron Shelton‘s Bull Durham and Brian DePalma‘s Sisters. And nobody has complained except for Tooze (half-heartedly), myself and a handful of thread commenters. And now Teorema.

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Early this afternoon Howard Hawks and I saw Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet together at the AMC Lincoln Square. It’s a slow, grim sit, all right…yes, it’s fair to call most of it “rural, less-than-hygienic Elizabethan misery porn”…but lo and behold the Globe Theatre performance finale turns on the feeling.

I actually began to melt, to be honest, and I sensed that hard-nosed Hawks was in a similar emotional place. When a powerful scene gets to you there’s no mistaking the effect. Your eyes slightly water, your throat tightens.

Especially when Jessie Buckley’s Agnes and several other serf-level patrons (i.e., huddled in the orchestra pit) offer gestures of compassion to a dying on-stage Hamlet (Noah Jupe). Yes, Zhao is looking to jerk our emotional chains, but it works. Jupe sells it and Buckley grand-slams it.

Buckley has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag…period, no contest, done.

But Lordy, what a glum, boring, miserable, mostly unsanitary, toil-and-trouble life everyone lived in 15th Century Stratford. Did anyone ever take hot baths? You can almost smell the body odor. I respect the grimy, sweaty, greasy-haired realism that Zhao was determined to convey, but my God…did the serfs have any kind of soap back then?

Friendo #1: “Buckley absolutely deserves the Oscar. Her name is already engraved. The Globe climax is far and away the best ending out of any movie this year. But does a great ending make a great movie?”

HE reply: “Honestly? I think the misery stuff is overbaked. It’s such a grim, grimey and anguished slog before that Globe theatre finale.”

Hawks to HE, Friendo #1: “It doesn’t have three great scenes and no bad ones. It has one great finale while Sentimental Value has at least three great scenes, if not four or five.”

Friendo #2: “The Globe theatre Hamlet sequence is beyond preposterous, but if you close your eyes and pretend that you know nothing about Hamlet, yes, it works in a rather fake but well-staged ‘Will showed his love and grief through his art!” Pavlovian tearjerker way.

“And yes, the Best Actress Oscar race is over.”

And here’s why: The trailer offers a moment when a young Japanese girl (Shannon Mahina Gorman) not only overcomes her initial discomfort with her pretend daddy (Brendan Fraser) but rests her head on his shoulder. And then Fraser makes a typical actor’s mistake by looking at Gorman. I hate “looks” in tender scenes of this sort.

Let it in and feel it deep down, of course, but don’t fucking act it.

Sentimental Value has no emotional actorish “looks” at all. Every moment, every conveyance feels steady and bottom-line real.

The snarky, morally reactive, curiously wild comment deluge in response to Scott Lemieux’s “The Inevitable Rehabilitation of Livvy”, an 11.15 riff about Jacob Bernstein’s N.Y. Times profile of Olivia Nuzzi, is one for the ages. Wowsah! Yowsah! The site is lawyersgunsmoneyblog.

Lemieux describes the Bernstein piece as a “horny profile,” and that kicks it off. 340 comments as of 5:30 am eastern, and a fair-sized percentage are (take your pick) pithy, nauseated (as opposed to nauseating), hilarious, raw, tasty, sobering and at times head-turning.

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And neither have I. So could those who’ve seen it please inform whether or not it has (a) three great scenes and (b) no bad ones? Please. Thanks.

I’ve been waiting for many weeks to dive into Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (Focus Features, 11.26), and tomorrow oh dear Lordy that climactic encounter will finally occur. Sunday, 11.16 at 1pm. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, for it may toll for thee.

Is it, in fact, a fair or at least a semi-justified thing to apply “porn” terms (trauma, grief, misery) to this Elizabethan tale of the troubled marriage between William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway (Jessie Buckley)? That is the question, oh my knaves.

Until HE has really and fully settled into Hamnet, this issue can never be truly clarified.

That said, I will not be approaching Hamnet with an attitude. When entering a theatre I am always open to a transcendent experience.

Tomorrow afternoon’s screening is important. The fate and the tilt of the 2025/‘26 Best Picture Oscar race will be affected one way or the other. On the face of it I’m more into the hypothetical fantasy of Hamnet beating the agitproppy One Battle After Another than vice versa.

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