Jeffrey Wells

I’m fairly certain this famous Pauline Kael quote is from her New Yorker review of Barry Levinson’s Diner (‘82), although it could’ve been sparked by a scene in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (‘81) in which Rourke, initially glimpsed lip-synching to Bob Seger’s “Feel Like A Number”, played a soft-voiced, settled-down felon who’d begun to think twice about…everything.

Rourke seemed to be in a state of charmed, almost magical ascendancy back then. I could go on and on about what happened or didn’t happen, but the glow had begun to fade by the late ‘80s. His last truly alluring performance that decade was in Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (‘87). Then came the early ’90s and boxing.

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Five months after THR published Rebecca Keegan’s 8.14.24 hit piece on Sasha Stone, which I described and commented on the very same day, Racket News’ respected reporter Matt Taibbi has jumped into the fray. Which is fine — better late than never.

I’m not going to recap Taibbi’s article chapter and verse, but he covers the whole messy affair, deftly and dryly and without using the terms “woke Stasi” or “woke terror” or anything in that general realm.

He basically trashes Keegan and her THR bosses for behaving like cloddish dickhead assassins…for whacking Sasha like some dude on The Sopranos by disingenuously pretending to take her facetious “white power!” tweet seriously, and then by calling around and basically poisoning her brand among distributors and award-season marketers and ad-buyers, and essentially assuring that her $200K annual income would be whittled down to almost nothing.

Taibbi:

Stone:

Here’s some of what I posted on 8.14.24:

…and which is mercifully drawing to a close as we speak. Again, better late than never.

Does anyone remember the infuriating 1970 Bob Dylan album, “Self Portrait”?

For me the loathing began with the album cover — Dylan’s grotesque, flagrantly crude painting of his face. That ridiculous nose, which looked like a moldy banana that had been run over by a car, and those cherry-red “Clutch Cargo” lips. You just knew the album would try your patience at the very least.

From “Ten Times Bob Dylan Was The Most Insufferable Man in Rock”, a 1.9.25 Telegraph article by James Hall:

From “Self Portrait” Wiki page:

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: