Jeffrey Wells

Putting Out “Fires” Is Default Response to Any Workplace Dispute or Complaint

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And the key strategy after dousing any workplace fire is to make certain that the complaints in question do not re-occur. That means tone it down and leave it there.

During the 2023 and early ‘24 filming of It Ends With Us, Blake Lively voiced complaints about director and costar Justin Baldoni, who had optioned Colleen Hoover’s source novel for adaptation in 2019, and producer Jamey Heath.

They had behaved in a leering, overly familiar manner, Lively said, which she found sexually intimidating.

But things cooled down after the issues were aired mid-stream and protections were enacted. A 12.21.24 N.Y. Times story about a legal complaint filed by Lively last Friday reports the following:

The current question is therefore obvious as well as perplexing.

Instead of chilling or at least turning down the gas, Baldoni began acting aggressively last summer as It Ends With Us neared its 8.6.24 release.

Perhaps because Lively had challenged his directorial authority by creating an alternate cut that was approved for release, Baldoni decided to go feral by hiring a p.r. crisis firm in order to diminish her reputation.

Why start another fire? Why not just leave well enough alone and move on to the next project? What a mystifying call. Now Baldoni is re-facing the same bad-behavior complaints, and possibly a Lively lawsuit to come.

What is the lesson here? Sexually icky or insinuating behavior during filming is never cool? Or never fuck with the willful Blake Lively and her aggressively protective husband Ryan Reynolds? Or a combination of the two?

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Say What?

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New York City isn’t about beauty. Never has been. Some nabes are aesthetically pleasing, of course, and the echo of history is unmistakable all over but NYC can’t hold a visual candle to Paris, Rome, Bern, Prague, Barcelona, Marrakech, London, Zurich, etc.

NYC is about the power and the glory…it’s about the bolt and the buzz and the very best (okay, hungriest) people clashing and harmonizing…a chorus congregated, the music of activity…the commerce and the juice and lots and lots of mad money, etc.

Impulse To Avoid

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…I Saw The TV Glow has been strong within me since it opened last May. Egg-crack, transgender, persistence of “Pink Opaque”, bury me alive, Tara and Isabel, Midnight Realm…later.

Friendo: “A middling, awkward, tiresome movie. That anyone could actually think it’s good is a sign of liquified brain matter leaking out of woke people’s ears.”

Slick, Well-Produced “Wicked” Is, At Root, Social Propaganda

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I’ve acknowledged from the get-go that the lively and engaging Wicked has been very efficiently produced, shot, performed, and choreographed. It is also a vessel of assertive feminist propaganda (i.e., social image enhancement)

There’s a massive, alternate-universe disconnect, of course, between Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West and Cynthia Erivo’s misunderstood Elphaba, but that’s part and parcel of the new (21st Century) feminist mythology.

Throughout the 20th Century American culture had the WWotW all wrong, Wicked is saying. This has been especially true since the redefining of female perspective and identity by the #MeToo revolution of 2017.

The demonic cliche of wicked witches goes way back, of course. It probably originated with the Brothers Grimm and had certainly been intensified by the Salem witch hysteria of the 17th Century. It was then furthered by Frank L. Baum’s fabled, written-for-children fantasies and then by the MGM dream factory of 1938 and ‘39 and the resultant impression of the mean, shrewish, Victorian-minded Almira Gulch.

Either you’ve been fed this crudely condemning concept (boomers and GenXers grew up with it) or you haven’t been.

21st Century mythology has reversed this, of course. Spirited notions of feminine self-empowerment in response to entrenched and oppressive male sexism is the only allowable narrative these days — obviously a much more positive and socially constructive thing than the old Almira Gulch model.

Seconds

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I expect A Complete Unknown to at least hold its own and perhaps even improve slightly. I already know, of course, what’s wrong with it so there won’t be any unexpected potholes.

Bad People

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It would’ve been one thing if my Dribble Dream ball (which cost $47 plus shipping and taxes) was in the States and slowly making its way. That’s life — you can’t always get what you want.

But I hit the roof yesterday when a tracking report said my package was still in effing China…CHINA!

Hiding In The Vaults?

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I have no problem with the idea of never, ever seeing the missing gas chamber finale from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (‘44).

Because the finale that Wilder ultimately went with (i.e., Edward G. Robinson lighting Fred MacMurray’s cigarette) pays off so perfectly — why spoil it?

MacMurray’s Walter Neff was an absolute idiot, of course, for killing Barbara Stanwyck’s cranky-ass husband. Risking his life for some great sex on the weekends? Not worth it, bruh. It was obvious she was a wrong one from the get-go.

Would I like to see the missing finale anyway? The scene sounds awfully grim, verging on grotesque. But if it turns up one day, sure. I can take it.

From https://filmnoir.art.blog/2008/04/09/double-indemnity-the-unseen-ending/:https://filmnoir.art.blog/2008/04/09/double-indemnity-the-unseen-ending/: