Jeffrey Wells

…being dropped because of hung jurors…anyone who approves of the prosecution of Daniel Penny being downgraded to criminally negligent homicide is almost certainly a racist and probably a Trumpie.

Okay, not really.

Seriously, any veteran NYC subway commuter who’s had encounters with aggressive mental wackos was on Denny’s side from the get-go.

Maybe the legions of other wackos out there will ponder the sad fate of Penny’s choke-hold victim, Jordan Neely, and mutter to themselves, “Hmmm, maybe I should make a greater effort henceforth to not make subway riders cringe and cower when I go into my routine?”

In all my years on this planet I spoke to Sean Connery only once, during a roundtable at a 1982 New York press junket for Richard Brooks‘ Wrong Is Right.

I wasn’t much of a fan of the film (nobody was) but it was thrilling to absorb the vibe and smell the aroma of the manly, bigger-than-life Connery.

He wasn’t much of a kidder but he had an engaging smile. Every answer he gave was straight from the shoulder, bordering on blunt.

The word around the campfire at the time was that Connery had made a successful advance upon a female journalist during a hotel-room interview, although not necessarily during his Wrong Is Right activities.

We all have impulses, of course, but we control them for the sake of decency and our careers and reputations. But if you were Sean Connery back in the day, perhaps not each and every time.

Restrained but affirming machismo will always be cool. The calm, sensible mindset of a guy who wields a certain kind of rugged glamour and a certain amount of entertainment industry dominance…it was good for the soul to sense that, and even taste it through close proximity.

Connery was clearly a gentleman and imbued with a certain diplomatic finesse, and he was very handsomely-dressed in that hotel room, and he smelled good (soap, subtle musk cologne) and wore newish, polished, well-crafted footwear**.

When I was sitting three or four feet away from the then-52-year-old Connery I felt the right kind of vibes. This is a good place to be, I said to myself.

The world was a whole different place during the early Reagan era. Urban gay culture had begun to flourish (the Studio 54 heyday had happened only three or four years earlier) while AIDS was only beginning to be whispered about, but notions of abundant diversity had yet to manifest (the Central Park Five injustice was only a year old at the time) and white hetero straight guys like Connery were, unlike today, not regarded as inherently problematic or regressive or morally arrested — they held a certain sway. And fine sexual opportunities for young heteros like myself were rather wonderful, I don’t mind saying.

Merit ruled over equity (what’s equity?), transitioned biomales weren’t competing in women’s sports, Oscar handicappers didn’t know from identity campaigns, woke merely referred to not being asleep, etc. E.T., The Verdict, Blade Runner, Tootsie, First Blood, Five Days One Summer, The Year of Living Dangerously, etc. I would have that time again.

** Nobody wore whitesides in 1982 — civilization had been spared as they hadn’t been invented yet — but if by some bizarre quirk of time-shifting style or fashion Connery had somehow been wearing whitesides that day, the whole subdued machismo thing would have been shattered.

HBO-wise Adam Driver peaked with “Girls” but theatrical feature-wise he peaked with his Stephen Sondheim-singing moment in “Marriage Story” — I loved him in that scene.

But then he all but assassinated himself by starring as one of most loathsome, thoroughly demonic characters in cinema history in Leo’s Carax’s “Annette”.

Then he played a morose pot-bellied academic flabby-ass in “White Noise”.

And then he played two — two! — Italian business-brand magnates (Maurizio Gucci, Enzo Ferrari) within a couple of years of each other. And I really liked Ferrari as far as it went.

And then he delivered the self-annihilating coup de grace by wearing James Mason-in-“Julius Caesar” hair in Francis Coppola’s mind-blowingly awful “Megalopolis.”

And then Driver appeared in a Kenneth Lonergan play at the Lucille Lortel theatre wearing GOLD-TOE socks, and that’s what really did it, I think.

Driver is finished for now. Not altogether but he needs to lay low. He’s certainly living proof that nothing recedes like success. He’s a good actor but I don’t want to ever, EVER sit through a histrionic, definitive-statement, large-personality Adam Driver movie EVER AGAIN.

Throw Stuff At The Screen

Honestly? If I was asked to pose for a Los Angeles magazine cover story with some other award-season blogaroos and they asked us to pose in pairs, let’s say, and if a colleague came up behind me and gave me a double-arm T-shirt hug like the one Adam Driver is giving Viggo Mortensen here, I would be cool about it but my first thought would be “the fuck?” My second thought would be “okay, I’m getting a warm erotic man-hug here, but does that mean I should tenderly place my right hand over the right arm of my man-hugger?” To me this photo is only a step or two removed from that 1963 shot of Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s just not me. I’ll do an arm-around-the-shoulder hug if I’m posing for a shot with a male friend or one of my sons, but that’s about it.



Glenn Kenny to Ben Reddick in mid 1930s: “Stop trying to make the term ‘Oakie’ happen. It sounds like something a 12-year-old would say, and I don’t care if Woody Guthrie had used it a couple of times “

Nothing horrible or turbulent, all good.

It never really registered before today that Julie (Creature From The Black Lagoon) Adams has a significant costarring role in Arnold Laven’s 1957 film, which I’ve never seen but is loosely related to On The Waterfront.

The Gotham Awards abandoned quality for its own sake some years ago. They’re basically become the gender-neutral, identity-celebrating, social virtue-signalling Wokey Awards…like their West Coast Spirit Award brethren they’ve become cultists in a kind of Branch Davidian way.

I haven’t seen Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man so who am I to talk, right? My avoidance impulse admittedly stems from weakness…from a sense of prospective anxiety and discomfort about hanging with an actual neurofibromatosis sufferer (in this case Adam Pearson). Which makes me a terrible person, of course.

I don’t want to avoid the disfigured…well, okay, I guess I do but I certainly don’t want to darken their lives in any way, shape or form. I merely choose to avert my gaze. If you ask me these feelings are benign and hands-off. And you know what? 98% of humanity feels the same way. Just ask Victor Hugo, Tod Browning (director of Freaks, which Andrew Sarris called “one of the most compassionate movies ever made”), Charles Laughton, Rod Serling.

I suggested in a piece last July that in response to my alleged or seeming cowardice and narrow-mindedness a certain kind of virtue–signalling hate snobbery (I called the proponents of this faith “neurofibromatosis wokeys”) would praise and embrace A Different Man as a way of trumpeting their open-hearted virtue and emotional support for not only the sufferers of this disease but anyone suffering from any oppressive handicap, biological or social.

They’re also determined to condemn anyone like me…anyone from the benign avoidance community, I mean…to eternal agonizing damnation. They are committed, trust me, to applying the bullwhip and sending we narrow-minded uglies straight to hell.

Last night the Gothams re-affirmed their social justice warrior belief system by giving their top prize to A Different Man — bingo! Like wind-up tin soldiers they walked right into their own self-lampooning satire…right into the mindset behind my snide little perception. In so doing they more or less said “we’re 100% sincere and real about this….neurofibromatosis sufferers have to be loved and supported and hugged, and we’re just the kind of enlightened organization to spearhead this social movement.”

Let me explain as carefully as I can that while neurofibromatosis wokeys are primarily guided by kind and gentle social impulses (as I am or at least try to be — I simply don’t want direct visual access to a manifestation of nature’s random cruelty) but they are also SJW snobs and haters. Remember Charles Bukowski’s “The Genius of the Crowd”? He nailed these detestable little scolds like few had ever managed. I’ve endured their slings and arrows in HE comment threads so I should know.