Jeffrey Wells

In all candor, my strongest recollection of the recently deceased Godfather producer was the unfortunate fact that he wore a profoundly ugly tuxedo to the 1973 Oscars (i.e., the watched-by-tens-of-millions ceremony that raised high the Godfather legend).

NYC transit system to weary traveller upon his return from France:

Welcome back, Chuck, and now the ordeal begins.

Nine and a half hours from Nice Airport take-off at 2 pm (or 8 am by a Manhattan clock) to your JFK 5:30 pm touchdown, you say?

Followed by 170 drag-ass minutes (customs, luggage retrieval, endless walking, Air Train, missing the Howard Beach A train by seconds), topped off by your A train’s sluggish arrival at Penn Station at 8:20 pm, thereby causing you to miss your 8:11 pm Jersey Transit train to West Orange.

I had awoken on Saturday morning at the NYC equivalent of 12:30 am.

London and Nice-area mass transit systems are faster, smoother, more comfortable and less arduous, you say? They actually have escalators everywhere, unlike NYC?

I began my Cannes-to-Nice bus voyage (free voucher supplied by Cannes Film Festival staff) at the NYC time zone equivalent of 4:30 am and finally walked through Jett’s door in West Orange last night at roughly 9:15 pm or 3:15 am Cannes time, or nearly 23 hours later.

What do you do, whine for a living? Are you a baby, some kind of chronic complainer? Are you a man or a mouse? Nine and a half hours of flying plus 14 hours of ground transport and waiting on both ends…par for the course.

…that comes over you or creeps in…after flying nine hours from Nice and then you finally touch down at JFK…I shall be released! Actually not so fast because there’s no available gate so your Delta 767 sits on the tarmac for 35, 40 minutes…waiting, waiting…trying to suppress anger. Really nice.

…that a super-famous person was portrayed by an actor who resembled him/her this closely?

Nobody knows how good Waltzing With Brando will be, but even if it’s only so-so Billy Zane will have landed his catchiest, most attention-getting role ever. Zane hasn’t been on a hot streak since his mid ‘90s one-two punch — The Phantom (‘96) and Titanic (‘97). Everyone loves a good comeback.

…are actually making sense or at least aren’t striking me as wildly off the mark.

Except, that is, for Jesse Plemons being handed the Best Actor trophy for playing three muted, hung-up, blank-eyed zombies in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness. This, to me, is a huge WHAT??

I’m especially pleased that one of my biggest faves, Halfdan Ullmann Tondel‘s Armand, has won the Camera d’Or.

I’d much rather listen to Deirdre’s vocal-free Beatles tracks than think about the dreaded Paul Mescal playing one of the lads in Sam Mendes’ planned quartet of Beatles films. I’m sorry but Jordan Ruimy’s 5.24 post sent me into a black pit.

Okay, I’ve popped for Delta’s onboard wifi…we’re now over the Atlantic (southwest of Keflavik) and the signal is surprisingly strong.

I’m only just starting to monitor ticket-buyer reactions to George Miller’s Furiosa (5.24) and the negatives seem higher than I expected. Many agree with my viewpoint. I called it a visually handsome but unimpressive revenge saga — shallow, overlong — in my 5.16 review.

…are going to upset me, at least to some extent. They always do. I’ll be among the last to read about the winners, as my Nice-to-JFK flight (departing 35 minutes hence) doesn’t land until 5something Manhattan time or 11sonething in Cannes

For 11 days I’d been staying away from restaurant cuisine, confining myself to common-man vittles (sandwiches, fruit, coffee, yogurt, sparkling water, Coke Zero) in HE’s Napoleonic-era crash pad.

And then all my restraint collapsed last night, or more precisely this morning at 12:30 am, following a 10:15 screening of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, which I found phenomenal.

The after-midnight joint was the famous La Pizza, which serves until 2 am or thereabouts. I dove into an oven-hot Marguerite halfer plus a sizable buffalo mozarella & tomato salad. I rarely eat after 9 pm as a rule and certainly no later than 10 pm, and there I was violating this sensible regimen by three and a half hours.

I bought this yesterday…approved.