Jeffrey Wells

11:50 pm: What an absolute tragedy. We’re all heading to hell. A louche, indecent, fascist-minded sociopath will be running the country between January ‘25 and January ‘29, and the damage to our democratic system will be considerable. Is there a chance Harris can eke out a win? Not much of one. She’s almost certainly lost. I feel so drained and deflated I can’t even cry.

11:15 pm: Harris will probably lose Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and that’s all she wrote. This is the beginning of a second national nightmare under Trump. I’m disgusted by the corroded moral values and lack of common sense among the rural voters who brought this about. I’m ashamed to call these degenerates fellow citizens. Good ole Joe Biden is back in the villain’s circle — he brought this about. If he’d bailed in late ‘23 or early ‘24 a better candidate might have emerged from a primary system. Thanks, Joe!! Remember how Frankie Pantangeli died in the bathtub at the end of The Godfather, Part II? Think it over!

10:37 pm: Trump is slightly ahead of Harris in Pennsylvania, and if he wins in the Buckeye state he’ll win the Presidency. The Pig Beast may actually bring about a second national tragedy! I’m devastated. But maybe Harris will eke out a slight Pennsylvania win…maybe. Please? But right now she’s also behind a point in Wisconsin. I feel weak, bruised. This is AWFUL.

10:26: Selzer got it wrong…booo!

10:16 pm: I’ve said all along that Harris would probably squeak through. Barely. That seems likely as we speak. I’ve been studying the returns for about three hours, but it feels like five or six. I’ve aged about three months. I’ve grown four or five new gray hairs.

10:04 pm: Decisive battleground numbers still not in…still hovering.

9:47 pm: Okay, Wisconsin is looking okay for Harris. Ditto Michigan, Pennsylvania. No longer freaking the fuck out, but I still don’t like this.

9:28 pm: Harris has won New York State…expected. Pennsylvania is looking good for Harris, but Wisconsin sort of isn’t. (Right now) What is this? I’ll tell you what it partly is — Harris and the progressive Democrat party has pretty much written off the dude vote, and right now they’re feeling the terrible result of that prejudice. That plus garden-variety misogyny, I’m thinking.

9:04 pm: Aacckk! Aaacckk! I’m so on edge about the drip-drip-drip uncertainty that I haven’t even felt the effect of that Oxy I dropped an hour ago. Harris isn’t pulling in votes like Biden did four years ago, and Trump is doing a little better than he did in ‘20. Trump is five points ahead in North Carolina…yeesh. Millions of people are knowingly voting for a monster. My stomach is flooded with acid.

8:48: I feel nothing but nerves, anxiety, tension. This is as close of a race as everyone has been predicting. No unexpected Harris surge…that’s for sure.

8:41 pm: How many days is this going to drag on? Will it be finally decided on Thursday or Friday?

8:36 pm: Florida independent voters have gone bigger for Trump this year than in ‘20. A concerning sign?

8:20 pm: Harris obviously isn’t going to prevail in Georgia. Oh, dear God…I feel so scared. All the usual patterns are kicking in, exactly as presumed. Bumblefuck states going for Trump, etc. I’m just not feeling the “phenomenal surge of women voters” thing. I’m scared, Auntie Em…I’m scared.

8:14 pm: Kirk Douglas in heaven: “Ladies and gentleman, there have been times when I’ve been ashamed to be a member of, for lack of a better term, whitebread American dude nation, and this is one such occasion.”

White–haired septuagenarian: “Trump’s the man.”

HE: “Okay, but do you guys think there’s a slight chance you might go to hell when you die?”

While–haired septuagenarian (chuckling): “Heh, not a chance.”

HE: “Satan is his father, not Fred! He came up from hell and begat a son of mortal woman. He will overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples!”

I actually didn’t say any of this Roman Castevet stuff, but I said it inwardly. I didn’t have the courage to say it verbally.

Ever since the marketing klutzes at Apple TV+ blew off debuting Steve McQueen’s Blitz at the Venice, Telluride, Toronto or New York film festivals and went instead for a London Film Festival debut, the clear indication was that McQueen’s film was some kind of not-quite-there curio or shortfaller.

And then came confirmation of same from a recent smattering of negative reviews. A 76% RT rating doesn’t say “wipeout” but it does suggest the drag-down effect of certain issues and concerns.

Bullshit!

I saw Blitz last night, and I’m telling you that Apple should be completely ashamed of itself for all-but-burying — are you ready? — this superbly composed, oddball period war fantasy — an exquisitely crafted, richly imaginative, occasionally horrific, constantly engrossing “adventures of a young lad” movie.

And the critics who’ve panned it need to fall on the church steps and beg forgiveness from the Movie Godz.

Blitz is a violent cousin of Disney’s Toby Tyler (‘60) with a racially eccentric, super-woke casting approach plus a little Empire of the Sun seasoning, amounting to something that almost feels a little Wizard of Oz-y — a multi-chaptered child’s adventure flick that blends (during the third act at least) Coppola’s The Cotton Club with Dickens’ “Oliver Twist.”

Partly because of the musical ingredients, I mean. Blitz has a strong, excitingly intrusive score (Hans Zimmer) and a fair amount of tunes that are sung — yes, sung! — with such spunk and warmth, it’s almost (but not quite) a kind of musical. It’s open-hearted and super-carefully composed in a way that vaguely reminded me of Spielberg’s 1941, if you substitute the tone of beardo’s failed comedy for the occasional jolts of brutal realism that punctuate John Boorman’s Hope and Glory.

You almost expect one of the kids whom Eliot Heffernan’s George runs into during his perilous, days-long, trying-to get-back-home-while-dodging-bombs adventure…you almost expect one of the boys he befriends to sing “Consider Yourself,” the 60-year-old tune from B’way’s Oliver!

I’ve been griping about presentism for years, but McQueen’s commitment to re-imagining and recreating the racial composition of 84-years-old London is so surreal and unbridled and fantasy-soaked that you have to give him credit for saying “fuck it” and just taking the damn plunge.

I mean, if you leave out Brixton and similar nabes, London wasn’t this black even in the mid ‘70s or early ‘80s — I was there back then so don’t tell me — and Blitz, of course, is set in ‘40 and ‘41, when there was one person of color for every 3800 palefaces.

Here’s what I tapped out on the train last night:

“Wow….Blitz is much better than I expected…a grittily imaginative, superbly composed Swing Shift meets the London Blitz meets ‘Oliver Twist’ meets Spielberg’s 1941 within a multicultural fantasyland that the ghosts of Alfred Hitchcock and Alexander Korda would be totally flabbergasted by if they could somehow see it…

“McQueen is such a great, ballsy filmmaker…this is what brave, phenomenally skilled artists do…they swan-dive into their own, self-created worlds.

“It’s almost a musical & is fairly amazing altogether and yet some half-panned it for being too square and conventional! What the fuck! All of that music and spirit & impressionistic imagery & a general current of adventure as seen and felt by a young lad…it’s a great smorgasbord of 1940s magical realism…it’s brutally realistic and quite violent at certain junctures and yet it almost feels at times like an old Disney film, and that’s what’s bold and robust about it.”

Friendo: “I didn’t see any of what you saw and got off on. I saw a movie that just kind of sat there, and I suspect it’s going to be a MAJOR commercial dud. I don’t think anyone is going to go see it.”

HE reply: “No argument there. Apple did as little as possible for Blitz. They suffocated whatever commercial potential it had.”

I’m feeling fairly confident about Harris’s chances tomorrow, especially after that shocking Selzer poll out of Iowa, but I’m also continuing to feel quite antsy about Pennsylvania, where, outside of Philly, Scranton and Pittsburgh, the breathtaking, mule-stubborn, Alabama-mindset legions reside…truly dumber than a box of rocks.

Snapped at 8:16 am, 11.3.24.

Commonwealth Ave. between Clarendon and Dartmouth, facing northeast — Saturday, 12.1.07, 3:25 pm:

In a fair and just world James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (Searchlight, 12.25) would just be a film and that’s all…an experience to be judged and savored and possibly enjoyed according to how good it is, period..,how straight and true and honest it feels on a no-bullshit, deep-down, character-driven basis.

But of course it won’t be processed that way.

For Mangold and Jay Cocks’ Bob Dylan biopic is arriving at the tail end of the boomer nostalgia era, which arguably began 41 years ago with Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (‘83) and peaked with Robert Zemeckis ‘ Forrest Gump (‘94).

HE commenter Eddie Ginley posted this yesterday:

Throw in Zemeckis’ Here (Sony, 11.1) and the forthcoming Jeremy Allen White-Bruce Springsteen biopic and you have to admit that the hour has probably come for boomer sagas and sentimentalists to give it a rest and sorta kinda go away…to hand the mythological movie torch to GenXers and even, God forbid, Millennials, some of whom who are now in their early 40s and are probably nurturing sentimental looking-back notions of their own (i.e., Eminem, Korn, Limp Bizkit).

A friend insisted this morning that no matter how crafty or admirably well-written or emotionally affecting or compellingly performed A Complete Unknown turns out to be, the younger Academy members and particularly the mutants who adored Parasite and Everything Everywhere All At Once are too dug into their boomer hatred, which is why Steven Spielberg’s The Post was blown off.

If a generational yardstick has to be used, a fair way to frame A Complete Unknown would be as the last noteworthy boomer flick…the last ambitious ‘60s atmosphere film….an auld lang syne to the pot and protest and sexual revolution generation (nookie from the late ‘60s to early ‘80s was really and truly astounding) in the same way that Saving Private Ryan, Flags of Our Fathers and The Fog of War were seen as farewell-to-the-greatest-generation movies.

She’ll be Best Actress-nominated, of course, but in the blink of an eyelash our tectonic plates have shifted and…wait, what’s happening?…identity campaigns are no longer a compelling poker hand.

Or so says an 11.2 N.Y. Times article by Jeremy W. Peters and “Identity Trap” author Yascha Mounk in particular.

If you ask me Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone losing the Best Actress Oscar vote earlier this year to Poor Things’ Emma Stone was an early indication of this cultural-turning-the-road thang.

Eat shit, wokesters!

Fascination, intrigue, recognition, emotional alignment, spiritual uplift, a reflection of a cultural-political era, etc.

Kris Tapley has allegedly seen A Complete Unknown, but David Poland apparently hasn’t. I’m completely serious about the “Poland curse” — whatever James Mangold’s film turns out to be, I don’t want it to suffer because of this write-up. It wouldn’t be fair.

Last night in Glendale, Arizona, Donald “king of beasts” Trump summoned a violent fantasy by seeming to threaten Liz Cheney with a potential shooting…”nine barrels aimed at her.” But not so fast. To be fair Trump was using the same kind of hypothetical that a late ’60s or early ’70s anti-war protestor might have been suggested in the cases of Robert MacNamara or Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War — “If Kissinger or MacNamara were suddenly thrust into combat duty in Vietnam, the war would very quickly come to an end” or words to that effect. Trump mentioning the idea of Cheney facing bullets was obviously a rogue, stupid, inflammatory thing to say, and once he said this you can bet that a sizable contingent of gun-toting rightwing wackos immediately began to imagine Cheney being shot. But Trump, I think, was mainly trying to buttress his argument that Cheney is a “radical war hawk”, apparently because she favors supporting Ukraine in its long war against Russia.