Jeffrey Wells

Initially posted on 4.21.21: After re-watching Sam Peckinpah and Steve McQueen‘s The Getaway (’72) a couple of nights ago, I’m all the more certain that Roger Donaldson’s 1994 remake, in which Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger took on the same Doc and Carol McCoy roles that McQueen and Ali McGraw played 22 years earlier, is a smoother, more involving watch.

The Peckinpah version has a few moments, but it’s also nonsensical at times.

Why doesn’t McQueen shoot Al Lettieri in the head after the bank job?

Those middle-aged, cowboy-hat-wearing goons who work for Ben Johnson and his moustachioed brother are ridiculous.

There’s no reason for McGraw’s bizarre lurching the car when McQueen’s about to get in.

The sappy ending with Slim Pickens after crossing the border…c’mon.

And why would Richard Bright‘s train station con artist, who’s pocketed a couple of wads of cash, go to the cops just because McQueen beat him up? He can’t find a local clinic?

Huisache: “With the exception of Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs all of Sam Peckinpah’s films are messes of one magnitude or another, with Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia the biggest mess of all.

“The Getaway is enjoyable but the Slim Pickens ending is emblematic of Peckinpah’s resort to just saying ‘screw it, how do I get out of this mess? It was just nailed on. Sam had a mess and he called Pickens for help and the old feller bailed him out with a glorious good-ole-boy bit.

“I saw the film when it came out and was living in the area where it was filmed in central Texas. I thought it a very enjoyable mess and the Pickens ending a hoot. But that’s all the film is — an enjoyable hoot. Acting like it’s some kind of worthy project is a bridge too far.

“I suppose Sam’s problem was his alcoholism and his anti-social personality disorder. Either way the guy had a hard time making the pieces fit into the holes.”

HE reply: “Thank you — 100% correct about the nagging ‘mess’ factor. Totally dead-on. That said, Ride The High Country, The Wild Bunch and, as you noted, Straw Dogs are not messes. And there are many reasons to respect Junior Bonner. And I’ve never even seen Noon Wine.”

By the way: At the end of The Getaway Slim Pickens’ character tells Steve McQueen‘s Doc McCoy that he makes around $5K annually, or roughly $31,683 in 2021 dollars. That works out to roughly $2640 a month — an impoverished lifestyle. McQueen offers Pickens $10K or over $60K in 2021 dollars for his beat-up, piece-of-shit pickup truck. Pickens figures they’ll pay more so he says “how about $20K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $120K…for a shitty pickup truck! And then Ali McGraw counters with “how about $30K?” or the 2021 equivalent of a bit more than $180K…for a piece-of-shit pickup truck! That, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s known as a messy ending.

In short, the festival hasn’t even begun but from an ideological, social-political perspective the fix is already in, more or less. Greta Gerwig + Lily Gladstone + Hirokazu Kore-Eda (Monster, Broker, Shoplifters) will presumably fill the role of the jury’s urgent humanist crusaders…the Batman + Robin + Commissioner Gordon social-inequity problem solvers…do the right thing, ”holy fruit salad!”, etc.

The only jurors I feel a strong cinematic kinship with are J.A. Bayona (The Orphanage, Society of the Snow) and Nadine Labaki (Capernaum). With much chagrin HE admits to never having seen Omar Sy’s standout performance in The Untouchables…my bad. Ebru Ceylan is the embedded screenwriting collaborator of her husband, director Nuri-Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, About Dry Grasses).

…for bike riding in the tri-state area…that’s my crimson bike on the right…recently washed it off, re-filled the tires, etc.

Next month Fathom Events will present that special 4K restoration (original negative VistaVision scan) of Alfred Hitchcock ‘s North by Northwest (‘59) on screens coast to coast (1 pm on Sunday, 5.19 and 7 pm on Tuesday, 5.22). All to promote the 4K UHD Bluray, which will presumably pop in mid-summer.

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I guess I’m so accustomed to movies being overlong or needlessly extended that I didn’t even mention the length of Challengers in my 4.16 review. Would I have preferred a 110-minute cut? Or, as Schrader suggests, 100? I only know I didn’t feel oppressed by the 131.

I visited Houston, Texas, in late April ‘06 or 18 years ago, and I frankly doubt if I’ll ever return. There are so many beautiful, soul-stirring cities, towns and regions out there worldwide (I could write chapters upon chapters) and I’m sorry but comparison-wise and with all due respect Houston just doesn’t knock your sucks off.

Here’s how I put it back then…deep in the Dubya miasma and roughly a year before Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign. The HE article was called “Texas Town.” The money quote (“Houston is L.A. without the soul”) came from Texas gal and good friend Cherry Kutac, who had invited me to cover the still-thriving Worldfest, the Houston-based film festival.

Because I hated David Leitch’s Bullet Train with exceptional passion, I’m 96% certain I’m going to loathe and despise The Fall Guy (Universal, 5.3). I know what Leitch is (ex-stunt man, delusions of adequacy) and what he’s basically about deep down (a quarter-of-inch deep aspirations). There’s an all-media screening in Manhattan on Monday evening (4.29) but I don’t feel that The Fall Guy is worth the hassle of travelling in and out. I’ll catch it locally on Wednesday, 5.1…like a dentist appointment.

“Loud Latino Construction Workers,” posted on 10.25.21: “There’s a Latino apartment renovation crew working in the building next door, three or four guys, and they’re being (what else?) obnoxious — shouting to the extent that their voices sound like sonic booms, playing loud sombrero ballads and singing along and occasionally going ‘whooo-whooo!’

“And it’s awful to listen to, man. It’s hell.

“I’ve asked myself if I should walk over to the worksite and ask these guys to consider the fact that this is West Hollywood and not East L.A. and would they mind giving the neighborhood a break with their awful Tijuana border crossing music, etc. But that wouldn’t accomplish much. I understand that.

“I’ve been all around the block with coarse Latinos so don’t tell me. My battles with the Hispanic Party Elephant in North Bergen. The “Loud Latinos” piece that I posted from Brooklyn in June 2010, and got in trouble over.

Posted on 6.26.10: “We all act thoughtlessly from time to time, but the mark of a real animal is someone who never considers that he/she might be giving offense.

“I’ve been all around Spain and I’ve rarely noticed this level of conversational obnoxiousness in cafes. Nor did I notice this element when I visited Buenos Aires a few years ago. The Latin men and women I’ve observed in other countries can be spirited and exuberant, of course, but they mostly seem to converse at moderate levels. People with money and/or accomplishment under their belts are always more soft-spoken.

“You can bet that if you were to go to a cafe with Paul Shenar‘s Alejandro Sosa, the Bolivian drug dealer in Scarface, that he wouldn’t be shouting and bellowing. Does Edward James Olmos bellow in cafes and cause guys like me to complain about him? I seriously doubt it.”

Longer version: Fuck your sentimental boomer attachments to riveting hot-button movies that ruled the roost between the late ‘60s and Iron Man (‘09). GenX is mostly running the show now but down the road we’ll be taking the fuck over, and if you think there’s too much third-rate, zone-out streaming content now, wait until we get our hands on the gears.

You want some attempts at old-fart, boomer-type flicks? There aren’t any. Try original content longform streaming, and if that’s not nourishing enough, tough.

All we care about are jizz-whizz fiicks — IP reboots, moronic romcoms and comedies, VFX and horror. And we definitely don’t want to adapt books or plays — eff that noize.

We are going to run this business into the ground, man.

A quarter-century hence the corpses of Ben Hecht, John Ford, Spencer Tracy, Daryl F. Zanuck, Gregg Toland, Jean Arthur, John Huston, Ida Lupino, Nicholas Ray, Agnes Varda, Tom Cruise, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, James Stewart, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Meryl Streep, Oliver Stone and Kevin Costner will be spinning in their graves on a permanent basis.

20 years from now people are going to be saying “wow, remember The Fall Guy? What a great film!”

…on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness said that it’s, like, heartwarming and touchy-feely and possibly the most inviting and emotionally friendly film he’s ever made? How would you respond to this scuttlebutt? Boredom, right?