Jeffrey Wells

The Horror, The Horror

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I’m okay with Harris Dickinson playing John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ forthcoming quartet of Beatles films (due in ‘27), and I don’t know enough about Charlie Rowe to squawk about Mendes having cast him as George Harrison.

But a rumored decision to cast HE’s two all-time biggest pet-peeve actors — Paul Mescal and Barry beestung-nose Keoghan — as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr is giving me heart palpitations.

I can only hope and pray that Jeff Sneider’s reporting is somehow mistaken or, if correct, is up in the air as far as Mescal-Keoghan are concerned. Please God, I’m begging you…

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Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, Apparently Persuaded That Dad Brad Is Evil Incarnate, Wants To Legally Drop Name

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Brad Pitt has been sober for nearly eight years, but because he lost his alcoholic temper during that infamous chartered flight (on 9.14.16) and was physically abusive to Maddox, one of the six Jolie-Pitt kids…because he was a belligerent drunken dick that one time, at least two of his daughters, Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 18, and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, 15, are convinced that he’s a living embodiment of Satan and want the Pitt struck from their last names.

Shiloh has in fact filed legal papers to change her name to a Pitt-less Shiloh Jolie. Perhaps Vivienne will follow suit when she turns 18.

We all understand teens who feel estranged from their parents (I was one), but who goes into court and says in effect “strike my father’s last name from my legal history!…he doesn’t exist, his name is anathema!…I judge him damned with the devil and condemn him to molten-lava hell with all the other fallen angels, where he will writhe in terrible pain for all eternity.”

What kind of nutbag daughter thinks this way?

Why is the divorce initiated by Angelina Jolie against William Bradley Pitt still ongoing and unresolved eight years later? Sane exes don’t behave this way as a rule.

Trust me — I’m not the first person on planet earth to rhetorically ask “what exactly is Angelina’s basic psychological malfunction?”

Then again I may be thinking too narrowly. Perhaps Pitt is the devil incarnate, and therefore deserves to be hunted down with clubs and spears and burned like Joan of Arc or Oliver Reed’s Father Grandier from Ken Russell’s The Devils?

Bend Over, Chuck Berry

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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 Certain Feeling

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…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.

When’s The Last Time

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…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.

Climactic Cannes Jury Awards

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…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.