Jeffrey Wells

Jeff Goldblum is the only Wicked: For Good cast member I personally relate to, and his character (the Wizard of Oz) is fairly villainous for the most part.

You can’t say Goldblum didn’t have the best line in the original Wicked: “I think it’s a bit much.”

But never let it be said this is not a “safe”, positive-minded, wholesomely diverse cast. They cover the woke waterfront.

What kind of 21st Century ensemble cast do I relate to? Dozens upon dozens. How about the Spotlight guys? The Sentimental Value family? Or the Zero Dark Thirty-ers? Or the Manchester By The Sea pain-bearers? Or the Weapons community? Or Team Irishman? I could go on and on.

What if you have issues with diverse identity brandishing but you don’t consider yourself a MAGA mouth-breather? What if you’re more of a sensible centrist?

From David Brooks N.Y. Times column, posted on 10.30.25:

From Politico’s Elena Schneider, dated 11.2…as if everyone didn’t already know that Democrats have all but slit their own throats over woke issues and trans stuff in particular.

Proles to Dems, Part 2: “Sorry to break it to ya, ayeholes, but J.K. Rowling had it right all along.”

The storied Asbury Park carousel is seared into my emotional history…my DNA even. Because it marked me…an innocent renegade incident that branded my childhood and teen years.

I wrote about it a couple of years ago…

It was a late summer evening, and my now-departed mom (her name was Nancy) and I were roaming up and down the more-than-a-century-old boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey. One of the evening’s highlights (in my mind at least) was the famous Asbury Park merry-go-round.

After going on a ride and eating some cotton candy we made our way south (or was it north?). At least a mile, maybe two. Then I somehow slipped my mother’s grasp and disappeared. Gone.

For the first time in my life I had decided that it would be more exciting and fulfilling to go on a solo boardwalk adventure rather than stay with mom.

Nancy freaked, of course. She found a couple of uniformed cops and asked for their help. They all looked, searched, asked all the merchants…no luck. The trio finally made their way back to the merry-go-round and there I was — staring, bedazzled.

This incident put the fear of God into both my parents. From then on they decided I had to be kept on a short leash and monitored extra carefully. The result is that I began to feel that my life was being lived in a gulag, a police state. Rules, repression, “no”, time to go to bed at dusk, “because I said so,” “you’re too young,” etc.

And that unalterable fact means that I’ll be obliged — okay, forced — again and again to sit through high-aspiring films that Variety ‘s Guy Lodge will praise to the heavens but which will also try my patience, at the very least, and may, in all probability, compel me to endure serious anguish and perhaps even misery.

The next film by Mascha Schilinski, director of the agonizing Sound of Falling, will probably subject me to great viewing difficulty. The next Park Chan–wook film will almost certainly cause some degree of suffering. Ditto the next cinematically ambitious smarthouse film from Brutalist helmer Brady Corbet, and definitely the next equally ambitious effort from Mona Fastvold, whose The Testament of Ann Lee put me through the ringer a couple of months ago at the Venice Film Festival.

Who are the other guaranteed pain-giving directors? All I know for sure is that they’re out there, waiting to lower the boom. And as William Holden’s Pike Bishop said in The Wild Bunch, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Because grade-A film festivals, of course, are generally dependable forums for the richest, most far-reaching and most delightful films emerging at a given moment. You can’t have one without the other. Suffering and deliverance go hand in hand.

In his Bugonia review, New Yorker critic Justin Chang offhandedly admits that Luca Guadagnino’s After The Hunt wasn’t critically trashed by for its cinematic shortcomings but for political-cultural reasons — for being “noxiously reactionary.”

One Battle After Another has a certain “not quite rooted upon planet earth” attitude, okay, but at least a couple of hundred miles away from comedic. It sure as hell isn’t musical.

…and it’s been staring us right in the face since Paul Thomas Anderson’s anti-rural-white-America epic opened four weeks ago on 9.26.

And here it is:

Even the ugliest, most deranged, most demonically boozy or druggy dad would have serious qualms about killing his own daughter, especially if the bad dad is a hardcore rightie, given traditional conservative beliefs (Charlie Kirk, etc.) in the sanctified rituals of parenting and fatherhood.

And yet Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw is such an impossibly racist fucktard that he somehow determines that his mixed-race daughter, Chase Infiniti’s Willa, has to be iced so as to eliminate biological proof that he once had sex with Willa’s African-American mother (Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills)…a paternity situation that would totally kill his chances of being accepted into a secret rightwing racist fraternity called the Christmas Adventurers Club.

This is what’s fundamentally and humanly wrong with One Battle After Another. There’s just no believing that this kind of psychopathic ugliness could prevail within the heart of even a fanatical rightwing hard-ass like Lockjaw….even the sickest, most racially diseased dad in the world wouldn’t clip his own daughter over a social-political motive.

Even if Lockjaw was so insanely devoted to racist ideology that he tried to nullify his own heart and shut off his own soul spigot in order to commit filicide, even the sickest bad dad would be so inwardly torn about the prospect of murdering his own that he probably couldn’t go there. Because deep down, even the worst dads are human.

And yet PTA has dramatically invested in this kind of venality. He believes that Lockjaw, being a racist pig and all, could be a daughter-killer. He bases the bulk of the film, in fact, upon this premise. (Not the 40-minute prologue set in 2008 or thereabouts, but the present-tense part.)

The problem isn’t just that silent Godly guidance and the better angels of human nature forbid such a diseased mindset at the end of the day, but that we, the ticket-buying, popcorn-inhaling, non-lefty extremists in the audience…we can’t and won’t believe this shit. It simply doesn’t add up in human terms. Filicide is simply a bridge too far in this context, and it just doesn’t wash.

Left progressives (who of course include many film-industry types and many if not most film critics) are buying it, of course, because they see hardcore, immigrant-arresting, ICE-resembling righties in starched military fatigues as inherently evil…to them a belief in Lockjaw’s inhuman scheme is a no-brainer and a no-sweater.

Even I, a sensible centrist, had half-accepted Lockjaw’s sick decision to slay his own daughter. I sat there in my movie-theatre seat and went along with PTA’s dramatic suggestion until, yesterday around noon, a friend flipped a moral switch by mentioning what I’ve written here. A lightbulb went on and I went “wow…yeah, of course…that’s a good one.”