Jeffrey Wells

For the last two days I’ve been preparing for an unpleasant invasive procedure that I’m not going to describe. The 24-hours-before prep is awful. I don’t want to think about it, but the bitter-licorice-tasting liquid you have to drink is nauseating.

The procedure happened today around noon. I was out for 90 or 100 minutes, and the after-effect of the knock-out sedative is still with me, like a Percocet blanket. When I returned home at 2:30 pm, I just flopped and dropped off.

Plus for the last three or four days I’ve been coping with a cough, sneezing and a runny nose. My voice is significantly deeper and more nasally as we speak. I wish I could sound like this all the time. I almost sound like Lee Marvin in The Professionals.

My health, in short, is at a low ebb, although I did receive good news from the attending physician. Don’t ask.

In Tomris Laffly’s mind, Kevin Spacey should once again be hunted down by villagers and peppered with woke buckshot…condemned, hoisted, lashed and repeatedly dunked in a lake for longer and longer periods until he, like, drowns.

If Curtis Hanson had cast me as Detective Ed Exley in L.A. Confidential, and if, during filming, Kevin Spacey (i.e., Detective Jack Vincennes) had fallen into the habit of patting my ass or whatever, I would have eventually taken him aside, looked him in the eye and said in a friendly, no-big-deal way…

“Look, Kevin…you need to let this go…nobody’s offended and we’re both cool but, you know, you aren’t going to wind up fucking me in the ass. I’m an adult and so are you but stop with the discreet overtures, okay? I’m into fucking girls in the ass, kapeesh? You can handle it, bro. Just pounce on some other dude.”

And if I had paid Spacey a visit in Savannah while he was shooting Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil a few months later, I would have re-explained things.

HE to Spacey: “I know it seems weird that I’m here in Savannah after I told you point blank that I’m not going to be your Crisco bitch, but the same deal still applies. No bending over and squealing like a pig, and I’m saying this as one who was approached at age 18 in the West Village by a 30something guy in a jacket and tie and asked ‘have you ever had your ass sucked?’ I said ‘no thanks’ then and I’m saying it again now. And it’s not a problem.”

Laffly, deep down, pines for the Joe Biden era of instant cancellation and sending offenders straight to the guillotine. Five years (‘19 through ‘23) that sent jolts of fear through the systems of arrogant conquistadors all over…she would have that time again.

The Amazon rental is only in standard definition, but the aspect ratio is 1.37. Plus it’s spoken in Italian (the almost constantly bare-chested, loin–clothed Kirk Douglas is dubbed) with English subtitles.

But you know what? It’s an intelligent film —low-budgety but honorable — unmistakably better than the Steve Reeves Hercules films at the very least.

The story moves along, it’s well-paced, the dialogue (partially written by Ben Hecht and Irwin Shaw) is better than servicable and almost eloquent at times. It’s even haunting here and there…a world of gods and sirens and crude, man-eating giants.

Found unconscious and memory-less on a beach by Rosanna Podesta, Ulysses is immediately regarded as a noble fellow, and Douglas sells this by behaving with restraint and dignity, by radiating a certain inwardness. One senses a man of maturity, thought, consequence.

I knew early on that I’d slagged this film unfairly. It’s really not half bad. It’s regrettable that HD streaming isn’t an option — what I saw last night looked like 16mm.

…vs 38 year-old Kirk Douglas as the titular Ulysses, which was shot in 1954.

I’m sorry but an ancient adventure tale focusing on a rough-and-ready fellow in the prime of life (lae 30s) is obviously different if the central figure is creased and weathered and approaching the final chapter (60-plus). You can’t dispute this. You can’t deny the ironclad terms of the clock.

Damon will soon play Odysseus in Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.26.26), which sounds hugely interesting and which will certainly rank as Nolan’s costliest film ($250 million).

71 years ago Douglas played the same Greek character (Ulysses is the Romanized or Latinized version of Odysseus) in a much more modestly budgeted film…basically a cheeseball popcorn flick aimed at the serfs and none-too-brights.

Douglas was age-appropriate for the role of a brawny, wandering adventurer, but the real-life Damon — face it — is too long of tooth. It would be one thing if Damon was 45, but he’s a decade past that.

The real-life Damon is now at an age where men have more or less figured things out and have put down roots and are nurturing families, And yet following the Trojan War Nolan’s old-guy Odysseus has failed to return to his wife and son for years, sailing the Aegean an infinitum, grappling with the Cyclops and the Sirens and going for the gusto and whatnot?

The time for that adventure-for-its-own-sake shit was 10 or 20 years ago, dude. Stand up, act your age and be a responsible man.

Who needs ten years to return home? A year or two, maybe, but not a full decade. Odysseus’s wife Penelope (apparently to be played by Anne Hathaway in Nolan’s film) had logical suppositions that would lead any reasonable woman to believe that her husband is dead. Who wouldn’t presume this after a couple of years?

What kind of wife shrugs her shoulders and says, “Ah, well…my husband has obviously been delayed on his way home, but I trust that he’ll return so I will wait and keep myself chaste until the glorious day of arrival.” Commendable but not when you’ve been waiting ten fucking years. That’s ridiculous.

What if Odysseus couldn’t find his way back until 12 years have passed? Or 15 or 20? How many years of absence are tolerable or understandable? I say no more than two. Okay, three max.

If I were Penelope I would say after four or five years, “All right, screw it…Odysseus has obviously drowned or been killed or has settled down with another wife somewhere. I guess it’s time to start thinking about finding a replacement husband. What am I supposed to do? Wait until I’m 50 or 55 years old?

“And someone younger this time. My husband had begun to slow down, erection-wise, before he left. God knows what he’ll be like in the sack when he returns. If I’m going to remarry I want a man with a phallus like a piece of petrified wood.”

And so, naturally, the word gets out and several suitors start hanging around Penelope…all of them looking to “make it happen”. But then Odysseus finally returns, and in a big thundering climax he and his son Telemachus murder all the guys who were hoping for a little Penelope action.

Dying would-be suitor, arrow in his chest, bleeding on the floor: “What the fuck, dude? You’ve been gone for ten years and you expected your wife to…what, just wait and wait and wait? If you had been among us and some other king of Ithaca had been absent for ten years, you know you’d be looking to win Penelope’s favor and maybe discreetly do her on the side when no one’s looking…you’d be acting no differently. So why have you and Telemachus killed so many of us? What have we done that is so awful? Nothing.”

Douglas’s version was mostly a pasta-and-tomato sauce costumer, produced by Dino de Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti. Whereas Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey will go for a deeper, classier tone, and it could even veer into the spooky.

Odysseus, Telemachus, Antinous, Nausicaa, Alcinous, Eurylochus, Hepatitis, Diabetes, Archimedes…I tend to devolve into a Woody allen mindset when contemplating anicent Greeks.

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There were only four golden years enjoyed by William R. Wilkerson’s original Cafe Trocadero (8610 W. Sunset Blvd**., West Hollywood, CA) — the spring of 1934 to May 1938, when Wilkerson sold the place to Nola Hahn.

Over the next nine years the “Troc” opened and closed under several shifty owners. By the time Clark Gable and his new Lincoln Continental posed for this shot on Sunset Plaza Drive in the fall of ‘46, the “Troc” was in its final year of operation. It shuttered in ‘47.

The Hucksters, Gable’s first significant post-war film, opened on 7.17.47. Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr co-starred.

** Chin-Chin West currently occupies the lot at 8610 W. Sunset (the address is actually 8618 W. Sunset Blvd).

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HE’s American LAX-to-JFK jet touched down around 8 pm Thursday night. I’m now (10:18 pm) parked on Metro North train to Westport. Public transportation almost always lets me down in some way — this time it didn’t — thank you.

The jig is up for Team Lively. She may as well throw in the towel — everyone despises her — vindication is out of the question. Team Baldoni needs to give in also…please.

Just walk away, and there will be an end to the horror.

The days when an actor like John Lithgow could be shamed into not playing a role over Stalinist trans outrage rhetoric are over. A couple of years ago trans terror was a force to be feared. Not so much these days. In my view J.K. Rowling is a woman of backbone.

Gulf of Emptiness? Gulf of Nowhere? Gulf of Infinite Nothingness?

I’ve always liked the sound of the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone should revert to that when Trump leaves office on 1.20.29. He won’t die in office — of that I’m fairly certain. German genes.

Gulf of Jose Jimenez?

…if I skip this one? Can’t hurt, right? Sorry but I’m 95% sure that I’m not stupid enough to really enjoy it. I know, I know…just sit through the damn thing and then trash it, if you’re so inclined.

This is a life-size mannequin, sitting in the lobby of the AMC Grove, where last night I caught a 7:15 pm screening of Becoming Led Zeppelin.**

** I first saw the Ledzep doc in Telluride in ‘22 (or was it ‘21?). It was 16 minutes longer then. It’s nothing close to a probing documentary — it’s more like a fan-created infomercial.