Jeffrey Wells

Late ‘50s Horror Flick

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James Stewart’s eyeliner makes him look like a mad ghoul in this German one-sheet for Bell, Book and Candle, which opened on 11.11.58.

It was the year’s second pairing of Stewart and Kim Novak, the first being Vertigo, which tanked after opening on 5.9.58. If memory serves Vertigo wasn’t exactly critically praised either.

Why didn’t Alfred Hitchcock’s haunted classic sell more tickets? Dysfunctional sexual vibes. Gray-haired Stewart (49 or 50 during filming but looking closer to 55) was obviously too long-of-tooth for Novak, who was only 24 or thereabouts.

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So Whadja Think of “The Fall Guy”?

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HE answer: Initially tolerable…irritating and certainly pumped up and obviously spittle and a waste of time, but not felonious. But it began to feel more and more bruising.

I really hate everything about this kind of bullshit megaplex action film…the kind that’s been par for the course for at least a quarter-century if not longer, perhaps going as far back as 48 HRS. and Lethal Weapon.

Except those films are almost Alvin Sargent-level compared to The Fall Guy…I really hate where this genre has gone, the kind of film that directors like David Leitch, a blend of amiable, low-key attitude and truly Satanic intent, have made into a form of surface-skimming pornography.

For me The Fall Guy felt gauche and bludgeoning and generally sociopathic…a cartoonishly violent, motor-mouthed mescaline movie…characters of a shallow or grating or despicable stripe…venal, wafer-thin, smirky, japey, goofball, overbearing and exhausting, like the film itself…for the most part repulsive and certainly draining.

Ryan Gosling is middle-aged stunt veteran Colt Seavers, a bruised and tousle-haired poseur…a Hollow Man whom T.S. Eliot would recognize instantly…a performance that belongs in the same trash bin as his empty Coke bottle zone-outs in Only God Forgives and The Gray Man…the guy I loved or at least related to in Drive, The Big Short and La–La Land has been terminated.

Emily Blunt’s performance as Bony Maronie…sorry, Colt’s ex and first-time director Jody Moreno (the film-within-the-film is a ComicCon nightmare called Metalstorm) is equally empty and narcotizing.

Aaron Taylor Johnson’s tousle-haired bad-guy movie star is nothing…a mosquito.

The most annoying and despicable character, an aggressively phony exec producer of Metalstorm called Gail Meyer, is played by Ted Lasso veteran Hannah Waddingham…black hair dye, screeching chalk.

Story-wise The Fall Guy contains all the real-world grit and gravitas of a Scream movie…Scream with wild-ass stunts.

Leitch orchestrates and choreographs with adrenalized efficiency as far as it goes, but Drew Pearce’s screenplay has less real-world intrigue than a Road Runner cartoon and is oppressively untethered to any semblance of human behavior…the man should be hunted down, arrested and sentenced to ten years on Devil’s Island with Papillon and Alfred Dreyfuss.

I laughed at one bit — when Colt’s hotel room swipe card doesn’t work twice.

HE Preparing To Fight Woke “Horizon” Dissers in Cannes

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We all understand that a significant percentage of woke Cannes critics may be looking to slag the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga (Warner Bros., 6.28) when the three–hour film plays later this month on the Côte d’Azur.

This is because Costner’s 19th Century narrative focuses upon (and reportedly gives a fair shake to) the perspective of fair-skinned, covered-wagon settlers, and consequently may not be perceived as sufficiently supportive of Native Americans, at least from a most-old-time-whiteys-were-evil-racists, Lily Gladstone-esque perspective.

HE 100% guarantees that a sizable portion of wokester Branch Davidians have already decided to pan Costner’s film, sight unseen. To balance this out, HE has decided sight unseen and if at all possible to bend over backwards in order to…well, give the film as much of a fair shake as I can within the boundaries of honesty and candor.

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Several Points of Pride

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…but at the same time surrounded by so much crap. Which is often par for the course, I realize. If a big-name actor manages to bat between .250 and .333, he/she is doing rather well.

When I think of truly gold-standard Michael Caine films, maybe 10 or 12 come to mind…Get Carter, Sleuth, Alfie, A Shock to the System, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Quiet American, Mona Lisa, Children of Men, Zulu, Youth, Harry Brown, Educating Rita, The Man Who Would Be King, Funeral in Berlin, The Ipcress File…what is that, 15?

Caine himself (or an assistant) posted this photo of his DVD and Bluray highlights. Give them credit for humorously including The Swarm (“A bee movie,” Caine once remarked) and Jaws 4.

Son of Duelling Thompson Sagas

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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.

Woke Cannes Jury: Top Awards Will Go To Films & Filmmakers With Progressive Identity Credentials

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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).

A Little RKO Action

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I came along way too late in the 20th Century to savor the storied, once-glorious atmosphere of the RKO Radio Pictures lot (Melrose and Gower), which was right next door to the still-standing Paramount lot.

My only physical, professional association with the former RKO operation (the studio having peaked between the early 1930s and late ‘50s) was my horrific three-month stint as an Entertainment Tonight employee. E.T.’s offices were located near the Gower gate, and I worked there for two or three months in the spring of ‘98.

It was absolutely the most hellish job I’ve ever had in my life, in part because I had to be at work at 5 am and in part because of the acutely political vibe under exec producer Linda Bell Blue. Everyone who worked there was “schemin’ schemin’ like a demon,” and after a while I began to daydream about shooting heroin into my veins.

HE to self during E.T. employment: “Will they fire me next month, next week…tomorrow?

“Why are people always speaking in hushed tones behind closed doors? Is the work I’m doing of any value to anyone? Will I always have to wake up at 3:45 am? Is it too late to learn a new trade?

The daily salt-mine vibe at Entertainment Tonight was the most horrifically political and terrifying I’ve ever known in my life, bar none. It was all about petty office power games and anxiety and who’s up and who’s down.

Nothing in that environment was the least bit calm or serene. Nothing was devotional. It was all about fake–performing in front of your co-workers in order to convince them that you wouldn’t say anything bad about them when they weren’t around.

Women were always conferring and plotting in their offices with the doors closed, and the subject was always other women who were huddling and plotting in their offices, etc.

I naturally wanted to keep getting paid, but half the time I wanted to stick my head in a gas oven. I was 40% upset when I was canned but 60% relieved.