Jeffrey Wells

I recently invited a friend to a NYC screening of Alex Garland’s Civil War (A24, 4.12).

“Thanks but I don’t think I’m’interested,” he replied. “I’m just not in the mood for a Very Important Movie (read: explicitly political) right now.”

I was going to explain that the narrative backdrop, according to the reviews, isn’t explicitly political, at least in terms of reflecting the red-vs.-blue, Trump MAGA vs. woke libtard dynamic. But that’s okay…

Posted on 3.14 after the SXSW debut:

Posted four years ago: Speaking as a life-long cat lover, I can say with authority that some cats are on the locoweed side. Inexplicable behavior. One out of several hundred, I mean.

If none-too-bright cats are unhappy or freaked about some kind of confining situation, for example, they’ll sometimes do anything they can to escape, even at their own peril. Or they’ll take revenge upon the person they think is responsible.

(1) A woman I knew was driving with an anguished male cat on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The weather was cold, a mild snowstorm was blowing, and her car was surrounded by a fair amount of traffic. She was going the usual highway speed. For some reason she leaned over and rolled down the driver-side window, and the cat immediately leapt out.

(2) My ex-wife Maggie and I had a calico cat who was accustomed to outdoor access, and who became extremely upset when we moved into an 8th floor high-rise apartment. The first night we moved in the cat climbed onto a waist-high balcony wall that overlooked the eight-story drop. I put him inside the apartment as this obviously seemed risky. Later that night he got out and jumped. We’d loved him, petted him, fed him, etc. Go figure.

(3) In the late ‘90s I was driving down Franklin Avenue with a cat who couldn’t handle being in moving cars. Jett and Dylan were with me. The cat was howling and freaking, and at one point jumped onto my shoulder and took a serious milkshake dump all over my neck and onto my blue workshirt. I remember the smell filling the car and the kids screaming with laughter.

(4) My sister and I knew that our excitable cat hated water, so we decided to take him with us on a short rowboat trip to the middle of a pond. As a training exercise. We waited until we were 30 or 40 feet out and then let him go. He looked around, assessed the situation, jumped into the pond and swam ashore.

(5) A girlfriend and I were sharing an apartment on Boston’s Park Drive. Her male cat, Tom, was bunking with us. I love cats but Tom was extremely hostile to me — the only cat I’ve run into who was this negative. One night we came back from a restaurant and found that Tom had peed on my sleeping pillow on our conjugal bed. That was it. Over the next day or two we found someone who was willing to take him.

I adored Maestro for the style and reach and flourish of it, and Carey Mulligan’s last-act demise was, for me, devastating.  But before I saw it and I mean throughout my whole life, Leonard Bernstein was the soul-stirring music man — composing, conducting, Lincoln Center, Tanglewood. Maestro didn’t exactly take issue with this, but it certainly sidestepped it. What it mostly seemed to do was whisper in my ear or poke me in the ribs as it said over and over, “O, I screw a lad.”  (That’s an anagram for “Oscar Wilde.”) And I don’t relate to that. There is so much more to life than the raptures of the phallus. And this nagging focus upon young men interferes with the sad French horn I hear in my head every time I think of Terry and Edie and that rooftop pigeon cage. Or, you know, what “Somewhere” does to me every time.

Friendo to HE: ” I still don’t get why the public was willing to embrace Oppenheimer but not Maestro. Neither J. Robert Oppenheimer nor Leonard Bernstein were well known to young audiences when the films arrived.”

HE to friendo: “The public detected that Maestro was mostly about the gay stuff and said ‘okay, yeah…nope.’ J. Robert Oppenheimer may have been a weird genius dweeb but he didn’t fuck pretty boys. Imagine if Oppenheimer had been mostly about the boys and just a little tiny bit about building the A-bomb in Los Alamos and then being politically persecuted in the 50s. I know this is an unpleasant realization for some, but 95% to 96% of the country is straight. Sorry.”

If I never see John Carpenter ‘s Starman (‘84) ever again, it’ll be too soon.

I hated hated HATED Jeff Bridges’ performance as a mentally handicapped, slow-on-the-pickup alien — the polar opposite of Michael Rennie’s “Klaatu” in The Day The Earth Stood Still. Plus I hated his hair. Less than a half-hour in I was fantasizing about ways Bridges might be murdered by the authorities.

I felt more affection for James Arness’s meowing vegetable in Howard Hawks’ The Thing (‘51) than I did for Bridges’ “Scott Hayden.”

Plus Karen Allen has always bothered me — she was the Sydney Sweeney of her time.

There’s a Starman 4K Bluray on the way…forget it.

Hugs and condolences to Katey Rich, who joined VF in 2013. Alas, old media is under intensive care. End of an era.

Late last November Disney CEO Bob Iger reportedly stated that Disney films had over–invested in woke messaging and that henceforth it needs creators to lean more toward traditional (non–agenda–driven) entertainment content.

Isn’t this more or less what major Disney shareholder Nelson Peltz, a billionaire businessman and centrist Republican, has been advocating as part of an attempt to get himself elected to Disney’s board of directors on Wednesday, April 3rd?

I agree that a guy whose last name rhymes with a term for skinned mammal fur…a term commonly used by trappers and hunters (Tom Hardy barked it out a dozen times in The Revenant…”we’re gatherin’ pelts!…pelts!…we need more pelts!”)…I agree that it feels slightly inelegant for a time-honored, milk-and-honey U.S. entertainment corporation like Disney to be strongly influenced by a guy with a vaguely coarse-sounding eastern European name…and Peltz being a Florida-residing Republican on top of everything else…I get it…not cool.

And yet Peltz has a point, and it’s one that the Critical Drinker has been hammering home for a long while, and yet two days ago The Hollywood Reporter’s Caitlin Huston ran a story about Peltz that was basically a woke hit piece.

It didn’t hint that Peltz doesn’t belong on the Disney board because he sounds like a meat-and-potatoes guy who doesn’t “get” the vagaries of showbiz, although that’s been implied here and there. It did, however, indicate that his thinking is tinged by racism and sexism, and this strikes me as cheap urban-progressive character assassination.

Tens of millions of average Americans despise the way Disney has woke-ified its brand over the last several years, and Peltz is simply saying “c’mon, this stuff has gone too far, time to roll it back.”

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown would be wise to open later this year as 2024’s award season is looking a bit anemic…compared to ‘23 it’s a weak, mewing little kitten…hobbled by last year’s WGA and SAG strikes.

A boilerplate principle photography period is three months, so James Mangold’s film having begun filming a couple of weeks ago indicates a mid-June finish.

That would give Mangold a fairly comfortable post-production period — five full months — to finish A Complete Unknown for theatrical release…let’s say around Thanksgiving or thereabouts.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis (‘13), an early ‘60s folk-music period drama with similar visual elements, shot in the late winter and early spring of 2012. It could have been “rushed” into that year’s Oscar season but the Coens wanted to hang back a bit.

Among the fastest post-production turnarounds in Hollywood history are Robert Webb ‘s Love Me Tender (‘56), Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (‘59), Oliver Stone’s W. (‘08) and Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers (‘19) — all were edited, fine-tuned and finished in the vicinity of 11, 12 or 13 weeks.

Mangold would have 20 weeks to finish and present A Complete Unknown by mid November. If he finishes principal by mid June, he could even pull a Preminger and have it ready to screen at the New York Film Festival by late September or early October.

…about Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis possibly not being ready for Cannes?

This is real:

Steam hisses out of my forehead every time I see a Zoomer casually strolling around in baggy flared pants with the cuffs an inch or so above the ankle. There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between today’s 20something fashion slaves and the Hebrew slaves who built the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Two weeks ago I hit the roof when N.Y. Times fashion maven Jonathan Weiner wrote that “skinny jeans are the new dad jeans.” I wear slim (i.e., not skinny) jeans but I saw red regardless.

…as Michael Corleone prepares to add vocal accompaniment. That’s Hyman Roth, of course, sitting 10 or 12 feet away, reading a lunch menu.