Jeffrey Wells

Unless you suffer from insomnia, a good night’s sleep is like experiencing “a little slice of death.” We all know what sleep and death are, and neither are all that big of a deal. If you’ve lived a relatively healthy and robust and crackling 76 years, as Richard Lewis did, it’s not a hugely devastating tragedy to submit to long slumber. The loss of a beloved person of value is always a sad event, of course, but the key determination is quality of life, not quantity of days. (Unless, that is, you have an especially good thing going with a young grandchild or two, in which case it is a bit of a tragedy — terribly sorry if that was the case.) At least Lewis was active and enjoying his life until a sudden heart attack got him. We’re all gonna get there. When your number’s up, Mr. Death doesn’t know from negotiations.

This Brett Ellis-Quentin Tarantino conversation was posted on 12.3.23, so I’m two months late. But this is real soul food, and I’m very glad that I finally got around to it.

Here’s Ellis’s intro riff, ending just prior to starting the conversation with Quentin. I’m not stealing anything as it’s mostly Ellis reading from “Cinema Speculation.”

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What the hell has happened to the inevitable Oscar triumph of The Holdovers’ Paul Giamatti? This was Paul’s year, his deserved payback moment for the Sideways snub of ‘05…and the SAG-AFTRA plebes have blown him off? My heart is breaking for the poor guy. Can the sardonically soulful Giamatti pull off an Oscar win regardless? You tell me. I’m really downhearted.

Major acting awards should be about major effing delivery…grand-slamming it…soul, gravity, reaching deep inside. Not this time. Congrats to the architects of Lily Gladstone‘s identity campaign. The Best Actress Oscar is now almost certainly hers, and everyone in the room knows the meaning…the final value of this.

SAG-AFTRA awards voters have been lowering industry property values for years…onward!

Posted on 2.23:

Two days ago I saw Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 3.8), and tonight [Thursday, 2.22] I watched Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive–Away Dolls (Focus Features, now playing).

Both are quite dykey — hungrily, aggressively sexual. The Coen-Cooke is mildly crazy in a nervy, farcical way (vaguely recalling the tone of Raising Arizona, the 1987 Coen Bros. film) while the Glass is like a volcano that spews more and more lava. And from my surprised perspective, both are moderately approvable.

This is not what I expected. I was a little bit afraid that both would piss me off in some way or would at least be annoying, and neither did that. Neither film is truly double grade-A but at the same time neither has anything to apologize for. And the Coen-Cooke is often fleet and clever, and it ends perfectly with a reaction shot from a peripheral character…bingo!

Glass’s film, which really uncorks the madness during its final third, is subversive in a way that I didn’t see coming.

The Coen-Cooke is deadpan droll — much lighter and goofier than the melodramatic Bleeding, which deals straight cards until the end and never fools around — although with a fair amount of violence. But you also know it’s basically comedic and is therefore going to observe boundaries.

Maybe it’s me but both films seem determined to be as provocative as they can be with the sex scenes. A lot of slurping and smooching and fingering and muff-diving, and the Coen-Cooke even goes in for sizable wang prosthetics toward the end.

I flinched a bit when the Glass went in for some light toe-chewing — sorry but the toes in question struck me as too thick and knobby. A voice inside went “eeeww, no…too much.”

Call me full of it if you want, but I have this impression that U.S. filmmakers aren’t allowed these days to make sexually graphic hetero-love-affair films. They can only dive into hot sex if it’s from a gay or lesbian serving tray. The prohibiting of Last Tango in Paris-level presentation is understood in every progressive corner of the industry (you certainly couldn’t make a film about a couple of saucy women who love to get fucked by Glenn Powell-type guys and are totally into hungry blowjobs, not in today’s environment) and you can sense that Glass and Coen-Cooke knew they had carte blanche approval and that now (i.e., last year) was the time to go for it and pull out the stops.

Posted by Vanity Fair‘s Savannah Walsh, 2.22.24:

Here’s a reposting of a Stanley Kubrick-Kirk Douglas story, passed along 13 years ago by director-screenwriter James Toback during a Savannah Film Festival q & a:

During last Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, guests Van Jones and Ann Coulter were asked about the Kansas City shooting that had happened during last Wednesday’s (2.14) Super Bowl celebration parade.

After it was mentioned that the identity of the shooter was being kept under wraps by Kansas City authorities, Coulter said this almost certainly indicates that the shooter is black, as district attorneys and news media types always suppress issues of non-white identity whenever a violent or criminal incident has occurred.

Daily Mail summary:

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It was announced yesterday (2.20) that the accused bad guys are Dominic Miller and Lyndell Mays. Radio personality Lisa Lopez-Gavin was killed by a random bullet during the shoot-em-up.

HE admires Netflix’s Best Actress campaign on behalf of Nyad ‘s Annette Bening. Netflix strategists know it’s an impossible dream (the top contenders are Emma Stone’s clearly superior performance in Poor Things vs. Lily Gladstone’s identity-driven campaign for her KOTFM turn) but they’re doing it anyway in never-say-die fashion, and HE respects the spirit behind this.

And congrats, by the way, to Awards Daily Sasha Stone for having authored the top quote.

I’m therefore satisfied and becalmed that it’s more or less become an extinct term. Good riddance. Effective, pizazzy promotion is fine. I could just never tolerate that horrible word. In fact, any word that ends with “hoo” — Yahoo search engine, boo-hoo, Yoohoo chocolate drink, etc.