Jeffrey Wells

Bob Costas Is 100% Correct

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For the good of the country and our currently fragile tradition of democracy, President Joe Biden really, really has to do a Lyndon Johnson as soon as possible — “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of the Democratic Party for another term as your president.”

Because while he may be able to muddle through, Woodrow Wilson– or Ronald Reagan-style, between now and January 20, 2029 if re-elected, Biden is obviously too old and diminished to run against The Beast.

C’mon, man…wake up. Johnson read the writing on the wall 56 years ago and right now there are only two people who can’t read the present moment — Joe and Jill Biden.

It’s possible that Biden might be able to squeak through to a micro-slender victory in November…maybe…but nobody believes this to be a likely scenario. People are finally starting to realize that it’s actually, truth be told, unlikely.

If he comes to his senses and throws in the towel, Biden’s reputation will suddenly become that of a noble statesman.

Spoken two nights ago on Real Time with Bill Maher but for some reason not on YouTube:

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Comedy Is Hard To Get Right

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I never laughed at the original James Carville joke of ruthlessness, to wit:

But I just heard the same line tweaked by The Warning’s Steve Schmidt — he omitted “sonuvabitch” and changed “anvil” to “fucking bowling ball” — and suddenly it was funny.

Anvil = not funny. Bowling ball = funny. Probably because most of us have never even seen an anvil but everyone knows how heavy a bowling ball is

Funny Judd Apatow line from last night’s DGA Awards: The 2024 Presidential race is going to be between “a guy old enough to have met Hitler and a guy who wishes he had.”

Medical Exam Time-Out

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Without getting into details I’ll be submitting to an examination procedure this morning around 10:30 am, and that’s all I’m going to say. Nothing wrong — just something I have to do. I’ll be out of it and presumably recovering by 12:30 or 1 pm.

Mildly Approvable, Visually Handsome

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All this time I had somehow failed to realize that Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space (‘53), which is based on a Ray Bradbury film treatment called “The Meteor”, was a clear forerunner of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (‘56).

Both were black-and-white chillers about bucolic, small-town communities besieged by aliens with the power to surreptitiously replace residents with creepy, emotion–less substitutes, the difference being that Arnold and Bradbury’s visitors aren’t aggressively evil or looking to harm anyone and certainly don’t serve as metaphorical seed agents for ‘50s-era conformity, as they did in Body Snatchers.

And both focused on a cerebral alpha male hero figure (Richard Carlson, Kevin McCarthy) and nearly identical brunette wifey-girlfriend love partners (Arnold’s Barbara Rush, Siegel’s Dana Wynter) who are taken over by aliens in the third act.

There are too many scenes in which Carlson tries and fails to persuade fellow townies that some kind of alien invasion is actually happening. Over and over and over. Charles Drake’s Sheriff Warren finally comes around toward the end, but by then the skepticism horse has been beaten to death.

I was expecting to engage with Kathleen Hughes, the blonde on the 4K Bluray jacket cover, but she’s only in one brief scene.

I was delighted by the relatively recent digital restoration of It Came From Outer Space. Clifford Stine’s cinematography looks about as proficient and ace-level as this kind of boilerplate big-studio monochrome effort gets. At times the image quality seems as clean and rich as, say, the VistaVision lensing of William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (‘55), especially during the outdoor-simulating sound stage scenes.

Mumblin’, Fuzzy-Brained Joe Doesn’t Need A Brilliant, Whip-Smart Memory To Do The Job, But He Can’t Debate The Beast

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We all know the great-grandfatherly Joe Biden, 81, “looks like his own skeletal remains,” as Bill Maher remarked on a 9.30.23 “New Rules” segment, and that he almost certainly lacks the mental agility and high-octane strength to run an effective campaign against the insane but grotesquely resilient, fat-as-a-cow Donald Trump, 77.

Every American of voting age, in short, has locked into “Biden is too old to serve another term,” so it was no shock to read that special counsel Robert K. Hur has noted, in his just-released report about President Biden’s occasionally errant handling of documents, that he comes off as a “sympathetic, well–meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — basically a rote confirmation of what everyone has long perceived or suspected so what’s the biggie?

But during Thursday evening’s impromptu press encounter at the White House Biden intensified the over–the–hill impressions by angrily barking at and sneering about Hur’s observations…a gruff and blustery short-tempered response that failed to exude even a semblance of the usual cool poise and confident assurance that Presidents have routinely been associated with.

My father used to behave like this in his 80s…grumpy, hair–trigger, junkyard dog–like.

Bill Maher on 9.30.23:

N.Y. Times:

I Began Writing Stories

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…when I was 12 or 13. Like Truman Capote I also was more into movies, reading books and drawing stuff than girls (the hound-dogging didn’t start until I was 23), sports or, God forbid, school studies.

When I was 16 or 17 I was putting much more time and energy into typing a socially satirical hand-out (circulated among my ruffian friends) than doing homework. I surely could have refined my writing skills by attending journalism school in my late teens or early 20s, but I’ve always been a do-it-yourself type.

Will Someone Explain?

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However jarring or chilling Jonathan Glazer ‘s The Zone of Interest may seem to some, one thing it’s clearly not is thematically complex. Write “the banality of evil” a thousand times on a blackboard.