Jeffrey Wells

Luce Potter was a Mexican actress (born in Chihuahua in 1914) whose best-known performance was entirely about silence and the power of seeming passivity. Augmented by way of reptilian pincer “fingers.” Nor was she expressive in terms of her eyes or facial features —she just stared and calculated and commanded. Okay, her eyes moved once when she glanced downward at a young boy but otherwise she was impassive. She had a slight assist from William Cameron Menzies, but no one who’s seen this wordless performance will ever forget it.

…that German-born actor Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), best known for playing the odious Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca (‘42), was quite the impassioned anti-Nazi activist (he and Jewish wife Lily Greger left Germany when Hitler took power in ‘33) and was “perhaps” bisexual and certainly into occasional cross-dressing, at least during the Weimar era.

I had somehow completely forgotten that Veidt played a major role in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (‘20), the seminal German expressionist horror film.

Veidt’s Los Angeles pallies called him Connie. He stood six-foot-three.

During his final two or three years he lived smack dab in central Beverly Hills (617 No. Maple Drive) and for a time was into occult spirituality.

Having inherited a weak heart from his mother and having aggravated this condition with chain smoking, Veidt died while golfing at the Riviera Country Club on 4.3.43 — roughly three months after Casablanca opened in Los Angeles (it had premiered in NYC in November ‘42) and eleven months before it won the Best Picture Oscar on 3.2.44.

Vertical Entertainment’s couldn’t-care-less theatrical release of Phillip Noyce’s Fast Charlie (12.8) was a reminder that some distributors are actively hostile to the idea of proudly presenting a first-rate film in theatres as a kind of cultural hors d’oeuvres prior to streaming.

Vertical apparently went to some effort to belittle Noyce’s film during its one week of theatrical life, such as limiting its NYC-area exposure to Coney Island’s Kent Theatre (1170 Coney Island Blvd.), allegedly a sticky-floors, hole-in-the-wall viewing experience.

Streaming is Vertical’s basic game plan, but if you’re going to briefly dip your toe into theatrical, you have to man up and summon a little heart and soul. You have show respect and a little caring.

“Yes, Priscilla’s darkly muddy visual palette must be celebrated….not. I felt as if I’d been locked in a realm of relentless gloom — confined like a kind of political prisoner with minimal access to sunlight.

“Director Sofia Coppola and dp Philippe Le Sourd are using oppressive under-lighting, of course, to convey how Priscilla Presley felt during that bizarre confining marriage.

“On one hand this is a respectable aesthetic strategy, but on the other it’s a strategy that punished me, Jeffrey Wells, as I sat there in my AMC auditorium.

“And by the way the under-lighting is evident during Priscilla’s life in Germany with her parents (gloom, gloom) so the visual confinement aesthetic lacks discipline.

“All I know is that Le Sourd’s cinematography made me feel like I was an inmate at Abu Ghraib.”

— response to K. Bowen’s effusive praise for Coppola’s film.

“The Zone of Interest is a highly respectable arthouse horror film with an obvious minimalist strategy, but it’s been boosted in a macabre sense by the genocidal stain of October 7th. Don’t tell me this isn’t a major factor in the minds of critics and industry folk alike — it obviously is. A vote for The Zone of Interest is a vote against that ghastly slaughter at the hands of Hamas. The fact that IDF shellings have also brought about many thousands of non-combatant Gaza deaths since Israel’s completely justified invasion…well, that’s another wrinkle. But don’t tell me that Glazer’s film and the Gaza conflict are unrelated.”

— HE response to “bentrane”’s comment that the current award-season heat behind Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust film “has nothing to do with Zionism.”

Shiny gold flora (leaves, vines) against solid black? This is the kind of shirt that a Shanghai pimp or a Bangkok assassin might wear. Not to mention those baggy–ass gaucho slacks.

Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface: “It looks like somebody’s nightmare.”

In his latest Oscar spitball projection, THR’s Scott Feinberg is stating that the top five Best Director contenders are Oppie’s Chris Nolan (no Hiroshima–Nagasaki horror), Barbie’s Greta Gerwig (reward the earnings), KOTFM’s Martin Scorsese (weakest film since Shutter Island), Poor Things’ Yorgos Lanthimos (deserved) and….wait, The Zone of Interest’s Jonathan Glazer? Since when?

Feinberg really and truly believes that Glazer is currently ranking higher, esteem-wise, than Maestro’s Bradley Cooper and The Holdover’s Alexander Payne?

HE’s perfect five: Nolan, Gerwig, Lanthimos, Payne, Cooper.

Anyone who “tearfully calls out Hollywood for not giving Black actresses the equity they deserve” is pretty much begging for pushback. Okay, maybe I’m misreading the room.

…if these poll numbers are repeated and re-affirmed over the next few weeks.

A citizen of Navajo Nation and a teacher of settler colonialism, Marxism and queer indigenous studies, University of Minnesota’s Melanie Yazzie defines herself on her umn.edu web page as follows: