Jeffrey Wells

…after many decades of being all but ignored. The conservative Dukes of Hazzard actor has clearly “lost it” in the manner of Jim Caviezel. Six years ago Paul Schrader was visited by DHS agents over an angry Facebook post about Trump. Schrader didn’t suggest that Trump should be “hung,” however.

It’s hard not to associate Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein (Focus, 2.9.24) with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, which is based on Alisdair Gray 1992 novel but has been more commonly referred to over the last few months as Barbie Meets Frankenstein. Lisa began shooting in August ‘22, or roughly 13 years after the development of Poor Things had begun.

I’ve just stumbled out of Will Gluck’s Anyone But You (Sony, 12.21), and I’m trying to imagine sitting through a more synthetic or robotic Millennial-Zoomer romcom…I wanted to leap into a river of molten lava.

Set on the sunny Australian coast and based on William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, it’s about the usual emotional avoidance crap…pretending and faking feelings and putting in appearances and never coming clean until the very end…romantic hokum at its most hellish and soul-numbing.

Anyone But You is a skin-deep farce of the lowest order…slick and precocious…basically like sitting through a ping-pong game…bad for your soul and UTTERLY HORRIBLE…I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.

Glen Powell has that hunky X-factor thing going on, but Gluck and Illana Wolpert’s script is so arch and fizzy and deeply infuriating in the way it flaunts its plasticity, it nearly smothers Powell’s soul…not even a vague semblance of human-like behavior to be found.

Sydney Sweeney’s boobs are bouncy and undeniable, but to me she’s nothing. Okay, she works hard at the physical farce stuff, but she refuses to relax and is constantly “acting.”

There’s more attention paid to Powell’s brawny, bare-chested physique and his butt cheeks (and the butt cheeks of Joe Davidson, playing an Australian surfer dude) than to Sweeney’s boobs or any other female anatomical diversions…it’s basically empty beefcake with a side order of cheesecake.

I’ll tell you one thing — if Powell had been cast in Paul Mescal’s role in All Of Us Strangers, I would have had significantly fewer problems with Andrew Haigh’s film, cum droplets and all.

I was half into the first 10 or 15 minutes of Anyone But You (mostly occurring in a Starbucks-like outlet) but despised the remainder top to bottom.

It basically plays on the same broad farcical level of Ticket to Paradise, that godawful George Clooney-Julia Roberts South Seas comedy (also shot down under).

HE’s alternate ending for The Holdovers: Paul Giamatti’s curmudgeonly history professor isn’t canned but impulsively quits in order to travel to Greece and write his novel…something like that.

Other suggestions?

A high judicial authority has finally agreed that a certain deranged insurrectionist is disqualified from running for President next year…praise God.

All of HE’s woke racist shriekers are getting the bounce today…Seasonal Aflac Disord, OneLastTime, Glenn Runciter…all the toxic ayeholes with their little sharp sticks.

Clemenza: “Gotta get rid of the bad blood, the uglies…this needs to happen every five years…ten years.”

I don’t agree with any of these “best” calls. What these films are is “not half bad in an interesting, arresting way.“

I finally half-liked Munich when I re-watched it a year ago.

Pale Rider is basically Shane as a ghost.

Magnolia is essentially a morose middle-class thing enlivened by Tom Cruise, the third-act musical sequence and the frog finale.

Casino is watchable, but is gradually asphyxiated by Sharon Stone’s noxious self-destruction and Robert DeNiro’s nonsensical attraction to her. And then Joe Pesci and his brother are beaten to death and buried alive in a cornfield.

For me Kathryn Bigelow caught glorious fire as a director when she made The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Then she got tangled up in the mania of exposing horrible historical truths (i.e., evil white cops murdering victims of color) in Detroit, and the air just whooshed out of the balloon.

She’s flat-out lied, in fact, about what it’s like to be swamped and smothered by hordes of American tourists in Tuscany’s San Gimignano, which Jett and I visited 14 or 15 years ago.

Campbell, a tour guide, has almost certainly decided that failing to mention how never-ending busloads of Aunt Biddies routinely suffocate the medieval vibe…she’s figuring that omitting this horrid fact is necessary to sell the city itself. Plus she misspells it.

From HE’s 5.17.10 Cannes review of Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (“Dweebie Conforme”):

In late January a restored 4K version of Roman Polanski Oscar-winning The Pianist will have a seven-day run at the Film Forum (1.26 thru 2.1). This will surely be followed by subsequent big-city bookings and a 4K Bluray.

This means something, methinks.

In the wake of the triumphant reviews and Cesar awards that greeted Polanski’s J’Accuse in Europe two years ago, I was told by reps for Bluray distribs and streamers that they wouldn’t dare stream Polanski’s historical thriller over fears of #MeToo protests, etc. Which seemed especially cowardly on their part and profoundly heinous on the part of Polanski’s detractors. The mere streaming of one of Polanski’s greatest films from the privacy of your own home…what kind of rabid fanaticism would forbid even this?

But the Pianist restoration suggests the winds are shifting.

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