This is some kind of optical photographic distortion. Richard Burton (5’10”) seems too large compared to Clint Eastwood (6’4″). Elizabeth Taylor was only 5’2″ — a stature sister of Kamala Harris.
Jeffrey Wells
Almost Everyone Seems Highly Promising in High School
Not to mention that slender, physically glowing quality. And yet I was fairly full of despair at 17 and 18. I felt no real hope and excitement about anything until I hit 25 or 26. And then slowly and very gradually, the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.
Clueless Midwestern Yokel Fashion Statement
That white-ish, elephant-collar jacket adorned with primitive paintings of divebombing bluebirds and whatnot…that plus the douchey whitewall buzzcut, the troglodyte stubble ‘stache and nascent beard, the open-collar white shirt and those godawful brown pants.
Life is nothing if not style choices, and when you wear a light brown double–breasted suit jacket for an SNL hosting gig, you’ve pretty much confirmed that you’ll never, ever “get it.” Amiable aw-shucks personality aside, your future is mapped out, bro…you’ve pretty much cancelled your own ticket.
Destroy All Haters
I have never forgotten the pain that I felt 15 years ago when an ex-girlfriend told me I wasn’t as slim as I had been a year or two earlier, and that I needed to drop around 10 pounds.
Nothing hurts like this. It’s agony — it cripples your very soul. Which is why there can be no forgiving Emily Blunt for what she said 11 years ago about that fat waitress. Apologies are meaningless at this stage. She needs to be cancelled permanently. Kidding.
“Holdovers” Will Soon Face Music
Glenn Kenny was deeply annoyed by yesterday’s TikTok pan of Killers of the Flower Moon by “benpiketheactor.” And so he lashed out at this balding “brainiac” while concurrently throwing shade upon the potential critical reaction to Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers.
HE reply:
“Benpiketheactor” will most likely embrace The Holdovers and perhaps even adore it for its close-to-amazing resuscitation of a crafty, character-driven ‘70s film, savvy narrative scheme and all. Not a skillful imitation of a good ‘70s film but an actual reanimation of one.
He may not be old enough to speak with authority on this particular matter, but Ben will probably applaud it for reminding audiences what well–written, well–acted, middle–class films were like back then…back when directors and writers actually knew how to craft and deliver third acts that played like THIRD ACTS of CONSEQUENCE.
What has everyone been saying about Alexander Payne’s prep school film since it first peeked out at Telluride? Seven words: “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” I can’t envision this TikTok guy not echoing the same.
Verily I say unto you that one day in the not-too-distant future The Holdovers will be paired with Hal Ashby and Robert Towne’s The Last Detail at the New Beverly Cinema.
One of Greatest Monochrome Profile + Hair Glamour Shots of All Time
Jean Seberg looks ten times better in this carefully posed shot than in any particular scene in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (‘64). Her hair is truly astounding.
“Killers” in Westport
Late yesterday afternoon I sat through my second viewing of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. (My first exposure was on 5.20.23 at the Salle Debussy, or five months ago.) It happened at Westport’s AMC Royale 6, Theatre #3 at 4 pm.
The screen illumination was decidedly dim (in Cannes the brightness levels seemed well above the SMPTE standard of 14 or 15 foot lamberts) and so the whole thing felt needlessly shrouded and vaguely downish…dark rainclouds overhead.
Plus there were only four of us in the theatre — Jody and myself plus a 60ish couple in the rear.
I knew I would be experiencing a kind of waiting, stuck-in-the-Oklahoma-mud gaslighting hell for the first two hours. For it’s not just Lily Gladstone being monotonously lied to by Robert DeNiro’s incessantly drawling “King” Hale and his dumbfuck nephew, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart — it was me also…me, Jeffrey Wells, sprawled in my handicapped seat for extra legroom…I had to sit through all that gaslighting bullshit…lying, lying, “ahh feel fer yew in your tahhm of grief”…will you shut the fuck up already, Bobby?
I flinched with every DeNiro sighting. Jesus, here it comes again…”we wull leave no stone unturned in order to fahhnd these killers…”
And then finally Jesse Plemons (as FBI investigator Tom White) shows up at the two-hour mark, and things start to pick up. But even then…
For one thing there’s no real Lily / Mollie catharsis at the end. No admonishments, no barking, no “how dare you?”
Even during her final scene with Leo / Ernest, after White has doubtless told her the full sordid truth about Leo’s conspiratorial complicity in the Osage murder spree as well as her own poisoning, Lily / Mollie can’t bring herself to slap or even scold that hayseed.
Instead she embraces Leo / Ernest and then her right palm gently touches the side of his face. Lily’s pained expression says, “I feel mostly pity in my heart for you, my poor dumb beef-bod yokel. You’re the lamb who went astray and saw to the deaths of my family and friends…poor little stupid baby.”
Not very dramatically satisfying, Lily, Leo and Marty!
Respect for Burt Young
Prior to yesterday’s announcement about the passing of Burt Young, I was honestly under a vague impression that he had passed 10 or 15 years ago.
I’m not saying this disrespectfully — I had just come to believe that Young, 83, had breathed his last during the Obama administration, or even before that. Somehow that driving-and-coughing death scene in that Sopranos episode (he played Bobby Baccalieri‘s cancer-ridden dad) had lodged in my memory as the real thing, or an omen of same.
Oh, and Young’s Chinatown character (“Curly”) wasn’t a “rotten client” of Jack Nicholson “Jake Gittes”, as THR’s Mike Barnes described him yesterday. Curly was actually a decent schlubby guy from Long Beach who helped Jake out in a pinch.
Young’s second most vivid performance was as “Bed Bug Eddie” in The Pope of Greenwich Village (‘84).
I know he played “Paulie” in all those Rocky movies, of course, but those were mostly paycheck gigs. Okay, the first one (in the 1976 John Avildsen-directed original) wasn’t — Young actually derived a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination out of that effort.
Young passed on 10.8, or a week and a half ago.
Billionaire’s Row
If you’re living in one of these soulless, pencil-thin glass towers on Central Park South, you are definitely suffering from a serious aesthetic deficiency — a condition some would call the wealthy Shallow Hal syndrome.
Rossen’s Dream Dashed
In other words, during filming of The Hustler director Robert Rossen developed the hots for female lead Piper Laurie, unaware that she’d been “seeing” critic Joe Morgenstern (aka “JoMo”). Just before filming ended Rossen offered Laurie a significant role (presumably the sensuous, mentally disturbed temptress that Jean Seberg eventually played) in Lilith, but the blood drained from Rossen’s face when Laurie said she was about to marry Morgenstern…gaahhh!
