Jeff Wells

I for one love vitriolic shouting matches on political talk shows. Can’t get enough of them. Mother’s milk.

Yesterday’s piss-balloon battle between conservative Katie Miller (wife of the demonic Stephen Miller) and Cenk Uygur on Piers Morgan Uncensored was as good as it got.

Not for Miller, as she seemed untethered to any sense of candor or humility as she used her Jewish identity like a battering ram, but for viewers everywhere.

It starts at 38:55. Piers’ panelists also included conservative fitness advocate Jillian Michaels and Palestinian American analyst Omar Baddar.

Miller: “Why is it that every time someone wants to criticize Zohran Mamdani, it immediately comes back to the Jews and the anti-Israel movement instead of actually talking about his viewpoints?”

Uygur: “Nobody said Jews. You just said it. You always do that. We say Israel, you say Jews. We say Israel as a government. Please don’t make it about Jewish Americans. You’re totally lying…it’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying. You and your husband are supposed to be working for America. Not for Israel. I think you’re betraying this country.”

Neil Rosen and Roger Friedman have un-posted (i.e., taken down) a convivial discussion with Woody Allen. The chat happened several days ago inside Woody’s downstairs den.

Friedman to HE (received at 6:54 pm eastern): “I don’t know how you came upon the unlisted link to our Woody Allen interview. It was not yours to publish. We’re always grateful for publicity, but the piece was not finished. It’s been removed and will launch soon properly. I’m disappointed that you didn’t contact me before posting it. Just so there’s no question, Woody loves the interview. It’s our decision to launch it properly.”

HE to Friedman: “Fine, but what’s the big deal? It was a really nice interview. Good stuff. No need to go all Soviet Union or Vladimir Lenin on your would-be fans.”

Back to interview commentary: Right away I was asking myself “okay, but is there a ‘take it to the bank’ money quote here?” Woody stating that he didn’t write Diane Keaton‘s “lah-dee-dah” line in Annie Hall, that she improvised it…okay, that’s one.

Neil trumpets the technical fact that Woody’s first film was Take The Money and Run (’69).

But in my mind, Woody’s first movie was What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (’66). Which I have a special place in my heart for. Partly because I’ve never stopped laughing at the throwaway bit in which the Grand Poobah shows Phil Moskowitz a hand-drawn map and says “this is Shepherd Wong‘s home”, and Phil asks “he lives in that piece of paper?”

Friedman mentions Luca Guadagnino‘s decison to use Windsor Light font — a Woody signature for decades — for After The Hunt‘s opening credits, and calls it “weird” because there’s nothing funny or classically Allen-esque about Luca’s film.

HE reply: It’s not “weird” — the Windsor Light font is an allusion to Woody having suffered over an allegation of sexual assault, which is what After The Hunt is about. It’s also a tribute, a fan gesture…a statement of emotional or political allegiance.

The interview happened by way of Friedman’s longstanding relationship with Allen, so I understand why smart-assed comedian and movie hound Bill McCuddy wasn’t part of this. Three interviewers would have been too much.

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One of the basic House of Dynamite messages, strategically speaking, is that this country’s “iron dome” defense system doesn’t work all that well, especially when the task is “htting a bullet with a bullet.” This has been disputed by Trump’s defense department, but nobody trusts a single word they might say, of course.

Fair question #1: “Yeah, okay, hitting a bullet with a bullet is a tough nut to crack but if you can’t lick this technological challenge, then what good are you, Jimmy Dick?”

Fair question #2: If you were screenwriter Noah Oppenheim and creating A House of Dynamite on your Macbook Pro, would your instinct be to show Chicago being melted to death and/or blown into little shards with a super-gigantic mushroom cloud reaching so many miles high that even Cary Grant‘s Roger Thornhill could see it from that Prairie Stop Highway 41 cornfield, which was….what, in southeastern Illinois or western Indiana?

Or would you figure “naaah, it’s more effective to hold back and prompt the audience to imagine the carnage instead?”

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Posted on 8.24.05: The winding down of the ’05 summer is fortunate in two respects: it’s getting a tiny bit cooler in the city (there was a transcendent breeze travelling southward down Broadway Monday night around 9:30 pm), and it gives me something to write about during a flat week.

It felt to me like an above-average summer. At the end of each year I always come up with a list of 40 or 45 films that were good, very good or excellent, and here we had a summer providing about 21 first-raters, or just over five per month. (I’m going by the perimeters of May 1st through August 30th.) Not bad for a season that’s generally thought to be mainly about flotsam, popcorn and yeehaw.

GOOD AS IT GOT (in the following order): Hustle & Flow, The Constant Gardener, Cinderella Man, Last Days, Crash, The Beautiful Country, Grizzly Man, Wedding Crashers, Batman Begins, Mad Hot Ballroom, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Aristocrats, Broken Flowers, Kingdom of Heaven, The White Diamond, Layer Cake, Cronicas, My Summer of Love, This Divided State, Tell Them Who You Are, War of the Worlds.

That was the good news, although I’m presuming very few even had the option of seeing The White Diamond, a Werner Herzog doc I wrote about in the June 8 column, or Mark Wexler‘s Tell Them Who You Are, a feisty portrait of the director’s relationship with his overbearing dad, the award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler.

The lesser films were tedious, grueling or worse. I am one who feels especially dispirited by cheesily commercial films made by directors and writers whom I know are capable of delivering much smarter and craftier stuff, and…well, I guess I should leave Judd Apatow and The 40 Year-Old Virgin alone. (I’ve been warned by readers.)

But this isn’t an obsession thing of mine. It’s a sum-up piece and Virgin is really, really not fit to lick the boots of The Wedding Crashers, and it certainly deserves to be called the SUMMER’S MOST OVER-PRAISED SO-SO COMEDY.

Just gonna zotz out the rest…

PUTRID, REPUGNANT, MALIGNANT…NOT TO MENTION ONE OF THE MOST BREATHTAKING CAPITULATIONS & SELL-OUTS IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY BY A TALENTED DIRECTOR WHO KNEW BETTER: Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which way too many people gave a pass to with the rationale that it was harmless fluff.

MOST ATTENTION-GETTING WIPEOUT & ACROSS-THE-BOARD CAREER DAMAGER: The Island. The bitch-slapping of Michael Bay may not have been such a bad thing for the guy. The only way Bay is going to do better work (and I know he’s capable of it) is to be woken up from the narcotized pipe dream of being Michael Bay (muscle cars, bimbo girlfriends, parking in handicapped spaces, etc.), and it’s a safe bet that the staggering failure of The Island has made him reconsider his whole program. Producer Walter Parks got slapped around also when he said insufficient star wattage on the part of Island costar Scarlett Johansson was one of the reasons the film tanked; the take-no-guff Johansson fired right back and set him straight.

MOST LOATHSOME BIG-STUDIO RELEASES AFTER PREVIOUS TWO: The Dukes of Hazzard, Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, Bewitched.

SEX SCENES SO BORING AND UNAPPETIZING THAT THOUSANDS OF COUPLES MIGHT HAVE BEEN PERSUADED TO PUT ASIDE SEXUAL ACTIVITY FOR A BRIEF PERIOD: Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. NOTEWORTHY ON-SCREEN IMPROV: After Kieran O’Brien playfully blindfolds Margo Stilley in 9 Songs, she says, “I can’t see!”

A MOVIE THAT PERSUADED ME TO THINK NEGATIVELY ABOUT A BIRD SPECIES THAT I’VE HAD NOTHING AGAINST MY ENTIRE LIFE: March of the Penguins. You can sing the praises of this doc all you want, but those Emperor penguins spend way too much time trudging across Antarctic wastelands and sitting on unhatched eggs during blizzards. The success of this film was mainly driven by women and old people. Tell me one regular guy you know who went to this thing on his own (or with his regular-guy friends) and came back going, “Amazing!” I don’t want to see any animals suffer, but it would have enlivened things if a few more penguins had been eaten by predators.

AS A LIVE-ACTION DIRECTOR, IT’S TIME TO FACE THE FACT THAT TIM BURTON MAY BE OVER: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

NOT ENOUGH: Monster-in-Law, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, Bad News Bears, Dark Water, Asylum, The Chumscrubber, Lila Says , Rize.

FLATLINERS: The Longest Yard, Madagascar, Kings and Queen, Lords of Dogtown, Must Love Dogs , Fantastic Four, Stealth, The Brothers Grimm, Heights.

WANTED TO SEE ‘EM, MISSED THE SCREENINGS, COULDN’T SEE FORKING OVER TEN BUCKS, ETC.: Howl’s Moving Castle, High Tension, The Devil’s Rejects, November, Mysterious Skin, Murderball, The Edukators .

WOULDN’T SEE ‘EM AT THE POINT OF A KNIFE: The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, The Honeymooners, Herbie: Fully Loaded .

NOT HALF BAD: Yes, Red Eye, Four Brothers, Reel Paradise, House of Wax, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, The Great Raid, The Last Mogul , Me and You and Everyone We Know, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead.

BIGGEST ACTOR BREAKTHROUGHS: Rachel McAdams (The Wedding Crashers, Red Eye), who could wind up doing it all. Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash), who deserves a Best Actor nomination hands-down for his Memphis pimp. Vince Vaughn (Wedding Crashers…can’t wait for his tortured deejay movie for director David O. Russell). And Amy Adams (Junebug), although she needs to move beyond that sweet and trusting magnolia-blossom thing.

LEAST INTRIGUING NEW ACTOR (and a possible speed-bump for Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of our Fathers): Jesse Bradford , the costar of Heights who, in that film, wore a fixed expression that said, “I’m not really getting what’s going on…I’m not sure what to say or do…maybe if I just stand here long enough looking like a stubble-faced bowling pin with legs, events will sort themselves out.”

SUMMER’S BIGGEST STOCK-DROPPERS: Tom Cruise and Will Ferrell. Will Cruise ever get back the lustre he had in the wake of Jerry Maguire, or are emperors forever disempowered once the public has seen them without their aura of mystery and velvet robes? When Ferrell came out of the shadows of that bungalow to talk with Owen Wilson in that third-act scene in Wedding Crashers, you could almost hear the film’s energy collapse and an instant consensus form in the audience that he didn’t belong and was way overdoing it. Plus he was ickily unfunny in Bewitched . This sounds incredible for a guy who’s only been a marquee draw since Old School, but he may already be heading downhill.

COLD-SHOULDERED, UNDER-ATTENDED, INSUFFICIENTLY LOVED (but not by me!): Cinderella Man, Kingdom of Heaven, Tell Them Who You Are, My Date With Drew.

But Gavin is dead fucking wrong when he says “all this anti-woke stuff is just anti-black…period, full stop.”

HE fully agrees with WaywardGreg: “Being anti-woke isn’t racist. Quite the opposite, actually. People who are anti-woke simply don’t want immutable characteristics being used as a criteria for judging human value.”

HE sez: If you’re black, you’re not necessarily an angel…you might be but not necessarily because of your ethnic identity. And if you’re white, you’re not necessarily a demonic force for racial cruelty…you might be but not necessarily because of your Wonderbread pigmentation.”

…by director Robert Aldrich having told the supporting players to hop up and down and go “whoop-dee-doo!” and “yee-hah!”…it could have been magnificent if the actors had been told to hold it down and act like men and not like five-year-olds, but Aldrich was couldn’t summon the character.

My first viewing of Manhattan was on opening day — Friday, 4.25.79. (Movies didn’t open on Thursdays back then.) I couldn’t wangle a ticket to the big premiere at the Zeigfeld on 4.18, so I saw it at a modest-sized theatre that I can’t recall the name of, but it was located on East 34th street, perhaps near Third Avenue or Lexington but definitely not as far east as Second Ave.

I waited in line a good 45 minutes or so, enjoying the expectant vibe, and what a surge when the crowd finally began to shuffle indoors. The almost quaalude-like high that rippled through the audience during the opening George Gershwin-meets-Gordon Willis montage was ecstatic, shattering — one of the greatest surges of pure cinematic feeling that I’ve ever experienced.

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