Jeff Wells

And none of the finest films of 2024 can begin to compete with it, quality-wise. The wild and woolly outdoors, and shot on a Warner Bros. soundstage yet! The dp was Ted McCord (Young Man with a Horn, East of Eden, The Sound of Music). Razor-sharp focus. The lighting was/is as good as it gets.

Go to any wealthy or plain old middle-class bedroom community and you’ll never, ever see junker cars from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s parked on residential streets. But there are all kinds of decades-old beaters in laid-back, nestled-away Ojai, which is a hugely expensive place to live and quiet as fuck — you can hear a pin drop on Main Street.

…I’d want it be over as quickly as possible. So I’d choose a single, ruthless, chomp-and-gulp from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I certainly wouldn’t want to get pecked to death by a Pterodactyl.

Posted on 6.6.18:

…Netflix execs would have Karla Sofia Gascon meet with an “accident” of some kind…just like Peter Finch‘s Howard Beale goes down in a hail of bullets after Robert Duvall‘s Frank Hackett and Faye Dunaway‘s Diana Christianson decide they have no other choice.

Paddy Chayefsky cooked it up, and then Sidney Lumet shot and cut it with all the necessary skills.

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Is it fair to say that mainstream media types are being a bit ageist in their reportings and commentaries about Elon Musk‘s young guns, otherwise known as the six DOGE hotshots?

Mainstream mantra: “What the fuck is this?…they’re too young, too brash…what do they know?…this is crazy!”

The subhead of this article is “All The Young Dudes.”

Posted three days ago (2.2.25) by Wired‘s Vittoria Elliot, Dhruv Mehrotra, Zoë Schiffer and Tim Marchman:

Six young dudes, all in or certainly adjacent to their early 20s, are key players in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, “tasked by executive order” with “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

These brazen engineers, every one a gunslinger and all of them absolute government virgins, have basically been given the keys to the inner workings and wirings of the federal kingdom.

The hotshots are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran.

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…it means the guy in question is almost certainly putting it to the woman in question. He’s at least giving it serious thought.

This Jon Voight-Raquel Welch pic was, I believe, snapped just before the 1975 Oscar ceremony. (Or just after.) Voight’s daughter, Angelina Jolie, who lives to hate and hold grudges, was born three months later (6.4.75).

“Whadaya think of this boner I’ve got here?” — Voight in Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis (‘24).

“Am I a drug-dealer of color? Are we in Inglewood?” — Eric Stoltz to John Travolta in Pulp Fiction (‘94).

Call it vague or paranoid or alarmingly perceptive, but last night I listened to a futuristic nightmare AI scenario. I texted the doomsayer this morning, shared a few thoughts:

“I can’t stop thinking about your gloomy robot forecast.

“Not just AI’s current, ongoing mimicry of most forms of Hollywood ‘creativity’, but its eventual, inevitable conquering…the swallowing of organic Hollywood culture as many of us know it or certainly have known it over the last half-century, and within 20 or 25 years.

“Sutton will turn 29 in 2050, and she’ll be right in the thick of it.

“Right now AI is merely working its way into things by mimicry and flattery, but give it time.

“When did this scenario occur to you? When you first contemplated the implications of HAL nine-triple-zero in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or did the light switch on more recently?

“If it’s a natural conclusion based on experience, have you written any of it down? Even fragments would be great. Last night you seemed to have the diagnosis down cold. You’ve been thinking and refining.

“From Aeschylus and Euripides in 450 to 500 B.C. to as recently as 2015 or 2020, there was only one kind of dramatic writing and crafting — a natural, organic, brain-to-hands-and-fingers process drawn from the rigors of daily life, refined through compression and struggle.

“2500 years of dramatic process and storytelling, and now, human-fallibility-wise, that’s coming to an end.

“I also liked your take on the next seismic shift in filmmaking coming from TikTokers. They’ll be working ‘with’ AI, of course, but indifferently or obliviously or what?

“Do you know any slightly younger creatives who have shared observations along these lines?”

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Given the corrosive reputations of Donald J. Trump and his onetime mentor Roy Cohn, who died from AIDS in the mid ’80s, you might expect some kind of wicked hit job from Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice.

And you’d be…well, partly wrong.

The film leans heavily on the factual record, and so Trump and Cohn don’t exactly come off as honorable or admirable at the end of the day, but they aren’t portrayed as total scumbags either.

Which is a bit surprising. It’s even affecting.

During the first half of The Apprentice Sebastian Stan‘s Trump comes off, believe it or not, like a relatively sympathetic ’70s lad from Queens — a bit naive and unsteady, hungry for fame and fortune, a hard-charging comer trying to learn the ropes and make something of himself as best he can.

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Trumpistan gradually succumbs to a kind of cynical, brusque egotism before morphing into out-and-out venality, but in the early stages Stan allows you to actually feel a little something for the guy.

Ditto Jeremy Strong‘s Cohn, who is unmistakably avaricious and reptilian during The Apprentice‘s first half, but gradually registers as half-human when Part Two kicks in.

With Trump having essentially decided to throw personal loyalty to the winds after learning that Cohn is sick with AIDS, the frail, soft-spoken Cohn emerges as a more or less tragic figure — you actually feel a shred of sympathy.

Which is quite a feat considering who and what Cohn actually was.

And here’s another rooting factor, although it may sound a bit hard-edged:

Above and beyond the obvious quality of their Oscar-nominated performances, Stan (now preparing to shoot Fjord for Romanian helmer Cristian Mingiu) and Strong are the only Oscar nominees associated with a thumbs-down message about the real Donald Trump. Today’s version, I mean.

Until recently Emilia Perez star and Best Actress Oscar nominee Karla Sofia Gascon stood to benefit the most from anti-orange sentiment. Several weeks ago THR‘s Scott Feinberg speculated that a vote for the transitioned Gascon could be interpreted as an extended middle finger aimed at you-know-who.

But right now the general consensus is that Gascon’s campaign has self-destructed with those years-old racist tweets, and so at the risk of sounding a bit mercenary, it can be argued that Stan and Strong are now the only viable symbols of anti-Trump industry fervor.

Do I believe that acting Oscars should be bestowed with this kind of political motive? No, I don’t — my feelings about Oscars are too romantic and deep-rooted to allow for this kind of thinking or symbology. But many AMPAS members, I gather, are itching to send a message to MAGA nation. Who am I to say they’re wrong?

To hide the possible fact that…what exactly? That she was a lesbian? So what? Who cares?

Friendo: “The problem with DEI isn’t that people get jobs because of it — it’s that people are too afraid to be honest with those they want to elevate.

“Women directors are graded on a curve, as are Black directors. This is because people want to be encouraging…they want the story to have a happy ending. But the problem is that in the end it ends up becoming more detrimental if you put someone in a job they’re not ready for or not innately good at (like Kamala Harris).

“Qualifications are one thing but the question is, could Cpt. Rebecca Lobach fly that helicopter like a champ or not? Choppers crash from time to time, but how often do they crash into other planes and kill everyone on board? I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that we have to be able to talk about who can do the the job and who can’t without worrying about being called a racist or a bigot.

“Helicopters crash every so often but they don’t crash into moving planes so the basic appearance is that Lobach was not a person who was skilled enough to handle that flight…what other conclusion could there be? That she was skilled enough? Then why that awful collision?”

That’s Cahuenga Blvd. and the Hollywood Freeway in the distance, and a scene between Peter Ustinov‘s Lintulus Batiatus and Laurence Olivier‘s Marcus Licinius Crassus in the grassy foreground.

I’m guessing that the hatless, dark-haired guy standing behind the 70mm Technirama camera is none other than director Stanley Kubrick.

Shot sometime in the late winter or spring of 1960.

…Harris Dickinson. Why? He’s got cold eyes — the eyes of a guy who could put a couple of silencer bullets into an adversary’s chest without blinking. Plus he’s authentically British. Plus he’ll be 29 in June and 30 or 31 when (and if) the next Bond film finally gets around to shooting…exactly the right age.

Daily Mail‘s Jonathan Dean is dismissing Dickinson because Sam Mendes has apparently locked him down as John Lennon for the next two or three years.

HE to Dickinson: Drop out of Mendes’ Beatles project immediately as it will be a disaster (certainly in my eyes) due to the most poorly calculated ensemble casting in the history of commercial cinema — the utterly reprehensible, quickly-downspiraling Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, the completely loathsome, warlock-eyed Barry Koehgan as Ringo Starr, and the geeky-looking, ginger-haired Joseph Quinn as George Harrison. Ridiculous!

Save yourself, Dickinson!…save yourself from a chain-linked anvil of a movie that will wrap itself around your neck and drag you down for years.