Jeff Wells

All hail fond memories of Peter, Paul and Mary as we lament the passing of Peter Yarrow, who had a gentle spirit within him. Or so I always felt.

Peter, Paul and Mary peaked for roughly a decade — between the early to late ’60s. But they’re regarded as a classic evergreen act, or they were for a long while.

Peter had the gentle soul, the late Mary Travers had great pipes and the blonde folkie hottie glamour thing until (I’m sorry but there’s no sidestepping this) she turned into a whale, and Paul Stookey had the folkie smartass thing.

When I think of Yarrow I think of “Puff, The Magic Dragon” (’62), which he wrote based on a Leonard Lipton poem. And when I think of Mary I think of her excellent 1969 recording of “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”, which was written by John Denver. And when I think of Paul I think of “I Dig Rock ‘n’ Roll Music” (’67), which he co-authored.

I don’t like admitting this, but when I look at YouTubes of Peter, Paul and Mary, I vastly prefer videos recorded when they were young, slender and attractive. Old bald Peter is okay because his kind-heartedness comes through at any age, but I still prefer the guy he was in the ’60s. But I really don’t like looking at…uhm, I prefer looking at videos of young, rail-thin Mary.

Here’s a slightly less articulate version of HE’s post-Golden Globes complaint (2.6, 10:30 am) about Emilia Perez beating Anora in the comedy-musical category.

@emmasamanthaaa GOODBYE #fyp #fypシ #anora #snub #emiliaperez #movie #goldenglobes ♬ original sound – emma

John Ford’s The Searchers, which is back in the stream of things with a brand-new 4K restoration, is not the greatest American movie or even the greatest American western.

It goes on and on and on. Episode after episode after episode. Runs 119 minutes, but feels like 150 minutes if not three hours.

The visual compositions are magnificent start to finish and the iconic John Wayne is excellent in a caustic and ferocious way, but oh, God, the story and the supporting performances drive you crazy

Jeffrey Hunter’s over-acting is deeply painful (I’m sitting there begging him to effing tone it down); ditto Vera Miles.

Hunter’s Martin Pawley writes Miles’ Laurie Jorgensen ONE non-romantic letter over a five-year period and is surprised that she gets engaged to someone else?


The over-spirited Ford ensemble celebration scenes amount to a kind of cornball endurance test. Hank Worden‘s acting as village idiot Mose Harper is silly and cartoonish.

The simplistic racist depictions of Comanches as mere bloodthirsty savages, not to mention that poor overweight Indian woman who is treated like garbage and then killed by U.S. troops and especially the wailing delirium of those white women who had been kidnapped and raised by Native Americans…all deeply repulsive.

The film offers no explanation why Natalie Wood’s Debbie has no children by Henry Brandon’s Scar, who has been fertilizing her for years on end and probably prior to puberty as Lana Wood was eight or nine when she played adolescent Debbie at the time of her abduction.

Ethan Edwards’ last-minute abandonment of racist fanaticism is just thrown in there without rhyme or reason — his character arc is basicallly “Indian hate and revenge, hate and revenge, hate and revenge, hate and revenge…hate, hate, hate” and then “let’s go home, Debbie.”

Ford’s The Horse Soldiers (‘59) is much more realistic and just as sad and even poetic and far less arduous.

From Reid Rosefelt‘s admiring, strongly written, no-holds-barred Facebook review of A Complete Unknown, posted this morning:

And this…

It’s utterly miserable out there. Nothing but frosty, biting, stinging pain when you step outside. It’s mostly the wind chill. North Pole agony.

Posted on 6.23.12: The boys and I visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial early yesterday afternoon. It’s located 9 miles to the northwest of Munich. You take a subway (about a 20 minute ride) and then grab a bus or a taxi when you hit town. It’s surprising when you reach the entrance, which is located on a fragrant, curving, tree-lined street. Maybe 150 visitors were there, some with tour guides. At first it feels like you’re walking into a large, well-tended city park. It’s attractive. And then you get to the main gate.

The words on the base of the statue, translated into English: “To honor the dead, to admonish the living.”

How can you visit a place like this and not feel sickened and somewhat depleted? I felt like I wanted to nap minutes after I began walking around the grounds. My system was feeling the odious signals and just wanted to shut down and escape, I guess. Obviously going there was not about me but about them. But I was thinking all kinds of tedious and banal thoughts. Some kind of blocking mechanism?

The main pebble-covered yard separating the German command and SS barracks and the area where the prisoner barracks stood is flat and wide and quite vast. Only two barracks — simulations of the actuals — remain on the grounds; only the gravel-based foundations of the rest remain. We saw it all and felt as much as we were able. Some 31,000 people were killed there. I was imagining what it might have felt like to be stuck at Dachau in the ’30s and ’40s, and how it might’ve felt to survive on a day-to-day basis. I can never know, of course, but my imagination was aflame and then some.

The ceiling on the gas chamber in the main crematorium building, located on the extreme southwest corner of the grounds, is quite low. The gas-dispensing “shower” holes on the ceiling were only eight or nine inches from the top of my head. There was one small window near the cement floor, covered with hard-metal chicken wire.

I couldn’t take any shots. The thought of raising my camera occured two or three times, and then it went away. At the end I forced myself to take a shot of a statue of an inmate (the model was Kurt Lange, a gay guy who served two “rehabilitation” sentences), and then one of the entrance.

Last night I read about the Dachau massacre, and I felt very, very gratified to read that after the camp was liberated in late April 1945, some U.S. soldiers gave handguns to some of the prisoners and allowed them to go to town on some of the SS guards.

We met a young Turkish guy at a food stand near the Dachau train/subway station, and his friendly personality and general vibe were really nice. “You from California?,” he asked. “Yeah, Los Angeles.” He has a brother in California, he said. “What town?,” I asked. “I don’t know, just California,” he said with a shrug and a smile. He’d obviously love to visit. It could have been anyone, but it was just beautiful on a certain level to meet and talk with him a bit. Some people just have an aura.

Donald J. Trump is a brutish sociopath who had permanently soiled his reputation well before the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But the Capitol MAGA riot that happened exactly four years ago today sealed his rep for good.

Trump is a criminal — an anti-democratic, would-be dictator in the mold of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and the recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. U.S democracy has been permanently bent and dented by Trump, and it’ll take many years to recover or restore any sense of normalcy because of his pathology.

I hate wokesters as much as the next guy, but the forthcoming Trump solution will be worse than any kind of crazy Kamala Harris wokester regime.

Posted by N.Y. Times editorial board on 9.30.24:

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Best un-used Glazer joke: “If Adrien Brody could go back in time, he would thank baby Hitler for his career.” A mostly spot-on joke because Brody does owe his career to a pair of holocaust-survival movies, The Pianist and The Brutalist. And yet the idea behind the joke is appallingly unfunny. The evasive reference to “baby” Hitler is what might have saved it.

“Baby” was used because if a time-travelled Brody were to reach out to an adult Hitler — the 34 year-old Beer Hall Putsch Hitler of 1923, let’s say — and say, “Herr Hitler, you don’t know me and you’re probably flinching at the thought of talking to me as I’m half-Jewish and you’re an anti-Semite, but I just want to thank you in advance for bringing about the future Holocaust because this horrific systematic mass slaughter will inspire two movies that will prove beneficial to my career in the 21st Century”…see? Not a laugh line.

Glazer told Howard Stern that she didn’t use the joke because “my assistant is GenZ, and she was like, ‘I don’t get it.’ And we’re like, ‘Well, there’s this whole thing where you could, if you have a time machine, you go back and kill Hitler and you prevent the Holocaust.’ And so it’s like, oh, we’re gonna lose a whole demo of people that don’t know [about Hitler and the holocaust]. And then I just said Hitler for nothing.”

There’s “a whole demo of people” who honestly don’t know about Hitler and the holocaust? Consider that assertion for a few seconds.

Worst un-used Glazer joke: “Glen Powell is nominated tonight for Hit Man. Who would have thought that by the end of the year, he’d only be the second hottest hit man in America” — a reference to United Healthcare CEO shooter Luigi Mangione. Initially half-funny until you think about it for two seconds. Hit men are hired killers — they do it for money. Mangione was a lone gunman who was vengeance-driven — nothing whatsoever to do with brown-bag money or Swiss bank accounts.

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I feel sick inside. Poisoned even.

And here we go…

11:14 pm: Emilia Perez (which I was okay with) has won the Best Musical or Comedy award…well, at least Wicked (which I was okay with) didn’t win. Why did I just say that? I don’t know. Let me mull this over. I don’t have a problem with either film but I just hate that my favorite, Anora, was completely blown off. Who are these GG voters? Mostly international types, right? Were they bought off or contact-highed or schmoozed off by Netflix? What happened?

11:04 pm: The damn Brutalist is going to win best Motion Picture Drama…dear howling, vomiting God. Yes, it has. Please punch me in the face, and then kick me in the ribs three or four times. If only The Brutalist budget had been significantly higher, this wouldn’t be happening. You did it so cheaply, o beautiful frugal Brady! “This movie is fairly punishing…monstrously bad filmmaking.” — Dale Launer.

10:55 pm: Best Male Actor in a Motion Picture Drama has to go to Timothee Chalamet…no? No — it goes to The Brutalist‘s Adrien Brody!! Did somebody put his or her thumb on the scale? Aaaaaggghhhh! Spit choke arrrggghhh! This is awful…I’m literally slapping myself. Angels are screaming…falling from heaven. This is awful!

10:51 pm: Best Female Actress in a Motion Picture Drama goes to Fernanda Torres in I’m Stll Here? Nobody’s seen it! Well, some have, obviously, but where’s it playing or streaming? Hearty congrats to Torres but this isn’t resonating. People are going “okay but huh?”

10:40 pm: Another Shogun award, this time for whatsername? And a fourth one for Best TV Series Drama? Repeat after me: “Shogun Shogun Shogun Shogun!!!”

10:29 pm: Hacks wins for Best TV Comedy….fine, whatever.

10:25 pm: The sickening, all-but-unwatchable Baby Reindeer wins a GG for Best Limited Series or Motion picture made for TV or Anthology? This show is becoming really awful. My internal organs are churning. “I can’t stand it” — Eric Clapton.

10:07 pm: Congrats to the Challengers music guys, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I don’t care about the Emilia Perez song that won. I don’t care about the GG box-office award. All I want to do is throw up over the Corbet win. Memo to Academy: Don’t let Jon M. Chu give any Oscar acceptance speeches. Please. The man won’t shut up.

9:54 pm: Best Director GG goes to The Brutalist‘s Brady Corbet? Get the fucking hell out of here, man! This is ridiculous. It’s a leaden, pretentious, all-but-impossible-to-sit-through slogathon. Pain in the brain. I’m kicking the furniture. I’m about to go into the kitchen and punch the refrigerator. Two absurd awards so far…Moore for The Substance, Corbet for directing that splitting headache of a period film.

9:47: Flow wins best Animated….great. I don’t care.

9:39 pm: I don’t care what anyone says…Sebastian Stan has won for his Donald Trump Apprentice performance as well as for his performance in A Different Man, which everyone respects and approves of but no one wants to sit through…please, no.

9:33 pm: Best Female Actor in a Drama GG goes to…Demi Moore?? For playing a wrapped-tight victim in a gaudy body-horror filM? HE respectfully disagrees. This is actually bullshit….I’m sorry but it is. Good, moving thank-you speech,. At least Karla Sofia Gascon didn’t win…whew.

9:19 pm: Best Female Actor in a limited series and whatever else — Jodie Foster for her excellent acting in the miserable-to-sit through Night Country.

9:16 pm: Colin Farrell wins for his Penguin makeup as well as his exceptional acting. Good man, great channeling. Wonderful shout-out for crafts services!

9:08 pm: Emilia Perez wins Best Int’l feature instead of All We Imagine As Light? C’mon! Is this a compensation award for Perez not winning Best Comedy or Musical?

9:01 pm: Ali Wong wins Best Standup Performqnce. Terrific…congrats!

8:57: Conclave‘s Peter Straughan wins for Best Screenplay! Approved! Doeds this indicate a general liking fo5 and perhaps even a preference for Conclave in certain other categories? I predicted Straughan’s win on my GG Gatecrashers ballot.

8:55 pm: The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White wins again? People are sick of Bear stuff always winning…enough!

8:50something pm: 8:41 pm: Baby Reindeer‘s Jessica Gunning wins a GG for her performance. Bates is living proof that Jessica can change whatever if she wants to go for it, but only if she wants to! Because she’s perfect as is!

8:44 pm: Tadanobu Asano wins supporting something-or-other GG for Shogun. Zero comment. Congrats.

8:38 pm: Kathy “Ozempic” Bates and whatsisname from In The Heights and Twister…right?

8:28 pm: Demi Moore‘s “what are you doing here?” repartee with Margaret Qualley is groan-worthy. The Shogun guy, Hiroyuki whatever, wins for acting. I’ll never, ever see Shogun….not a chance. Not with a samurai sword poking my throat.

8:25 pm: Best Supporting Actor award goes to…no surprise…Kieran Culkin for his Real Pain performance. No jacket, brightly colored tats on his right forearm. Obviously a guy with hyper hyper homina homina homina issues.

8:20 pm: I have no particular feelings, yea or nay, for Jean Smart or her GG Hacks in. Okay, congrats.

8:17 pm: Emilia Perez‘s Zoe Saldana wins for Best Supporting Actress. A good performance, but stop weeping. This had better not mean what I’m afraid it might signify in terms of other potential nominations. Way too much weeping! You’re being played off, man…for heaven’s sake! Note to Academy: Give your Best Supporting Actress Oscar to someone else….anyone else.

8:03 pm: Nikki Glazer: “Zendaya, you were so good in Dune….I woke up for all your scenes.” The Timothee Chalamet moustache joke…missed it. “My boyfriend’s boyfriend really loves Wicked.” “I give Babygirl two fingers up….so good.”

Look at the opening credits of David O. Selzneck and Charles Vidor‘s A Farewell to Arms (’57) — the words of the title do the same right-to-left horizontal crawl that Selznick’s Gone With The Wind used.

I’ve never actually watched all of this reportedly mediocre film, which is based, of course, on Ernest Hemingway’s drawn-from-real-life 1929 novel. But I’d like to see it regardless for the authentic Italian locations — the Italian Alps, Venzone in the Province of Udine in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lazio and Rome.

The Gary Cooper-Hleen Hayes Farewell to Arms Bluray is purchasable, but not the Hudson-Jones. The latter is on EBay, however, and there’s also a shitty-looking version on YouTube.

Selznick’s wife Jennifer Jones, then pushing 40, played the lead role of Catherine Barkley, a British nurse who was described by Hemingway as being in her mid 20s.

According to Carlos Baker’s 1969 Hemingway biography, the 58-year-old Hemingway was informed by Selznick that he would receive a $50,000 bonus from the film’s profits.

Unhappy with the Jones casting, EH replied: “If, by some chance your movie, which features the 38-year-old Mrs. Selznick as 24-year-old Catherine Barkley, does succeed in earning $50,000, I suggest that you take all of that money down to the local bank, have it converted to nickels, and then shove them up your ass until they come out your mouth.”

One of my favorite Los Angeles restaurants during the Bush and early Obama years was Typhoon, located adjacent to the Santa Monica Airport runway. The proprietor was Brian Vidor, son of director Charles. Excellent vibe, good people, delicious eats, exotic vibe…the kind of place that the characters from Only Angels Have Wings might have frequented.

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20 years ago in Park City, Utah, I went totally nuts for Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow. And so did the Sundancers who caught it there. I watched it again last night and it still works beautifully in its own gritty-ass way, but guess what? If Hustle & Flow hadn’t happened in ’05 and ’06, it couldn’t be made fresh today.

One, it presents too much of a downmarket, even denigrating portrait of a poor African American community (it’s set in Memphis) — not positive enough in terms of cultural self-image. Two, even as a transformational moth-into-a-hiphop-butterfly story, Hustle & Flow dwells too much on the ugly, skanky aspects of pimping and whoring and dope-dealing. And three, throughout most of the film Terrence Howard‘s DJay is a violent, sexist, low-life pimp, and in today’s political atmosphere such characters are too mongrelish and distastetul, and guys like DJay are certainly anathema to the #MeToo community.

Howard, 35 in ’04, initially didn’t want to play DJay because of the lower-depths factor, but he eventually changed his mind because it’s basically a film about transcendence through the power of music.

Taraji P. Henson, 54, is too old these days to play Shug, but if she were to somehow magically de-age to 34 she still wouldn’t play such a character — not in today’s climate. Nor would a magically younger Taryn Manning (now 47) play Nola, a bargain-basement prostitute who services tricks in their cars. Neither of them would touch a Hustle & Flow-like film with a ten-foot pole todqy.

Hustle & Flow is a fable that sells ideas about life and creativity that may not be realistic, but people sure as hell want to believe them…I know that much. We’ve all got pain in our hearts and poetry in our souls, and it’s never too late to make your move, etc,

To say you’ve “seen this kind of film before” means nothing. The question must always be, “How well was it made, and how much did you care?”

It’s worth it alone for Howard’s D-Jay, a flawed, at times brutally insensitive guy in a classic do-or-die struggle to make it as a rap artist.

Anthony Anderson (now 54) is almost as good as Howard. Henson, Manning, DJ Qualls and Ludacris make it play true and steady and right as rain.

Every frame of this movie says, “You know what we’re doing…this guy wants to climb out of his crappy situation and maybe we’re gonna show him do that…but we’re gonna do it in a way that feels right to us.”

And once D-Jay hooks up with Anderson and Qualls and starts to put together a sound and record a few tracks, Hustle & Flow is off the ground and pretty much stays there, suspended.

Forget the funky backdrops and gritty-ass particulars — is there anyone out there who can’t relate to a character who feels stuck in a tired groove and wants to do more with his/her life? Is there anything more commonly understood?

Whatever you might expect to feel about D-Jay, he is, by the force of Howard’s acting and Brewer’s behind-the-camera input, utterly real and believable, and even with his anger and brutality you can’t help but root for him. And, for that matter, the film.