Jeff Wells

Last weekend I re-watched George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the 208-minute Martin Scorsese-David Tedeschi doc from 2011. I experienced the same reaction. A fair amount of annoyment with the jumpy, spottily edited, all-over-the-map first half, and a profound emotional involvement with the second half, especially the portion when George’s cancer starts to win and infinite finality is getting closer and closer.

As a kind of wind-down exercise in bed I re-read my 10.5.11 review and thought, “Okay, I was obviously in the tank for Harrison and Scorsese but it was also a perceptive, reasonably fair assessment.”

Then I read Bill Wyman’s 10.4.11 review for Slate, titled “The Boring Beatle.” The difference between my piece and Wyman’s is that he didn’t care for Harrison’s gloomy manner or a good portion of his output after All Things Must Pass, or for Scorsese’s sanitizing on Harrison’s behalf. I, on the other hand, was more or less a fan who was willing to look the other way.

Wyman’s review is much ballsier and more incisive than my own.

Please read them both, starting with my HE review…

Initially posted on 10.5.11: I saw the first half of Martin Scorsese‘s 208-minute George Harrison doc during the [2011] Telluride Film Festival, and was only somewhat impressed. It covered the first 23 or 24 years of Harrison’s life, or ’43 to ’69…and I felt I knew all that going in. But the second half, which I finally saw at a New York Film Festival screening, is highly nourishing and affecting and well worth anyone’s time.

Yes, even for guys like LexG who are sick to death of boomer-age filmmakers and film executives endlessly making movies about their youth. It’s reasonable to feel this way because boomers have been commercially fetishizing their ’60s and ’70s glory days for a long time. But George Harrison: Living In The Material World is nonetheless a very good film. Particularly Part Two.

Because it’s about a journey that anyone who’s done any living at all can relate to, and about a guy who lived a genuinely vibrant spiritual life, and who never really self-polluted or self-destructed in the usual rock-star ways.

Well, that’s not really true, is it? At age 58 Harrison died of lung cancer, which he attributed to being a heavy smoker from the mid ’50s to late ’80s. And he wasn’t exactly the perfect boyfriend or husband. (There were a few infidelities during his marriage to Olivia Harrison.) And he wasn’t the perfect spiritual man either, despite all the songs and talk about chanting and clarity and oneness with Krishna. He had his bacchanalian periods. And he did so with the wonderful luxury of having many, many millions in the bank. It’s not like Harrison was struggling through awful moments of doubt and pain in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Nobody’s just one color or mood or flavor. Everyone’s complicated and inconsistent and contradictory. If Harrison-the-holy wasn’t known for occasionally flawed or weird behavior his rep would be insufferable.

But this journey is something to take and share.

Part Two, as you might presume, is about Harrison’s solo career. It starts with the Beatles breakup, the making of All Things Must Pass, the 1971 Concert for Bangla Desh, etc. And then settles into the mid to late ’70s and ’80s, “So Sad”, “Crackerbox Palace,” Handmade Films, “Dark Horse,” the Travelling Willburys, the stabbing incident and so on.

The film is entirely worth seeing for a single sequence, in fact. One that’ll make you laugh out loud and break your heart a little. It’s a story that Ringo Starr tells about a chat he had with Harrison in Switzerland two or three months before his death in November ’01. I won’t explain any more than this.

Scorsese’s doc has no title cards, no narration, no through-line interview as Bob Dylan: No Direction Home had. As noted, I found Part One a little slipshod and patchworky at times. The editor is David Tedeschi, who also cut No Direction Home as well as Scorsese’s Public Speaking, the Fran Lebowitz doc, and Shine a Light, the 2008 Rolling Stones’ concert doc.

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I still say A Complete Unknown should have been titled Ghost of Electricity (Searchlight, 12.25) because there’s definitely something ghostly (as in elusive, unknowable, wispy, shadow-cloaked, just out of reach) about the actual Bob Dylan as well as Timothee Chalamet‘s version of him. Not an allusion to “going electric at the ’65 Newport Folk Festival”, for Chrissake, but something, you know, trippier.

I would have also loved My Weariness Amazes Me because it’s the single best line in Mr. Tambourine Man…because before Dylan cooked it up nobody had ever been amazed by their own weariness, and I mean nobody. I sure as hell hadn’t felt that way, I can tell you. But ever since I first heard that line I’ve chanted it over and over. It’s almost become a kind of motto…a mantra to be repeated when the ache and angst and cosmic boredom get to be a bit much.

Eddie Ginley again: “A Complete Unknown is the boomerist boomer shit that ever boomered.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s 11.25 review of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Beatles ’64 (Apple +, 11.29):

“Another thing that sets Beatles ’64 apart is that the film is full of incisive commentary: latter-day reminiscences by several of those fans, as well as meditations on the meaning of it all by figures like David Lynch, Joe Queenan, Jamie Bernstein, and Smokey Robinson, who speaks with fierce perception about the nature of women’s unguarded emotionalism in dictating the shape of pop-music culture.

“Whether it’s Jamie Bernstein (Leonard’s daughter) talking about how she dragged the family TV into the dining room to watch the Sullivan show, or David Lynch evoking what it is that music like that of the early Beatles does to you, or Betty Friedan, in an old TV clip, speaking with daunting eloquence about how the Beatles incarnated a new vision of masculinity that threw over the old clenched model, these testimonials color in the consuming quality of our collective passion for the Fab Four.

“Early on, there’s a sequence of the Beatles in transit, each of them putting on headphones that let them hear recordings of their voices. There’s something touchingly metaphorical about that. The Beatles would preside over a world where projections of who they were took on a life weirdly separate from themselves. The documentary shows you that they understood this, instinctively, from day one.

“Seated in their ‘prison’ of a suite in the Plaza, whiling away the hours (scenes that might have been the model for “A Hard Day’s Night”), always cutting up with that whimsical Liverpool put-on that takes everything just so lightly, as if it weren’t real, they were perfectly positioned, as personalities, to become the eye of the new media storm.”

Forget that “no one is above the law” stuff. Ominous thunderclouds are rumbling overhead. The ghouls are running the show. Merrick Garland, this is on you…wimp.

I wasn’t a Brad Pitt admirer at first. Over his first five years of prominence he struck me as a pretty boy without much going on inside — Thelma & Louise (’91), A River Runs Through It (’92), Legends of the Fall (’94), Interview with the Vampire (’94). Even in Se7en, I was telling myself, he radiated cheap hot-dog vibes…a certain lightweight petulance.

But then I bought the Se7en Criterion laser disc and listened to the commentary tracks (Pitt, David Fincher, Morgan Freemanm, Andrew Kevin Walkr), and the stuff that Pitt shared turned me around. After listening all the way through I told myself “okay, I underestimated Pitt…he’s a fairly bright and committed guy…he’s okay, not a lightweight…he seriously cares about the quality of Se7en and all the intense effort that went into it.”

The below was recorded in ’95 for Criterion. This particular commentary (edited) is not available on DVD or Bluray. Here’s the longer, unedited version.

Only now can it be told…

It happened at least a year and a half ago, and possibly longer than that. I was chatting with the renowned director-writer Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Duplicity, Andor, Beirut) inside the AMC Lincoln Square IMAX theatre. It was prior to a hot-shot invitational screening, and we were standing next to our seats and shooting the usual shit.

After a few pleasantries Gilroy sat down and I turned to face the huge screen, and I somehow tipped over a bit, and then quickly tried regain my balance…nope. Perhaps my heavy leather computer bag was a factor, but the IMAX theatre seats are built upon a very steep grade — something close to 45 degrees — and so I tumbled forward and fell like a crash test dummy upon the row of seats in front of me.

Although it was no big deal in terms of bruisings or physical injury, I felt slightly embarassed because, you know, who loses his fucking balance and falls over a row of seats just before the start of an IMAX screening with a gathering of hot-shot journalists sitting and standing around nearby? I was Chevy Chase doing a Gerald R. Ford.

But you know what? Gilroy saw everything and didn’t say a word. Didn’t even raise an eyebrow. He knew it was a galumphy thing to have done but he maintained his poker face and kept his cool, and in so doing he kept mine.

Another friend might have shouted “oh my God…Jeff! Jeff! Are you okay?”, and in so doing would have prompted others to take notice or ask what had happened, and the next day it might have been a topic of derision and belittlement on the Six O’Clock News. But the taciturn and unshakable Gilroy said zip and nobody else did either (no yelps or “oops!”), and our lives went on as if nothing had happened.

One, the middle section of Anora never, ever drags…not once, not even briefly. It doesn’t really take off, in fact, until roughly the 50- or 55-minute mark. The first act is all set-up. It pays off in Act Two — farcically, comically — and then it goes to Vegas (“Your son hates you so much that he married me, and by the way he’s a fucking pussy”) and returns to Brooklyn, and then reaches inside at the very end and transcends itself.

Two, the fact that “it doesn’t really seem to have anything larger to say about the world today,” as Scott Feinberg has put it, is precisely, profoundly and deliciously why it’s such a standout. It’s not preaching or messaging or offering any “this is how life sometimes is”, food-for-thought material. It’s just Brighton Beach, man. It’s not La Strada, although it does deliver a certain catharsis if you let it in. Anora is specific rather than general or universal. Either you get that or you don’t.

…or not? My basic opinion was that it steamrolls with such eye-filling verve and intensity that it’s hard not to at least give the film credit for selling the shit out of itself.

If you happen to pass by these murals in NYC or LA, take some photos and tag us. We can’t wait to see them! #ACompleteUnknown pic.twitter.com/9IT9zgGbam

— A Complete Unknown News (@acufilmnews) November 23, 2024

Joseph Kosinski‘s F1, the Brad Pitt Formula One thrill drama, will open seven months hence (6.27.25).

Three thoughts occured as I contemplated F1‘s arrival. Thought #1 was that it’ll almost certainly be good. Thought #2 was that if anyone dies, it won’t be the second-billed Damson Idris because black dudes aren’t allowed to die these days. Thought #3 was that I need to re-watch John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix (’66) and Steve McQueen‘s Le Mans (’71) as preparation.

Guess what? Grand Prix, which I hadn’t seen in ages, is dramatically better than decent and technically excellent…make that wonderful. I had such a great time that I streamed it twice. Magnificent, super-sharp 70mm cinematography, at times multi-panelled, beautifully cut, always breathtaking. A nearly three-hour film with an intermission and a delicate, genuinely affecting Maurice Jarre score.

All in all a classy, well engineered, nicely honed immersion…a flush European vibe to die for.

You can sense right off the top that Frankenheimer is, like, ten times more invested in the race cars than in the romantic-sexual intrigues (the mid 40ish Yves Montand and Eva Marie Saint occupy center stage in this regard) and yes, the emotional renderings in Robert Alan Aurthur‘s script are on the subdued, subtle side. But the couplings and uncouplings feel believable, at least, and certainly don’t get in the way.

Grand Prix won three tech Oscars — Best Sound Effects (Gordon Daniel), Best Film Editing (Fredric Steinkamp, Henry Berman, Stewart Linder, Frank Santilloa) Best Sound (Franklin Milton). Frankenheimer (whom I got to know a little bit in the late ’80s) was nominated for a DGA directing award.

Grand Prix made $20.8 million in the U.S. and Canada (serious money back then) and returned almost $10 million to MGM.

Every action frame of Grand Prix feels genuine and unsimulated. The tragic ending is foretold and foreshadowed.

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