Jeff Wells

Friendo who attended this evening’s A Complete Unknown screening at the old Academy theatre (Wilshire & La Peer): “The house waas completely full, and the audience went crazy for the film and actors. i’ve never seen a response like this in many decades of watching films at The Academy. Extraordinary.”

HE: “A bigger, more exuberant response than the one for Emilia Perez a a few weeks ago?”

Friendo: “Bigger response, bigger audience. Standing and clapping through the credits. Huge applause for each of the actors.”

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“No prisoners!….no prisoners!”

BREAKING: Syria TV says Bashar Assad has fled Damascus to an unknown location.

ASSAD FLED!! pic.twitter.com/dpvuzI5wsE

— Mazen Hassoun (@HassounMazen) December 8, 2024

Posted on 4.19.07: “Robert Altman‘s casually-paced detective film, released on 3.7.73, re-imagines Raymond Chandler‘s Phillip Marlowe as an old-fashioned man of honor with a zen slacker attitude. The intrepid but low-key Elliot Gould got under the skin of this loose-shoe shamus and gave the second-best performance of his life (after “Trapper John” in Altman’s M.A.S.H.)

The Long Goodbye‘s most noteworthy signature, I’ve always felt, is how Vilmos Zsigmond‘s widescreen camera is always slowly tracking in a very gentle arc to the right or left. I always saw this as a metaphor for the constant mobility and lack of roots that goes with life in Los Angeles, where the film takes place. I shared this view with Zsigmond himself, the film’s illustrious cinematographer, during a q & a at the Newport Beach Film Festival. He agreed with the thought, he said, but remarked that Altman never discussed the “meaning” of the constant camera movement. He just said, “Just keep it moving.” That’s an artist for you — go with the instinct and leave the dissertations to others.

My two favorite dialogue portions: (a) Mark Rydell, playing a haunted sociopathic gangster, mentions to Gould that he was always afraid of getting undressed in the locker room at the end of gym class because he “never had any pubic hair until I was 15 years old,” and Gould deadpans “Oh, yeah? You musta looked like one of the Three Little Pigs”; and (b) a small-town Mexican official, speaking English with a very thick accent, refers to Gould’s friend, a morally sleazy guy named Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) who may have committed suicide, as “the deceased,” and Gould immediately says, “The diseased…yeah, right.”

As much as I’ve loved Joe Jackson’s music for the last 40-odd years, I always found his Pee-Wee Herman dress sense (nerd collars, pants pulled up to his chest, Clarabelle suspenders) more than a bit odd. Jackson turned 70 last August, and currently bears a distinct resemblance to Joe Biden.

In the comment thread for yesterday’s Sean Connery piece (“Connery In The Flesh“), an HE regular posted an anecdote from a woman friend who told him she “did” Connery way back when, and that his package was unimpressive.

I hate that kind of cheap snark so I deleted the post. Today the guy asked why.

HE to Connery disser: “I despise any and all comments that try to belittle someone’s reputation by claiming their schlong was smallish. James Ellroy once wrote that JFK was ‘hung like a cashew’…fucker! It doesn’t get much lower or scummier than that.”

Connery disser to HE: “You seem pretty obsessed with masculinity, yet when I point out that someone doesn’t measure up in a certain area, whether that yardstick is valid or not, you become really upset. Seems kinda funny to me. And BTW, the woman [who fucked Connery] is totally credible.

HE to Connery disser: “It’s a shitty thing to say. Besides almost all guys are growers. Very few have hefty animal members in repose.”

In Pablo Larrain‘s Spencer (Neon, 11.5), Kristen Stewart‘s Diana says that “beauty is useless, beauty is clothing.”

That is one of the most full-of-shit lines I’ve ever heard in a film…hell, in my entire life on this planet.

We all understand that good looks won’t do much for a person unless accompanied by sufficient smarts, social skills, a healthy lifestyle and some sort of gift or ability that can be understood and appreciated in the marketplace. But when you’re young and just starting out in whatever field (and even after you’ve gotten going), good looks are a golden passport, and they always have been. They open doors, turn people on, pave the way.

Diana became Prince Charles‘ bride because of her looks plus all the other alluring qualities. But definitely because of her looks. I mean no disrespect when I say that Charles would have never proposed if Diana had looked like, say, the quietly attractive Sally Hawkins.

If Paul McCartney had looked like Gerry Marsden (of Gerry and the Pacemakers) and John Lennon had looked like Ed Sheeran, the Beatles would have had a much tougher time of it…okay?

I really hate having to explain this, much less argue it, but there are some out there who seem to sincerely believe that looks aren’t necessarily a ticket to ride. They’re actually offended by the notion that attractiveness matters.

Five years ago IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich shrieked like a p.c. banshee when I tweeted to Jessica Chastain that an aspiring film critic not only needs to be talented, tenacious and willing to eat shit, but that it would “help” if he/she is “fetching.”

Ehrlich was appalled that anyone would even suggest that an attractive appearance might have something to do with how you’re received in mixed company or by potential employers. I called him a delusional little bitch, of course.

Bill Maher on 5.4.18: “News flash: People just like the physically attractive better. Sorry. The taller candidate usually wins the election. Studies show that the better-looking person, all things being equal, usually gets the job. Even babies prefer to look at attractive faces.”

The last time I gazed upon the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was in mid-May of 2019. The devastating fire (which was almost certainly caused by embers flicked by some labor-union, cigarette-smoking douchebag) had happened only a few weeks before. And now it’s restored and open for business again…wonderful. But the interiors look too spruced up or scrubbed down, too 21st century film set…they didn’t try to make those glorious architectural interiors (nave, transept, apse, stained glass, Romanesque sculptures) appear marked by the centuries.

Originally posted on 8.30.15: “The older Richard Brooks‘ In Cold Blood gets, the more Hollywood-ized it seems.

“Much of the film has always struck me as an attempt by Brooks to almost warm up the Perry Smith and Dick Hickock characters (played by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson) and make them seem more ingratiating and vulnerable than how they were portrayed in Truman Capote‘s nonfiction novel.

“You can always sense an underlying effort by Brooks and especially by Robert Blake to make the audience feel sorry for and perhaps even weep for Perry Smith. That guitar, the sad smile, the traumatic childhood. Take away the Clutter murder sequence and at times Blake could almost be Perry of Mayberry. Scott Wilson‘s Dick Hickock seems a little too kindly/folksy also.

“These are real-life characters, remember, who slaughtered a family of four like they were sheep. I realize that neither one on his own would have likely killed that poor family and that their personalities combusted to produce a third lethal personality, but I could never finally reconcile Blake and Wilson’s personal charm and vulnerability with the cold eyes of the real Smith and Hickock (which are used on the poster for the film).

“In Cold Blood is nonetheless a striking, reasonably honest, nicely assembled re-telling of the Smith & Hickock story. I respect it. I worship Connie Hall‘s cinematography. I love the editing. Quincy Jones‘ blues combo score is partly haunting and even mesmerizing and partly laid on too thick at times. The film is certainly a cut or two above mainstream fare of the ’60s. But it’s not a great film. It feels a bit too cloying and manipulative too often. Those memory and dream sequences (the sound of the mother’s voice going “Perrrry!”) are a bit much.

HE reader Michael Gebert posted this in response: “Yes, I think this is right and well put. It’s made at kind of the last moment of postwar FDR-Kennedy liberalism that was idealistic about the possibility of reforming, well, everything, if we can catch it early enough with a big dose of Freud.

“It’s sometimes referred to as noir, just because it was one of the last big-studio features in black-and-white, but it’s the complete opposite of noir, which assumes that society is as dirty as the criminals and that chance bets against you. In Cold Blood is a throwback to New Deal crime films like 20,000 Years in Sing Sing or Angels Have Dirty Faces. Within a few years that idealism would be completely overthrown, criminals would be taunting maniacs like Manson or Andy Robinson‘s Zodiac type in Dirty Harry, a lower species in need of wiping out.

“It’s kind of amazing to think that in five years, social attitudes could change so rapidly.

“So yes, it’s exceedingly well made, but lives in such a different world that it’s hard to relate to. It’s certainly hard to find any sympathy for the mindless thugs who killed the Clutters like cattle in their basement.”

We come to this place out of habit. Some of us, at least. To lament what we no longer have. To contemplate the grim milieu…a once-stirring art form that obviously has no interest or faith in the soul of things.

We used to come to movie theatres for magic. Once upon a time.

Back when movies were much better in general…craftier, sturdier, richer, less “sensitive”, less instructive, nervier, more explorational.

Movies that were more into quality for its own sake, and less about…it’s depressing to even describe , much less endure.

The better movies used to be about how life actually felt for people living it day by day…hah!

Movie theatres once had an aura of worship…some of us actually saw them as churches…hah!

We used to come to theaters to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us.

We need that easy-to-describe feeling we all get when the lights begin to dim.

That feeling is…hello?…simply called irrational anticipation.

We’ve heard on social media that the film we’re about to watch is a problem of some kind, as most films are these days.

But against all reason we want to believe in ecstasy, or least in luminous possibility…that it might be a kin of The Godfather or The Verdict or A Separation, or maybe another Anora.

If there’s one thing that 95% of movies mostly don’t do these days, it’s taking us somewhere we’ve never been before.

The person who wrote that “movies today do more than entertain, but make us feel somehow reborn”? That person needs to be taken out behind the stables and horse-whipped.

Empty dazzling images on a sizable screen.
Sound that we can feel in our ribs….fine.

“Somehow heartbreak feels good in a place likе this”? Once in a blue moon, if at all. Please.

“Our heroes feel like thе best part of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful”? Bullshit.

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Earlier today the American Film institute released a Ten Best Movies of the Year roster (i.e., Motion Pictures of the Year).

The ten include Anora (yay!), The Brutalist (booo!), A Complete Unknown (yay!), Conclave (yay!), Dune: Part II (approvable), Emilia Perez (highly ambitious trans-identity piece…entirely decent but calm down), Nickel Boys (stylistically audacious), A Real Pain (Yay!), Sing Sing (more of a documentary than a narrative) and Wicked (aggressively impactful).

What’s missing? Tim Fehlbaum and Scott Feinberg‘s September 5. Why is it missing? Sasha Stone posted the following speculation five weeks ago (i.e., late October):

“The problem with [September 5] right now is obvious. Much of Hollywood, or at least the loud half, is anti-Israel now. They believe our government is involved in genocide. They are angry enough that Jonathan Glazer devoted his whole Oscar acceptance speech to this subject last year. On the other hand, there are probably lots of Oscar voters who feel differently but who aren’t comfortable speaking out. So that’s a problem. The other problem is that the Oscars are ruled by actors and generally like movies with lots of stars in them.

The other reason (unmentioned by Sasha) is that while September 5 is sturdy, gripping and highly watchable, it doesn’t blow your socks off.

Elliot Gould about working on Robert Altman‘s M.A.S.H. (’70), quoted on mash.fandom.com: “Sometimes Bob would get flustered. We were fighting the clock and he [was facing the pressure of having] to do it a certain way by a certain time otherwise you got into golden hours.

“And I remember this scene in M.A.S.H. — it was actually a scene that Sylvester Stallone, whom I’ve only met a couple of times, appears in…Stallone has said he doesn’t admit that he was ever an extra in any movie but he admits that he was an extra in M.A.S.H. And when I told that to Bob he said, “No, I don’t accept that Sylvester Stallone was in my movie…I don’t accept it.”

A 1.2.70 N.Y. Times story by Bernie Weinraub (“For Film Extras, Variety Is Certain, Stardom Isn’t“) reports that movie extras were “paid a daily minimum of $29.15.”

Altman once claimed that M.A.S.H was the first major studio film to use the word “fuck” in its dialogue.[ The word is spoken during the football game near the end of the film by Walt “Painless Pole” Waldowski when he says to an opposing football player, “All right, bud, your fucking head is coming right off!”

Yesterday Jett called and said, “You’ll never guess where I am….Koreatown! And it” — Los Angeles, he meant — “smells exactly like it always did. It all came back the second I stepped out of the Uber.”

There are three different geographical aroma pockets in that haunted, infected, worn-down, architecurally underwhelming city.

(1) The stink of congested mid-city nabes and boulevards, which is what most of it smells like. (“Once the stink of L.A. gets into your bones” is one of Charles Bukowski‘s greatest lines.) (2) The mostly delightful fragrance of the affluent canyons and hills and hiking trails. And (3) the beachy areas, which is to say a mixture of sea air, grassy soft-soil cliffs, fast food wrappers, road tar and gasoline vapors.

You just need to occasionally take a moment and sample as much of it as possible. A few minutes of olfactory meditation.

I recall walking down an open-air ramp out of a DC-10 at LAX in the late spring of ’81, and leaning my head slightly back and taking a few sniffs and saying to myself, “This definitely doesn’t smell like New York.” You could taste the jet exhaust and melting tar and carbon dioxide, of course, but also the faint scent of dirt and sand and marshy grasses and the nearby Pacific Ocean, and the flowery fragrance of Jacaranda trees or something in that realm, and the faint smell of tacos or hot dogs or something like that.

That was 43 years ago, of course. That kind of aroma salad is gone from the LAX area for good now. Dead and gone.

But there are a few scent pockets here and there. You just have to get out of your car to really inhale them. Which no one ever does, of course.

The problem with so much of Los Angeles today, of course, is that too much of it is covered in asphalt and steel and plastic and concrete shopping malls and massive apartment buildings, and it doesn’t smell like anything exciting or promising…certainly nothing you’d want to stick around for.

I used to talk to Robert Towne about how Los Angeles used to smell in the 1940s, particularly after reading his screenplay of The Two Jakes (which is much better than the film) for some great descriptions of the fragrances that were fairly commonplace. Or talk to anyone who remembers what it smelled like from time to time in the ’70s even (despite the town being covered in horrible smog back then) or the early ’80s.

Paris is probably the greatest aroma town I’ve ever sunk into. A feast wherever you go. The Seine at night, outdoor markets (especially in the pre-dawn hours), the aroma of sauces and pasta dishes coming from cafes, warm breads, scooter and bus exhaust, strong cigarettes, strong coffee, fruit stands, gelato shops, etc.

Cannes is a heavenly aroma town during the annual May festival with the briney sea air, especially at night. Tuscany, Rome, the Amalfi Coast, etc I could go on and on.