Jeff Wells

Roughly seven months after debuting in Cannes, Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada (Kino Lorber, 12.6) will open theatrically in select urban locations…three weeks hence.

Richard Gere plays Leonard Fife, a dying, pissed-off documentary filmmaker who left the U.S. for a Canaadian exile during the Vietnam War. The film is about a no-holds-barred interview that Fife gives to a pair of filmmakers (Michael Imperioli, Victoria Hill)…an encounter that may or may not be ruthlessly honest, at least on Gere’s part.

Uma Thurman play Fife’s wife. Jacob Elordi, who’s way too tall and lanky to be playing a young Gere, plays a young Gere. They don’t even vaguely resemble each other.

Oh, Canada isn’t as good as First Reformed, but it’s definitely better than the last two (The Card Counter, Master Gardener), and it surprises a bit by reaching inward and letting go.

Fife submits to the interview in order to shake it all off and confess (or maybe imagine) as much as possible.

It’s basically a cut-the-crap, take-it-or-leave it, taking-stock-of-the-boomer-legacy film, and kind of an an old-school thing in a good way…very earnest and solemn, carefully and cleanly written, and it gets sadder as it goes along.

Gere’s white-haired, worn-down appearance and performance are riveting and a little startling, especially if you think back to his sexy-cat beauty and swagger in Schrader’s American Gigolo (’80).

Full respect and 90% satisfaction are felt from this corner. Pic hopscotches all over the place but always feel somber, reflective, sincere…a respectable clean-out-the-cobwebs, stop-lying-to-yourself movie for grown-ups.

Excellent supporting performances are given by Jacob Elordi, Uma Thurman and Michael Imperioli.

Start the press conference at the 20-minute mark…

Otto Kruger‘s story about a deposed tyrant who was cheered upon his return to Athens by average citizens. Ring a bell?

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The enhanced, un-muddied, cleaned-up sound is terrific (love the bass tones!), the black-and-white footage looks like new. and the editing is obviously first-rate.

Posted on 10.14.24:

…HE regulars are hereby required to post opinions about it, and to especially opine whether they believe Karla Sofia Gascon is (a) playing a lead or supporting role (Netflix has decided that she’s not supporting), and (b) whether or not Gascon deserves to beat out Anora‘e Mikey Madison for the Oscar.

Here’s an opinion shared this morniny by an HE friendo: “It’s a really audacious film –a trans musical romance set in the world of Mexican cartels. Very stylishly directed by Jacques Audiard, and the three female leads are uniformly excellent. I wasn’t bored for a second, but after a while I started to feel that this film was having an identity crisis, that it didn’t really know what it wanted to be: a musical? A trans romance? A cartel tale set to music? And that violent ending seemed really out of place, something from another film entirely.

“It’s a very offbeat, interesting work, but missed its opportunity to be a great one.

“There’s a very powerful musical number in the middle of the film, ‘Aqui Estoy’ (Here I am), sung by people searching for their loved ones. It shows what Emilia Perez’ could have been if it had gone full cartel tragedy, and avoided any romantic issues.”

HE to friendo: “Okay, but Emilia Perez is definitely not ‘set in the world of Mexican cartels.’ We don’t see any of the ugly nitty-gritty…we don’t see anyone or anything involved in drug trafficking, murders, flamboyant millionaire lifestyles, bribes, torture, bodies hanging from freeway overpasses, evading the authorities, digging tunnels in and out of jails, etc.”

HE-posted last August:

(1) Emilia Perez is nothing if not audacious but there’s no believing the central conceit (i.e., that a macho cartel king would want to transition into womanhood in order to escape his violent world) and so it falls short of being a knockout musical masterpiece, as some have called it, and…

(2) Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the titular character, gives a striking supporting performance. If she campaigns for a Best Actress Oscar, fine, but it won’t result in a win. Identity campaigns (like Lily Gladstone’s) get a lot of attention from wokester journos, but rank-and-file industry types are less taken with the razzmatazz.

“Which comes about due to the lack, often, of a coherent vision. On top of which Hollywood has a real attitude about masculinity. Masculinity unblurred or untrammelled by Hollywood writers who are aloof toward or simply not aware enough of the proclivities and frames of reference of mainstream men…proclivities that have a certain itch or menace, and when that is brought forth in films like No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood, it radiates through the screen.

“Having sci-fi or adventure shows or films with bland iterations of masculinity and cast with gender interchangibility and lack of distinction creates a flatness of tone. male characters 3ho are frustratingly unrelatable and increasingly unrecognizable.” — Echo Chamberlain.

Donald Trump‘s announced cabinet nominees are wackazoid…nominated by The Beast in order to troll the mainstream Washington establishment….that and the notion of blind Beast loyalty…surreal but at the same time real.

“Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, along with his selection of Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, shows that Trump did mean what he said. He is going to govern with a sense of vengeance, and personal loyalty really is the coin of his realm.” — David French, N.Y. Times columnist, 11.13.24.

In the current Club Random podcast with Bob Zemeckis, Bill Maher confesses to having melted down during the Omaha Beach cemetery scene in Saving Private Ryan…the moment when the old-geezer version of Matt Damon collapses at the sight of Cpt. Miller’s (Tom Hanks) gravestone…because the actor who played old Damon, Harrison Young, strongly resembled Maher’s late father, who had passed three or four years before Ryan opened in ’98.

Posted in mid-April of 2018: Last weekend I watched a 4K streaming version of Steven Spielberg‘s Saving Private Ryan. There’s no question that this 1998 WWII drama is one of the most brutally realistic and emotionally affecting war films ever made, and is certainly among Beardo’s finest. And yet I found myself flinching at the occasionally forced or unlikely moments, at the too-broad “acting” and emotional button-pushings. It kept ringing my phony gong. “Jeez, I don’t know if I even like this movie any more,” I said to myself. “Even the Omaha Beach landing sequence is starting to bother me.”

I had the same kind of reaction when I rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind in ’07, or 30 years after it opened. The bottom line is that Spielberg’s sentimental or overly theatrical instincts aren’t aging any better than John Ford‘s similar tendencies.

The greatest offense comes from Harrison Young‘s awful over-acting as the 75-year-old Ryan. His face is stricken with guilt as he shuffles through the Omaha Beach cemetery, and he walks like a 90-year-old afflicted with rheumatism. In ’87 I visited this same cemetery with my father, who’d fought against the Japanese during WWII. He was quietly shaken, he later said, but he held it in because that’s what former Marines do under these circumstances. They show respect by behaving in a disciplined, soldier-like way. They don’t moan and weep and flail around like some acting-class student.

I almost lost it when the teary-eyed Young collapsed upon the grave of Cpt. Miller (Tom Hanks). “Oh, for God’s sake!” I said out loud. “Show a little dignity…be a man!” Kathleen Byron‘s performance as white-haired Mrs. Ryan is almost as bad. All she does is eyeball her doddering, bent-over husband. The whole family, in fact, is staring at the old coot like he’s about to keel over from a heart attack.

Then comes one of the most dishonest cuts in motion picture history, going from a close-up of Young’s eyes to the D-Day landing craft carrying the Ryan squad — Hanks, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns, Barry Pepper, Adam Goldberg, Vin Diesel — as they approach Omaha beach. Matt Damon‘s Ryan (Young’s 21-year-old counterpart) won’t meet them for another couple of days, when they’re inland a few miles.

I don’t believe that loaded-down soldiers drowned after being dropped by landing craft into 15 feet of water. That might have occured in real life, but I didn’t believe this in Saving Private Ryan — it just seemed absurd. I didn’t believe that bullet wounds would cause the water off Omaha Beach to turn red with blood — in fact Spielberg’s crew poured 40 barrels of fake blood into the water to achieve this effect. The basic effect is one of Hollywood exaggeration blended with historical, real-life horror.

Then comes Hanks’ big zone-out moment when he hits the beach. He’s an Army captain in the thick of battle with machine-gun bullets whizzing by and guys getting drilled and blown apart, and he chooses this moment to go “Ohhh, I can’t think or move…it’s too much…I’m so upset by war and its carnage that I need to go catatonic for a couple of minutes…don’t mind me…I’ll come back to life after this sequence is over.” I’m sitting there going “get it together, man! You wouldn’t do this in a Samuel Fuller or Howard Hawks film…you’re only zoning out because Spielberg likes the idea of spacing out and turning the sound down.”

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But it’s a worldwide blessing to hear the bells of Notre Dame ringing again. Five and two-thirds years after the April 2019 fire, The cathedral will re-open next month. Warren Zevon: “Jubilation across the land.”

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Donald Trump has always been and always will be an animal….a whimsical ego monster (“He doesn’t listen to anybody“) with arguably the shortest attention span of any U.S. president, ever. He’s the brusque force of fuck-you evil in the second half of Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice….oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t seen it yet? I don’t regard Joe Biden as the same light as Trump, but in my heart of hearts, I feel more anger at Joe because he ushered in this scenario…his obstinate, arrogant refusal to bow out of the race before mid-July paved the way for the 11.5 catastrophe.

I’ve despised Trump for years, and am sadly accustomed to his bullshit. But Biden, to me, is almost worse in a certain way. He couldn’t let go of his Irish ego for months and months, and now the U.S. of A. will be taking it up the ass for the next four years and change.

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“They do what they want to do / say what they want to say / live how they want to live / play how they want to play / dance how they want to dance…kick and slap a friend, eeyo!…the Addams family!”

Consider the facial expression on 6′ 9″ Barron, a.k.a. “Lurch”.

…except for the $475 price tag plus shipping…can’t do it. Made in Italy, of course. If I was in Florence or Venice or Milano I could buy these for roughly half the price.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a personalized jean jacket to give to Sutton for her third birthday (11.17).

I bought it from a Chinese company called Woodemon. The package was shipped and tracked by SF-international.

Two days ago (Sunday, 11.10) the SF tracking info said the package had been delivered to HE’s Wilton abode…except it hadn’t been.

The delivery company was closed yesterday for Veterans Day, but after much online searching and suffering I managed to discover three photos taken by the delivery person — photos that made it clear the jacket had been delivered to the wrong location — a home painted bluish-gray with a grassy front yard plus a white mailbox with the street number and a tiny red flag. The carrier also took two photos of the package and the shipping label.

As the name of my condo community begins with the name “Wilton”, I went searching around for streets with that name…two of them…zip.

This morning I went to the Wilton post office and showed the boss (40ish dark-haired woman) the messenger photos, and asked if she or any of the mail carriers recognized the home in question. She said it looked like it was located on a street I hadn’t inspected — Wilton Acres. I went right over there and bingo…mystery solved! Two cars parked in the driveway. A small dog barking inside.

I rang the bell next to a shed door two or three times, and then rapped loudly on it. I noticed that the door was very slightly ajar so I opened it and stepped inside and knocked on the kitchen-adjacent house door three or four times. No response except for the dog.

I went back to my car to search for the occupants on Facebook (their names were on address labels inside the shed), and then all of a sudden a moustachioed Wilton cop was rapping on my passenger window. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

I got out, explained the basics, showed him the delivery photos and my ID etc. It turns out the occupant had a video security system that sent her video footage of me poking around, and so she called the fuzz.

The satisfied, calmed-down cops spoke with the home owner at her place of employment. Ten minutes later she drove up and went inside and gave me four white plastic packages — the jean jacket plus three others that contained scarves that also hadn’t been delivered to my address earlier this month and last month, despite notices saying they had been.

My name, address and phone number were clearly printed on the labels. If the Wilton Acres woman had any good-neighbor inclinations she could have easily called or texted and explained that she had some of my stuff, etc. I would have gratefully come over and picked them up, or we could’ve met somewhere. That’s what I would’ve done, trust me, if someone else’s deliveries had been left at my place.

But over a period of a week or two she did nothing. In her defense she leads a busy life and has kids and a dog and all, but still.