Jeff Wells

So much for Clint Eastwood’s Juror No. 2, which may be his final film. If I was running WB distribution I’d open it this year solely out of respect for Clint’s legacy. To hell with the quality aspects, whatever they may amount to.

No passing the scepter to the not-all-that-popular Kamala Harris…I’ll certainly vote for her but she may lose to Trump…America’s first DEI candidate for the presidency (chosen by Biden purely for identity factors) is not necessarily the smartest path…an open convention is the only way to go.

Presuming the Harris cabal will get their way, will Kamala have the strength of character to choose the obvious best choice for her vice-presidential running mate — Pete Buttigieg? Even the most ardently homophobic black voters (a sizable voting bloc) would support this ticket.

Droolin’ Joe knew that if he’d refused to drop out and had subsequently gotten his ass kicked on 11.5.24, he would have gone down in history as the stupidest, the most mule-stubborn and most despised Democratic president in U.S. history. So he didn’t have much of a choice.

Last night I hopped on the R train (Times Square to Steinway) in order to visit the nominally pleasant but architecturally dreary neighborhood of Astoria, Queens.

Talk about your ethnic downmarket vibe. I took a couple of snaps (SAMO graffiti, a guy openly taking a leak) as I wondered how and why anyone would want to live in this kind of vaguely shitty neighborhood.

The precise destination was the Museum of the Moving Image, where the highly touted 70mm restoration of John Ford’s wildly over-praised The Searchers unspooled at 7:30 pm.

The MOMI host told us we were in for a real treat — a 70mm replication of a genuine, bonafide VistaVision version of a luscious color film (shot by Winston C. Hoch) that very few popcorn-munching Average Joes saw in ‘56.   

What I saw last night looked like a nice but unexceptional 35mm print that could have played in my home town of Westfield, New Jersey.

“Bullshit!”, I muttered to myself as I sat in my third-row seat. “I’ve been took, tricked, scammed, duped, deceived, flim-flammed, led down the garden path, fooled, boondoggled, lied to, taken to the cleaners, sold a bill of goods”, etc.

Immediately my eyes were telling me that the 70mm restoration is some kind of reverent con job, and that ticket-buying schmoes like myself were being gaslit. “This?” I was angrily saying to myself. “Where’s the enhancement? Where’s the extra-exacting detail that a ‘straight from the original VisaVision negative’ 70mm print would presumably yield?”

The MOMI theatre is seemingly a technically first-rate operation with a nice big screen, but what a fuming experience I had. No “bump” at all over the versions I’ve watched on various formats over the years. No bump whatsoever, fuckers! Plus some shots looked overly shadowed, and some looked a tad bleachy.

Technically sophisticated friendo who knows his stuff: “In order to present a film print properly — especially 70mm — more things must come together than you might imagine in your worst nightmare.”

Thanks, powers-that-be!  Thanks for lying right through your teeth!

Have you ever been to Monument Valley? It’s kinda like the moon. Beautiful but barren. No water, no nutritious soil, no grass for cattle to eat, nothing at all to sustain life. It’s a completely ridiculous notion that anyone would have settled there.

Where did Ethan’s canteen water come from? How did anyone clean themselves or wash their clothes, much less take a bath? How did the families “attend to business” in any sort of half-sanitary fashion without an outhouse, much less toilet paper? No one had any perfumes or colognes or deodorants. They all stunk to high heaven.

The racism in this film is beyond odious. It’s appalling how Ford depicted Native Americans as bloodthirsty simpletons…savage, murderous, sub-human. Those shots of captured white women whom Ethan dismisses with disgust (‘They ain’t white!’), howling and shrieking like young witches whose brains had been removed….a ghastly moment.

Plus Scar (played by Henry Brandon, the blue-eyed gay actor who turned up 20 years later in Assault on Precinct 13) surely began to sexually enjoy Natalie Wood’s “Debbie” in her early teens, and she didn’t have children?

Why did Ford never shoot during magic hour? The natural glaring sunlight seems to overwhelm the wonderful brownish-red clay colors in the powdery soil. The only interesting dusky compositions were shot inside a sound stage.

On top of which the toupee-wearing John Wayne had begun his descent into overweight-ness. He was a much slimmer fellow when he made “Hondo.”

I finally couldn’t stand it. I left around the 85-minute mark and forlornly strolled across a mostly vacant 36th Street to Tacuba Cantina Mexicana and ordered some unexceptional grub.

…and those of Mayor Pete:

Based on Anthony Quinn‘s “Curtain Call”, adapted by Patrick Marber and directed by Anand Tucker, The Critic — a British period thriller — opens on 9.14.24.

Eight years ago Tom Hanks said a very bad thing, at least according to the HE commentariat. He said that his career “peaked in the ’90s” — a heinous statement by any standard but particularly egregious by HE commenter standards. All careers are glorious, and the use of the term “peaking” represents an obscene way of looking at them. Obviously this kind of dismissive thinking needed to be stamped out back then and it certainly needs to be stamped out now.

The Bad and the Beautiful‘s Harry Pebble: “Give me a picture that ends with a kiss and black ink on the books.”

Friendo: “Why oh why did they eliminate the kiss-at-the-airport finale?”

HE: “Because a kiss at the end isn’t a feminist progressive #MeToo ending. Lee Isaac Chung was adamant that Twisters is whatsername’s story…Daisy Edgar-Jones. He wanted to avoid the old romantic cliche finale, which of course is what the audience wanted. He also wanted to ‘gay it up’ on the fringe with Sasha Lane and Katy O’Brian.”

Friendo: “Okay, ‘gay it up’, fine. So why doesn’t the film have a trans character?”

HE: “It does! Glen Powell‘s Tyler Owens character is trans. He was born Tiki Owens and even had a couple of tornado-chasing, anally-obsessed boyfriends in her teens, but Tiki decided to become a non-binary they and she…sorry, “they” gradually decided to become an all-male, cocksure cowboy stud type.”

WHY DID THEY CUT THE KISS pic.twitter.com/is7XhI9iu9

— zara ️ TWISTERS SPOILERS (@seresinbradshaw) July 18, 2024

In the deeply loathed Forrest Gump, Robin Wright‘s Jenny, the tragically abused woman who became a selfish, impulse-driven hippie slut in the ’60s and ’70s, was quite the conversational topic.

Jenny’s dad sexually abused her as a child, and so she’s basically damaged goods all through Robert Zemeckis‘s bullshit fairy tale.

Here’s a 10.27.11 HE article titled “Reactionary Oscar-Winner“. It’s followed by two comments — a serious one from The Thing and a funny one from Lex. G.

BEWARE OF MILD SPOILERS: I didn’t hate Lee Isaac Chung‘s Twisters. It’s as empty and formulaic and jizz-whizzy as I feared, but more or less harmless. One swirling, cacophonous calamity after another. Nonstop destruction and disaster with a few deaths layered in. I shrugged, I chuckled, I got through it.

The ‘96 Twister is sooo much better. Much better dialogue (co-penned by Michael Crichton). I missed the His Girl Friday triangle dynamic — Helen Hunt as Cary Grant, Bill Paxton as Rosalind Russell, Jamie Gertz as Ralph Bellamy. I missed the eccentric Philip Seymour Hoffman character. (Poor Philly.) I missed Paxton. (Also dead.) I missed the old-fashioned, almost embarassing CG. I missed the exceptional widescreen lensing. I missed Lois Smith‘s “Aunt Meg.”

Twister’s drive-in movie destruction scene (The Shining is playing) is so much more effective than the indoor movie theatre’s destruction in Twisters. The theatre is located in a one-horse town in a rural Oklahoma region and James Whale’s original Frankenstein (’31) is playing to a full house in the daytime?

It’s interesting how Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens character, initially presented as a cocksure cowboy adrenalin junkie, doesn’t save the day at the end. He turns down the daredevil vibes, yes, and calms down in a soft, sensitive, nice-boyfriend way, but there’s no sex or even a make-out session with Daisy Edgar-Jones, the British actress with the bumpy, broken nose…

What was that airport finale about exactly? Kate (Edgar-Jones’ character) and Tyler are clearly attracted to each other and destined to hook up, but they don’t do anything except talk and confide. Unless I missed something, they don’t even hug or touch.

It’s like Chung was literally ordered to delete any serious chemistry or physical attraction stuff so as not to offend the woke lesbians in the audience. Studio execs to Chung: “We want a vaguely gay vibe here. We certainly don’t want a conventional hetero romantic thing like the old Twister had. Maybe we need a couple of tough lesbos.”

How exactly was Kate responsible for the tornado deaths of her boyfriend, played by Daryl McCormack (the sex worker in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, that oddball Emma Thompson film about finally getting properly laid at age 60), as well as the blonde girl (Kiernan Shipka) and that oafish, chubby LatinX guy with the tennis-ball haircut and the flannel shirt?

Five years later Javi (Anthony Ramos) persuades Kate to return to Tornado Alley, but he’s also sweet on her. He’s clearly a bit jealous when she starts hanging out with Powell, but then he has an Act Three epiphany and decides to “help” people rather than dig into the tornado research. Strange character arc.

But there’s no villain…not really. David Corenswet‘s Scott, Javi’s business partner, is chilly but not villainous.

The theme of the film is “face your fears,” right? Kate does the brave thing alone at the end. Glen’s not really needed…he just watches!

Daisy sure as shit doesn’t look like the daughter of Maura Tierney. They didn’t even look like cousins.

Has anyone noticed that Katy O’Brian, Kristen Stewart’s lover in Love Lies Bleeding, plays a mechanic on Tyler’s “team”? Has anyone noticed Sasha Lane, the female lead in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (16), is also part of Tyler’s crew? Lane and O’Brian are both openly gay.

Again — I didn’t hate Twisters. It just keeps coming at you. It’s all formula bullshit but I was chuckling here and there, and I loved the tornado death moments.

I have to at least say this privately, and that’s the irrefutable fact that pretty as she is, Edgar-Jones is no physical match for the muscular, buffed-up Powell. Glen has the pecs and the rugged arm muscles and flat abs, but Daisy — candor requires me to say this — doesn’t have that curvy, pear-shaped-ass thing going on. Sorry.

AOC says behind closed doors no one supports Kamala.

pic.twitter.com/1jvdizUQSy

— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) July 19, 2024

In March 1996 news reporter and anchor Dina Ruiz, 30, married Clint Eastwood, who at the time was 66.

During a subsequent interview Dina was asked if their difference in age bothered her. Clint quipped, “Hey, if she dies, she dies.” He and Ruiz divorced in 2013.

The following year the 84-year-old Eastwood began seeing Christina Sandera, then 51, whom he met while she was working as a hostess at the Mission Ranch Hotel in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. They were seen together at several events over the subsequent decade.

It was announced today that Sandera has passed at age 61. Eastwood is 94. No explanation has been offered about why she died.