Jeff Wells

Posted seven years ago by “Aylmer666.”

I can’t find William Goldman‘s second most famous adage about movies, so here goes from memory:

Hollywood makes three kinds of films — (1) the kind that attempt to be really good and succeed (the smallest percentage), (2) the kind that attempt to be very good or at least pretty good, and fail at that, and (3) the kind that aren’t intended to be any good from the get-go — they just shit in the audience’s lap and wind uo making money anyway.

Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Poor Things, Barbie, Maestro and Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant belong to the first category, Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, Napoleon and May December belong to the second, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 belongs to the third.

Read more

Posted on 6.15.18: I was crashing with a married couple, Frank and Karen, in a smallish Boston apartment in the general vicinity of Symphony Hall and Hemenway Street. They had a linebacker-sized friend named Eddie who lived nearby and was also hanging out a lot. Mainly the four of us sat around in the evenings and got high. I distinctly remember not rolling joints as much as tapping the tobacco out of filtered cigarettes and then-filling the cigarette with what I recall was low-grade pot. Moderately potent, lots of stems and seeds.

One night around 10 pm or so we decided we needed a straw for sucking in hash smoke. A tiny chunk of hash placed on the burning embers of a cigarette, etc. No, I don’t remember why we didn’t just use rolled-up dollar bills. Probably because it would’ve been unsanitary.

I recall that it was fairly cold out and that we were probably broke or close to it, and so going to a market and buying a pack of straws was out. So I decided to start knocking on doors and asking Frank and Karen’s neighbors if they had a straw to spare. It wasn’t just the vaguely strange notion of a long-haired guy in jeans and boots with bloodshot eyes looking to bum a straw from strangers, but that it was too late to knock on doors and bum anything from anyone.

Read more

Her name is Ada (@ada_akpala)…

I can’t explain why I feel more jolted and jazzed by The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars now than I did 52 years ago. I liked David Bowie’s 1972 landmark album but didn’t adore it — now I’m head over heels, can’t stop listening to it. I was actually more into Lou Reed‘s Transformer back then, although they weren’t exactly concurrent. Ziggy popped in June ’72 — Transformer arrived five months later.

I always thought glam rock and glitter rock were one and the same. They’re certainly synonymous today.

Posted on 8.26.14: Last night I tried to explain my sense of frustration about The Leftovers to a guy pretending to be Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of the HBO series. I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been because I posted my thoughts on Twitter rather than in an e-mail. But I made a few points that added up to something, I think.

And then the fake Lindelof tried to blow me off or at least denigrate what I was trying to say by addressing me as “Ma’am.” He did so, he later said, because I reminded him of his aunt. But the conversation had merit nonetheless because I meant what I said.

I tried to say that it’s always seemed to me that there’s a huge empty hole in the middle of The Leftovers, and this is due to an absence of awe and wonder on the part of just about everyone in the series, both in front of and behind the camera.

A cosmic event of extraordinary significance has occured three years before the series begins, and in the wake of the disappearance of 2% of the world’s population, it seem as if everyone in The Leftovers is saying “Wow, we didn’t get chosen…that’s fucked up…this feels bad…I guess we’re all spirituallly deficient on some level…shit.” And yet no one is saying “Wow, the religious wackos were right all along! There is a God and a heaven and a scheme of some kind…what a mindblower! Bill Maher and Woody Allen and all the great existential philosophers were wrong all along, and…well, even if some of us don’t wind up in paradise, at least we know for the first time in the history of humanity that there really is a plan and a scheme and some kind of order to things. The term intelligent design is no longer a right-wing slogan. It’s obviously real and serious as a heart attack.”

And yet the scheme is not particularly intelligent. It’s arbitrary and random as fuck. There’s no special moral glow or distinction shared by the departed. They’re just gone. A woman of Indian descent who smokes cigarettes and is having a fast fuck in a motel room with Justin Theroux‘s Kevin Garvey…she gets taken along with Vladimir Putin, Gary Busey, Jennifer Lopez and the Pope? Along with Carrie Coon‘s husband and two kids? And an unborn fetus in the womb of Amy Brennaman? What the hell for? If anything the design is malevolent and perverse. Nothing calculates or balances out. It’s all a big sick joke, and it’s all from the head of evil Lindelof.

Here’s how I put it to fake Lindehof on Twitter and how he replied. Note: I’ve clarified and expanded upon a couple of thoughts here — in actuality they were a bit shorter and blunter. Senior Variety editor Marc Graser was kissing Lindehof’s ass about something and I jumped in with…

Wellshwood: “Does it bother anyone that there’s never been even a mention of wicked design in this series?”

Wellshwood: “What kind of idiotic God removes an unborn fetus from a mother’s womb? To what possible fucking end?”

Wellshwood: “In short, [the series] has a big fat empty hole in the middle of it — a hole it doesn’t know what to do with, much less fill.”

Wellshwood: “The show says over and over that God is one ruthless fucker, a master of infuriating fate.”

Lindelof (later on): “Ma’am, I would make fun of you, but I honestly can’t even tell what you’re trying to say.”

Wellshwood: “Go ahead and make fun. Your series is about cosmic malevolence and the utter absence of wonder.”

Wellshwood: “And where’d you get the idea I’m a ‘Ma’am’?”

Lindelof (this morning): “Honest mistake. Sorry about that. Your haircut and ramblings about religion reminded me of my aunt.”

Wellshwood: “Funny.”

..we all know what this is going to be. A feminist Bride of Frankenstein empowerment saga by way of Poor Things….same deal, back from the dead, recreates herself spiritually, sets the world on fire.

Yesterday World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy told me he’s “hearing good things about The First Omen…from fairly reliable people, I mean.”

I won’t watch it…I won’t. Okay, I might if enough people chime in with the same positive views. Non-horror fans, I mean.

The basic problem is that I’ve always hated the Omen franchise. Three years ago I re-watched Richard Donner’s 1976 original, which I’d been respectful of for decades, and I realized it was actually pretty bad.

Posted on 5.26.21: The Omen is “a good creepy film of its type,” I wrote years ago. “But I t’s actually not — it’s a very stupid film that was made in a lazy, half-assed manner with mostly awful dialogue, and is burdened by idiotic plotting.

The Omen‘s success was based upon a general audience belief in mythical religious bullshit, and it launched itself upon the lore of The Exorcist (’73), which was and is a much better film. So please accept my apology for saying what I said. I don’t know what I was thinking.

With the exception of three good scenes — the nanny hangs herself during Damian’s birthday party, the dogs in the graveyard scene with Gregory Peck and David Warner, and Warner gets his head sliced off by a flying pane of glass — The Omen is a painfully mediocre effort.

Almost every scene summons the same reaction: “Why isn’t this better…why didn’t they rewrite the dialogue?…God, this wasn’t finessed at all.”

I came to really hate the tiny, beady eyes of that young actor who played Damian — Harvey Spencer Stephens (who’s now 54 years old).

The middle-aged, warlock-eyed priest who gets impaled by a falling javelin of some sort — why did he just stand there like a screaming idiot as he watched the rod plunge toward him?

Why didn’t Peck and Lee Remick simply fire that awful demonic nanny (Billie Whitelaw)?

Why didn’t Peck just buy a pistol and shoot that demonic Rotweiler right between the eyes, and in fact shoot all the other Rotweilers in the graveyard?

The Omen depends upon Peck and Remick refusing to consider the obvious during most of the running time. Refusing to reach for an umbrella, wear a raincoat or take shelter during a thunderstorm…that kind of idiocy.

During his career heyday (’45 to ’64) Peck mostly played smart, restrained, rational-minded characters, one after another. (His roles in Spellbound, Duel in the Sun and Moby Dick were the exceptions.) The Omen was the first time Peck was called upon to play a stuffed-shirt moron — a denialist of the first order. Okay, he starts to wake up during the final half-hour, but it’s truly painful to watch an actor known for dignity and rectitude and sensible behavior undermine the idea of intelligent assessment at every turn.

Read more

…better than John Wayne. And while we’re at it, let’s reconsider the lesson of Wayne’s increasing baldness and constant wig-wearing in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s…losing most of your hair can be a terrible or certainly a diminishing thing.

“He’ll do.”

“Take your friend’s horse…we’ll bury him.” Later: “Get a shovel and my Bible. I’ll read over him.”

“Every time you turn around, expect to see me. ‘Cause one time you’ll turn around and I’ll be there.”

Read more

…weighing in on the forthcoming interracial London stage production of Romeo and Juliet…Tom Holland and Frances Amewudah–Rivers, etc.

Canyon Coyote posted the following last night, and this, ladies and gents, is what “woke terror” is all about:

(1) If you are in the industry in any capacity, you know that you can’t really speak openly or honestly about your feelings if they aren’t absolutely progressive full tilt. This is tripled if you are a middle-of-the-road creative or technician white guy in the middle of a recession. It also applies if you aren’t a rich successful person with fuck-you money to a lesser extent.

(2) Why do you think every critic sounds exactly the same and has a lot of the same moralistic talking points? If I called Barbie misandrist on Facebook, 20 progressive friends would dunk on me and 50 others would share the take as if I wore a MAGA hat and had just shot a gay black trans woman on Park Avenue in Trump’s name. There is also no reason to have an Israel-Palestine take right now because people are equally worked up. Even if something isn’t political why go public with a hard or critical take on a film when you may be interviewed for or employed by someone who made it? You think in this economy I’d be willing to lose out on producing The Bachelor just because I think the new Bachelorette is lame?

(3) If you are a normal working person in any kind of a sales or public capacity, having the wrong take could literally cost you your job if it’s seen by the right people at the wrong time. People are politically and socially enraged and might literally avoid hiring a doctor or attorney if said doctor or attorney feels the wrong way about any hot-button issue.

(4) If you have middle-of-the-road safe progressive takes on entertainment you can speak your mind, but if you are slightly contrarian at the wrong time, it honestly might crush you at an inopportune moment. I work in reality and have worked in offices where people gossip, and let me tell you in the freelance world having non mainstream takes can literally mean not getting asked back on the next season. You can think I’m delusional or a neckbeard but I’m absolutely telling the truth. For what it’s worth I’m in decent to good shape, and am happily married with a kid.

(5) I’m not Brad Pitt but I’m better looking than Tobey Maguire so I’m hardly a basement dweller, but I know talking about why I dislike Barbie under my real name would get me blackballed with the half-dozen female EPs I’m friends with on social media. Barbie is just a random example but I wouldn’t even make my above comments in the current climate because some POC might decide that anyone thinking that the new Romeo and Juliet actress isn’t beautiful is racist. I went after Will Smith pretty hard when he assaulted Chris Rock and had two friends DM that I was borderline racist and should respect that Smith was struggling and let it go cause it’s not my place to have an opinion on the actions of a black man.

(6) I guarantee there are folks here that would have lost their damn minds in 2004 if Seth Rogen were cast as Romeo opposite Natalie Portman. Those exact same people are pretending to be fine with this new Romeo and Juliet casting as if it’s not weird. Anyone But You works because they are both equally hot. It would not have worked with Josh Gad in the Glen Powell role. Sometimes I think people are just losing their minds in order to be morally righteous. Just wild nonsense.

(7) Like why can’t we all just have takes anymore without someone being insanely offended as if their world was destroyed? Racism = Bad. Questioning a romantic pairing based on looks in a love story is absolutely normal human behavior!