Jeff Wells

I’ve spoken with four Civil War viewers, and the general consensus is that director Alex Garland has over-muddied the narrative of this armed domestic conflict flick, or has otherwise bent over backwards in order to discourage audiences from perceiving too many real-life parallels or culture-war animosities.

Garland’s original idea had been “what if the George Floyd rioters and the January 6th insurrectionists grew into hardcore military armies and engaged in a serious shooting war?”

But then he and A24 apparently got cold feet and decided to muddy the waters in order to avoid lighting incendiary fuses in an election year.

But if you put aside Garland’s incongruous or vaguely described red herrings (the anti-government rebels defined as a Texas-California alliance, an “Antifa massacre”, a suppressed Florida rebellion) and boil out the snow, Civil War seems clear enough to me. You’d have to be in a deep denial pit not to grasp the basics.

The war is basically between (a) rural-minded, diversity-resistant whites…fatigue-wearing MAGA forces loyal to a journalist-despising, Steve Bannon-resembling, martial-law embracing authoritarian President vs. (b) a diversity army (POCs of varying shades with sprinklings of white progressives) that initially seems less heavily-armed and more guerilla-style until the last half-hour when it suddenly transforms into a major, fatigue-and-helmet-wearing military force that storms the White House.

I’ve actually spoken to two viewers who aren’t entirely persuaded that Nick Offerman‘s U.S. President, a blustery, God-invoking bullshitter who has thrown out the Constitution by granting himself a third term, is a Trumpian figure…they’re not? Nor are they entirely certain that the White House assaulters are the diverse anti-fascist “good guys”.

Trust me, Garland makes it quite clear who is who in this thing and yet these fellows are saying “wait, who do they represent again?”

HE is telling you straight and true to dismiss the comment thread smoke-blowers who are arguing that the real-world parallels are too vaguely contoured to mean much. But they do amount to what I’ve stated here…really. Sasha Stone shares this perception.

Yes, Garland has certainly over-muddied the narrative, but at least he’s reversed the ambiguity in one instance — the instantly iconic Jesse Plemons interrogation scene.

Please understand that Civil War doesn’t really kick in until Plemons arrives, but after that point it’s a much more vigorous and accelerated deal with an ending that, as I mentioned Tuesday morning, made me feel so ecstatic I almost experienced a Zero Dark Thirty-ish boner.

I need to see this again ASAP. I’ll probably catch a commercial screening tonight.

A slew of negative responses to Steven Zallian‘s brilliant Ripley are highlighted in a recently posted Independent article by Maria Butt.

A fair number of people are experiencing problems, you see, with Robert Elswit‘s exquisite black-and-white cinematography

Gripe #1: “What a crime to make a sexy crime show set in 1960s Italy and not do it in color.” Gripe #2: “I didn’t last the first episode…the cinematography is so annoying.” Gripe #3: “Why on earth is Ripley filmed in black and white? Totally killed it for me, although the dog seems okay with it.” Gripe #4: “Black and white is a good way to keep the budget down but adds nothing.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone says the monochrome aversion “might be a generational thing…we olds remember a different kind of filmmaking than what the youngs are used to.”

I also think it’s due to a simple lack of cinema literacy, but you do have to wonder how these morons can look at Elswit’s exquisite cinematography and not realize what a high-end thing it is…what a sublime treasure each and every shot is?

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