Jeff Wells

…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!

I saw Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance (now playing) a few weeks ago. It’s basically about unstated but acted-out things, and I was pleased most of the way through because I couldn’t tell where it was going. I knew something unpleasant was in the pipeline, but there are no real tip-offs and I couldn’t guess what what the third act might actually bring. So in that sense I was fully engaged.

But I have to say (although I can’t explain the particulars, which is what most of my notes are focused on) that I didn’t care for the ending.

I would love to explain why the ending didn’t feel right or satisfying to me, and I’d really like to share my own solution (i.e., my own scenario) but I can’t. But overall this is a better-than-decent Woody — not Match Point good but reasonably diverting. And I totally concur, by the way, with Kyle Smith‘s 4.5 Wall Street Journal piece — “Woody Allen’s Cancellation Is a Crime Against Culture.”

Boilerplate: Lou de Laâge‘s Fanny, a young French wife, is feeling empty or even sterile within a marriage to Melvil Poupaud‘s Jean, an exacting and persistent rich guy in his early 40s…one of those “demanding in a quietly ruthless way” sort of guys. Fanny is more or less content because of the affluent comforts and whatnot, but at the same time she’s sensing that this overly comfortable, mostly bloodless relationship is slowly draining her of something vital.

And so despite all the perks and by a stroke of good (or bad) luck she finds herself hanging with Niels Schneider‘s Alain, an ex-boyfriend, and then naturally having sex with him and whatnot. And then all the stuff that inevitably happens when a wife or husband starts regularly lying and covering up…it all kicks in and then some.

I have to add that Woody’s Coup de Chance screenplay often feels a bit on-the-nose and first-drafty, like almost every film he’s written since the turn of the century. I’ve been complaining about this off and on for 20, 25 years. I’ve been saying all along that Woody needs a sharp writing partner…a 40something whippersnapper…a Marshall Brickman or a Douglas McGrath…someone to tell him that in 2023 there’s no such thing as an “only copy” of a novel in progress.

I was fine with Schneider’s boyfriend (a writer) although he’s something of a bland stock character…written rather conventionally, no edges or undercurrents, etc. And Lou’s cheating young wife struck me as brittle and wound too tightly, and she definitely didn’t radiate any of those magnificent-in-bed Grace Kelly vibes. I took one look at her and said “nope…not worth the trouble.”

Gay people are 100% cool but watch out for the trans-gender nutters, especially when it comes to their influence upon kids of various ages, including surgical stuff and school curriculums and whatnot.

This isn’t HE talking (I’m fairly easy with everyone in a facetime sense, hard only on HE commenters) but a cross section of Middle Americans….just listen.

Who is the American working class? Do they still have a shot at the American Dream? How do their beliefs differ from those of the elites who control the narrative? In reporting my book Second Class, I found that an extreme moderation characterizes the American working class: pic.twitter.com/ETwsT1HtzX

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) April 5, 2024

Earlier today I wrote that Kerry Condon‘s performance in Robert Lorenz‘s In The Land of Saints and Sinners (Samuel Goldwyn, 3.29) amounts to “one of the greatest female villains ever…a feisty, take-no-shit-from-anyone IRA firebrand.”

There’s no rolling your eyes or waving this woman away — she holds eye contact, means every feckin’ word and is full of absolute conviction and a fair amount of controlled rage. Condon’s character, Doireann McCann, won’t take “no” or “maybe” from anyone about anything, and her eyes are fierce and flaming. Talk about a fascinating lady from the word “go.”

In The Land of Saints and Sinners is “a Liam Neeson movie,” and we all know what that means — a steady and stalwart Neeson fellow who’s not looking for trouble and in fact would like to back off into a shelter or backwater of some kind, and then a slow burning, a gradually tightening situation, implications of tough terms, bad people up to bad stuff (including the threat of serious harm to a couple of innocent characters as well as to Neeson’s guy) until it all blows up in the end.

But the story, set in rural Ireland in the mid ’70s, pulls you in bit by bit, and the script has been carefully and compellingly written by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane, and the shaping of Condon’s character is exceptional. You can call Doireann a volcanic madwoman, but that would be selling her short or at least putting it too simply. She’s a villain, all right, but she doesn’t believe in playing it cool or fair or even-steven. You can’t help but believe every damn word she says, and at least respecting whatever it was that put so much acid into her blood. Not a woman to be trifled with.

I certainly didn’t see Doireann as some kind of broad charicature or cliche…some kind of Irish Cruella de Ville. She’s way too blistering for that.

All I know is that I sat up in my seat when Condon came along and start giving orders and barking questions and challenging and intimidating pretty much everyone, and I’m thinking of watching the film again just for her performance.

The only vaguely “off” thing about the exquisitely composed, visually ravishing Ripley (Netflix, now streaming) is that Andrew Scott seems a bit old to play the lead. He’s early 40ish looking, or 12 or 13 years older than the 28 year-old Matt Damon was in The Talented Mr. Ripley (’99) and 16 or 17 years older than Alain Delon was in Purple Noon (’60).

But it’s only a slight bother.

Dennis Hopper was almost exactly Scott’s age — around 40 or 41 — when he played Ripley in Wim Wenders‘ The American Friend. Ripley was shot in 2021, when Scott was 40 or 41.

When you boil it all down, the great Gene Wilder, who lived for 83 years, enjoyed a peak period of 13 years (’67 to ’80). Performance-wise he knocked it out of the park seven times but four of these happened in ’67 and ’74 — his super-peak years.

One, his genius-level cameo as the giggling excitable undertaker in Bonnie and Clyde (’67). Two, Leo Bloom in The Producers (’67)…”Max, he’s wearing a dress.” Three, the doctor who has a sordid affair with a sheep in Woody Allen‘s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (’72). Four and five, his double-whammy performances in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both in ’74). Six, George Caldwell in Silver Streak (’76). And seven, Skip Donahue in Stir Crazy (’80).

And that was it. Wilder gave other noteworthy or beloved performances (Willy Wonka, The Woman in Red, The Frisco Kid) but they weren’t as good as the hallowed seven.

No, I haven’t seen Remembering Gene Wilder.

I could never fully understand why Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, which opened five and a half years ago, was blown off by nearly everyone. The Sony Pictures docudrama is about the tragic fall of Presidential contender Gary Hart during the 1988 primary campaign.

I completely fell for it after the Telluride ’18 debut. It featured a commanding lead performance by Hugh Jackman and several delicious supporting performances. And it all but completely flopped — cost $25 million to make, earned $3.2 million theatrically, and was pretty much ignored on during the 2018 award season.

Seriously, what happened?

Posted on 9.19.18: Less than ten minutes into my first viewing of Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, I knew it was at least a B-plus. By the time it ended I was convinced it was a solid A.

It’s not a typical Reitman film — it doesn’t deliver emotionally moving moments a la Juno and Up In The Air. It is, however, a sharp and lucid account of a real-life political tragedy — the destruction of former Colorado Senator Gary Hart‘s presidential campaign due to press reports of extra-marital womanizing with campaign volunteer Donna Rice.

The Front Runner is an exacting, brilliantly captured account of a sea-change in press coverage of presidential campaigns — about a moment when everything in the media landscape suddenly turned tabloid. Plus it feels recognizable as shit. I immediately compared The Front Runner to Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, Mike Nichols‘ Primary Colors and James Vanderbilt‘s Truth. It is absolutely on the same wavelength and of the same calibre.

Hugh Jackman delivers a steady, measured, well-honed portrayal of Hart, but the whole cast is pretty close to perfect — every detail, every note, every wisecrack is spot-on.

Why, then, are some critics giving Reitman’s film, which is absolutely his best since Up In The Air, the back of their hands? The Front Runner easily warrants scores in the high 80s or low 90s, and yet Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic aggregate tallies are currently in the high 60s — over 20 points lower than they ought to be.

I’ll tell you what’s going on. Critics can be cool to films that portray journalists in a less than admirable light, which is what The Front Runner certainly does. The Miami Herald reporters who followed Hart around and broke the Rice story are depicted as sleazy fellows, and the relationship between the Miami Herald and Hart is depicted as deeply antagonistic, especially on the Herald’s part. Hart screwed himself with his own carelessness, but the Herald is depicted as being more or less on the same level as the National Enquirer.

You can bet that on some level this analogy is not going down well with certain critics. Remember how Vanderbilt’s Truth (’15), a whipsmart journalism drama, was tarnished in the press for portraying the collapse of Mary Mapes‘ faulty 60 Minutes investigation into George Bush‘s National Guard history and alleged cocaine use? A similar dynamic is happening right how.

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The principle behind my imminent submission to Monkey Man roughly parallels my sense of resignation and obligation to see Ken Loach‘s The Old Oak. I can’t wall myself off — I have to engage.

It’s obvious what kind of cards are being dealt here — resentful old Loachian guys in England’s northeastern region vs. Syrian refugees. And I know I’m probably going to struggle to hear a portion of the dialogue. (I’ve never seen a Loach film that wouldn’t have been improved by subtitles.) This is Loach’s last film, however, and I feel I owe it to him.

Favorite Loaches: The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Looking For Eric, My Name Is Joe, Poor Cow.

An HE commenter said the other day that I need to engage more with ongoing spring product, and therefore need to settle into Dev Patel‘s Monkey Man (Universal, 4.5), aka “John Wick in Mumbai” — the same revenge formula with a dunking of Indian nativist class rage…rage and revenge. I realize I have to endure it, but it’s obviously going to be painful. Patel: “I wanted to give it real soul, real trauma, real pain…and I wanted to infuse a little bit of culture.”

Back in the Nixon, Ford and Carter era I had a thing for Angel Tompkins. This was partly due to the fact that she’s my type (blond, great eyes, WASPy) but mostly because she’d delivered a mature, grounded, open-hearted performance as a cheating wife in Mel Stuart and Robert Kaufman‘s I Love My Wife, a minor but decent dramedy about a young married doctor (Elliott Gould) who cats around.

My memory is a bit hazy but Tompkins’ character, Helene Donnelly, was listlessly married to Dabney Coleman‘s Frank Donnelly, and her affair with Gould’s Dr. Richard Burrows was about more than just gymnastic distraction — she was all in, and you could really sense the unambiguous depth of feeling. It was Tompkins’ best role and finest-ever performance — nothing else she did came close.

The deal was doubly sealed after I spoke with Tompkins following a Rear Window screening on the Universal lot, sometime in late ’83 or early ’84. Okay, she struck me as a glib conversational surfer that night but almost everyone is like that after a drink or two. And perhaps my recollection of I Love My Wife is overly generous, but it wasn’t half bad.

Tompkins’ career hung in for a while but gradually tapered off. She married Ted Lang, described on her Wiki page as a film and comedy writer slash venture capitalist. She gradually became a political conservative (no problem) and then a Trumpie (good effing God).

And then today I saw this. Obviously not a statement that anyone with any sort of informed, straight-arrow perception or sense of rationality would share with a straight face. I’m distressed that Joe Biden didn’t pass the baton, but Tompkins seems to honestly believe that a blend of Satanic derangement syndrome and an anti-democratic agenda is the way to go, and it’s mystifying that an actress who seemed to have some sort of basic humanistic grasp of things way back when…it’s odd to think of a person going this far around the bend and becoming this fruit-loopy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (’77) was the third and final Sinbad film. VFX by Ray Harryhausen, of course. Shot in ’75, the release was delayed two years due to Harryhausen’s exacting visual standards. And yet all of Harryhausen’s creatures used the exact same body language and exaggerated gestures. And who came up with that cyclops “erp” sound?

I’d never seen so much as a snippet of footage from this film until tonight. Clearly a bargain basement effort. It’s the visual equivalent of eating french fries at a Burger King

Directed, believe it or not, by distinguished stage and screen actor Sam Wanamaker (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Death on the Nile, Private Benjamin, The Competition, Raw Deal), who was in his mid 50s in ‘75. Talk about a paycheck gig.

The film stars Patrick Wayne (36 at the time), 22 year-old Taryn (daughter of Tyrone) Power, 24 year-old Jane Seymour and Patrick Troughton.

Stop-motion creatures were riveting in their early to mid 20th century heyday (early 30s to mid 50s). From the ‘60s onward it seemed as if Harryhausen alone kept this increasingly passé but surreal-seeming technique going…the exotic unreality, the rareness of it…an odd-bird visual realm that was neither “real” nor animated nor CG’ed.

And yet Harryhausen’s Sinbad films were curiously arresting as far as they went, and even the stiff and hokey Clash of the Titans (‘81) had its brief diversions. I still love the shadowy, torch-lit confrontation scene between Harry Hamlin and the Medusa serpent with the bow-and-arrow.

The constant problem, of course, was the difficulty of blending live-action humans with these creatures. They were almost always in separate shots. And of course, the action was always about the same choices — run or fight and possibly be killed ad infinitum.

I had never seen this scene from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger before Wednesday night, and I’m sorry but I felt immediately underwhelmed. That midday, too-much sunshine visual palette, for one thing. And I instantly recognized those Spanish boulder-strewn hills from the battle scenes in King of Kings (’61). And what was the horn-headed cyclops looking to accomplish exactly?

Although born 100 years ago today, Marlon Brando is still “alive” in a sense, at least by the measure of a fair percentage of Millennials and Zoomers knowing his name and at least one of his great performances — Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

I’d be surprised if most of them have even heard of On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Last Tango in Paris, Viva Zapata, etc. Everything that seems eternal and granite-like crumbles and collapses into rubble and dust.

Posted on 9.30.17: Director-producer George Englund has died at age 91. The only half-decent film he directed was The Ugly American (’63), which starred Marlon Brando as a naive and somewhat arrogant Ambassador to “Sarkhan” (Thailand crossed with South Vietnam) during a politically tumultuous period.

It costarred Eiji Okada, the good-looking guy who played Emmanuelle Riva‘s lover in Hiroshima mon amour and also costarred in Woman in the Dunes.

The Ugly American, which had almost nothing to do plot-wise with Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s 1958 best-seller, is not a top-tier film but a moderately good one, and it foresaw, of course, the misguided U.S. policies toward resentful Vietnamese patriots that would lead to so much horror and death for so many years.

Englund’s well-written book about Brando, “The Way It’s Never Been Done Before,” was published in 2004. It mentions a late-night soiree Englund shared with Brando in 1955, and which concluded with the two of them shooting the shit in a Santa Monica parking lot. Their conversation was interrupted by a cop, who wanted to know if they were up to something: