Jeff Wells 
“Yes, there’s still a long way to go, and [there’ll be almost certainly] more horrendous shit to endure over the coming few years. But I genuinely believe we’ve seen the worst of it. In fact, I would say the scale of change has been quite abrupt.
“Something like Disney’s Strange World, released just over a year ago, would probably not be greenlit, produced or released 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.
…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.”
…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.