Jeff Wells

Fool that you are, you suggest a certain film for the evening. “What’s it about, who’s in it, when was it made?” etc. You give her all that. She has a problem with overly theatrical acting styles, she says, and believes that only films made in the ’80s and beyond have genuine, real-deal acting behavior, so you assure her that the acting isn’t fake.

And then you might mention the music or the cinematography or your history with the film, etc.

“How many times have you seen it?” I don’t know, five or six times, ten or twelve times, more than a few. “And you want to see it again?” I can see great films over and over, it doesn’t matter. On top of which it kinda makes it new in a way when you see it with a virgin.

“What’s the title again?” You give her that and after endless skepticism and vague reluctance she says “okay, let’s go.”

And then you call up the stream or insert the Bluray into the tray or you head for the Aero or Metrograph or Film Forum, and then the movie starts and five or ten minutes later she says, “Oh, I’ve seen this!”

Progressive lefty critics don’t want to know from harrowing depictions of violent, hardscrabble, non-white, hand-to-mouth, lower-income, mentally-stressed NYC natives howling and moaning and suffering the pains of hell in shitty, grubby, rat-infested apartments.

Because such depictions don’t blend with the progressive program and are generally bad for the soul. It doesn’t matter if Ryan King‘s screenplay was a Black List favorite. Critics don’t approve and that’s that. When I saw this film in Cannes last May I noticed two or three female jouurnalists walking out early.

Critics will, however. approve of or at least give a pass to Martin Scorsese‘s Bringing Out The Dead (’99), which is quite similar to Jean Stephane-Sauvaier‘s Asphalt City (Vertical / Roadside, 3.29) but is insulated to some extent by being 25 years old and therefore from another, less socially scrutinized era.

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The idea for the new HE podcast is to call it “The Misfits“**, and to video record it on Zoom….three or four heads at a time. I’ve never organized a Zoom project so I’ll need to learn the ropes fast, including the basics of uploading the Zoomcast to Substack and getting the sound right.

HE friendo Edward Champion, who knows the tech stuff top to bottom, has graciously offered a certain amount of guidance.

As the honcho I’ll participate each and every time, of course. You can never be sure who has real character and cojones and who doesn’t when the heat is on, but a couple of folks will turn out to be regulars, I’m sure, and some others will become every-other-weekers or once-monthly alternates.

The table settings are far from final but anyone who wants to step up to the plate and pick up a baseball bat and face those the pressure and the fastballs…the door is open.

Good amigo Sasha Stone is stepping back but has always been and always will be an excellent human being. Glenn Kenny is talking about chatting this weekend…here’s hoping. The feisty and fearless Tatiana Antropova is willing to give it a shot. HE regular “Eddie Ginley” and I will be speaking soon. Manhattan funny guy podcaster Bill McCuddy is down with the idea. “Zoey Rose” has said she’d like to jump in from time to time.

Two behind-the-camera friendos have backed out…okay. Jeff Sneider initially said in a thread that he wanted to co-host, and then he vaporized. Kristi Coulter indicated in the same thread that she might want to take part in a discussion or two, and then…

It’ll take two or three weeks to iron out the kinks, but the initial plan is to try and make the first bumpy Zoomer happen this weekend — probably on Sunday. It’ll happen for dead sure the following weekend.

** Or maybe “Oscar Poker 2: The Misfits.”

And my earnest pledge to be more careful and exacting forthwith. I could offer weak excuses but to what end? It just felt safer to be ticketed to a certain screening that I might be able to attend than to not be ticketed. I should have been more vigilant.

From “Schindler’s List: An Oral History of a Masterpiece,” an oral history THR history piece by Scott Feinberg. Posted on 2.21.24. Feinberg spent about a month interviewing everyone (Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Martin Scorsese, Mike Ovitz, et. al.) and throwing it all together.

Spielberg: “I had known Billy Wilder because when I was making E.T. and Poltergeist at MGM, Billy was a consultant there. He was given scripts to read, especially comedies, and would make notes on the scripts and give them back to the studio people, [and this process was killing him].

“Billy felt he was wasting his life. We would have lunch often in the commissary, and Billy would say, ‘I just cannot get a film off the ground anymore. Whatever worked for me for 30 years is not working any more. The humor is different. I read these scripts, make some notes, give ideas, and my ideas are ideas that would’ve been brilliant in the 1940s and ’50s, but nobody’s accepting them today.’

“Years later he called me at the office and said, ‘I need to see you, it’s very important.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll come over to your house.’ He said, ‘No, I need to come to you, because I’m going to ask you for something.’ So he came over to Amblin and up to my office, and he said, ‘I just read a book and found out you own it, Schindler’s List. This is my experience before I came to America. I lost everyone over there. I need to tell this story, and I hear you own the rights. Will you let me direct this and you can produce it with me?’

“And I didn’t know what to say except to tell him the truth. I said, ‘Billy, I’m leaving for Krakow in three weeks. The whole film’s been cast. All the crew’s been hired. I start shooting at the end of February.’ Billy couldn’t speak and then I couldn’t speak, and I just reached my hand out and Billy took my hand.”

This story originally appeared in a Premiere magazine story, “Un pour tous” by Léonard Haddad, published in December 2015-January 2016 issue. It was concurrently posted by “Chippily“.

Imagine you’re speaking to Ryan Gosling in a dark cellar room with a single chair, a table and a light bulb hanging from a cord, and he’s somehow slipped into a very candid mood…cough it up, no holds barred. And you ask him “of the 26 or 27 films you’ve made since Remember The Titans, how many are you seriously proud of? How many hold up honorably and beautifully?”

If i were in Gosling’s shoes, I would name the following 7 films: The Believer, Blue Valentine, The Driver, The Big Short, The Nice Guys, La La Land, Barbie.

The other 19 or 20 Gosling films are decent, not bad, passable, problematic, disappointing, underwhelming, painful: Remember the Titans, Murder by Numbers, The Slaughter Rule, The United States of Leland, The Notebook, Stay, Half Nelson, Fracture, Lars and the Real Girl, All Good Things, Crazy, Stupid, Lovem, The Ides of March, The Place Beyond the Pines, Gangster Squad, Only God Forgives, Lost River, Song to Song, Blade Runner, First Man, The Gray Man.

So 7 out of 27 or roughly 25% good and 75% problematic in one way or another. That’s not a terrible average. It’s probably an inevitable one.

There is no more terrible sound in our Godless universe than the shrieking of a “friendly” celebrity, laughing with forced, exuberant, high-pitched glee.

Charles Melton‘s moussed hair looks really great…seriously.

Lily Gladstone‘s slicked-back hair looks good, but what’s with the pinkish ghost face? Remember that scene in Mike Nichols‘ Silkwood when Diana Scarwid, as Cher’s girlfriend who works in a funeral parlor, was powder-puffing Cher’s face and maing it look all white and chalky, and then Kurt Russell saunters into the kitchen and says “you look like a fucking corpse”?

Why is Tinkerbell-sized Jenny Ortega hanging with this group? The only semi-noteworthy film she did in ’23 was Scream VI.

I get it, I get it…Barry Keoghan and the W magazine guys want to alarm and offend middle-class schmucks like myself. Mission accomplished, so to speak.

Comment #1: Thank God in heaven that they chose not show Keoghan’s “blood”-stained feet. Comment #2: The grand guignol effect is compromised if not ruined by Keohgan’s grotesque bee-stung nose. Comment #3: No offense but if Bloody Barry was the size of an insect and I happened to notice him crawling along my kitchen floor, I would gently pick him up and take him outside and place him in the grass…I wouldn’t stomp him to death…I would give him the gift of freedom.

Imagine all the Times Square passersby who looked up at this huge, block-long billboard in December of 1958 and said, “Wow…that looks like something I should definitely see.” Right now it’s a struggle to find anyone who recalls even seeing this film, or who remembers it with any particular fondness if they have. If you ask me this billboard photo (posted by flashbak.com) is cooler than the film, which I was somehow motivated to write about on 2.23.18.

Why in the world would Martin Scorsese want to make another Jesus film? 35 years ago he delivered his magnum opus with The Last Temptation of Christ…he did it, nailed it, nothing left to prove. Especially with Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind, a parable-driven Jesus flick he’s been editing for somewhere between four and five years, possibly debuting later this year. On top of which belief in Christian dogma has been plummeting for decades, and especially this century.

At a Berlinale press conference earlier today Scorsese said he’s still “contemplating” the approach to his Jesus film.

“What kind of film I’m not quite sure, but I want to make something unique and different that could be thought-provoking and I hope also entertaining. I’m not quite sure yet how to go about it. But once we finish our rounds here of promoting [Killers of the Flower Moon], maybe I’ll get some sleep and then wake up and I’ll have this fresh idea on how to do it.”

HE suggestion: Forget the Nazarene and do another gangster flick, only faster-moving this time. Faster and less contemplative and no old guys. As John Ford was to the western, Martin Scorsese is to northeastern-region goombah crime flicks.

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, released a couple of days ago, has decided that the lowest-ranked U.S. presidents, ranking #40 to #45, are Warren G. Harding (Teapot Dome, tempestuous sexual appetite), William Henry Harrison (died 31 days after inauguration), Franklin Pierce (racially antagonistic, divisive), Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s successor), James Buchanan and, at the very bottom of the list, Donald Trump.

The good guys (#1 through #10) are Lincoln, FDR, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry Truman, Barack Obama, Dwight D. Eisenhower, LBJ and JFK.

Bill Clinton ranks 12th, Joe Biden is two notches below at 14th, Ronald Reagan is 16th, Dubya is 19th, Jimmy Carter is 22nd and Gerald Ford ranks 27th.

I don’t understand Eisenhower being in eighth place. He was a steady, unexciting, moderate-minded fellow who presided over a country absorbed in anxiety, paranoia, invaders, commie conspiracies…Elvis Presley, Debbie Reynolds, No Down Payment….a relatively timid chapter in our country’s history…”the bland leading the bland.”