Jeff Wells

…this is how you respond. You don’t duck or push back. You don’t whine. You don’t call the cops and say “waaahh, my wife or my girlfriend is hitting me.” You just Lee Marvin it….simple.

Posted today (1.11.24) by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy.

Children of Men premiered 17 years ago (technically 12.25.06), which is at least a generation ago. Most Zoomers probably couldn’t be bothered to stream it, but if they did they’d probably presume that most of this driving scene is digitally painted or augmented, when in fact it’s all real (pure physical stuff) except for the one bit where Clive Owen opens the door and the guys on the bike go flying. Otherwise it’s totally organic.

33 year-old Kristen Stewart has been out for quite a few years now. She officially announced on SNL in September ’17, but I recall getting slapped around by the HE commentariat a year or two earlier for saying that I found one of her girlfriends too butch and that if I were Stewart (rich, famous, pick of the litter) I would go for someone foxier.

Anyway, Variety‘s Adam B. Vary has posted a 1.11.24 piece called “How Kristen Stewart Became A Queer Trailblazer“, and I’m like “we’re doing this again?” How many times can Stewart be celebrated for being out and proud? Are we going to be reading a similar cover story in 2030, when Stewart is 39?

As you read the article you can feel Vary’s emotional investment in Stewart’s bold-as-brass queerness. It turns him on, lights him up, gets him off.

Vary adopted this “yay, team!” approach because Stewart is promoting Love Lies Bleeding, a Sundance ’24 attraction about a hot lesbian love affair.

About 20 days ago I wrote that I don’t find Love Lies Bleeding especially appealing as neither Stewart (whose character looks plain and butchy and wears bad mullet hair) nor costar Katy O’Brian seem especially attractive, at least in this instance. The commentariat bitches beat me up for saying that also.

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Posted on 9.7.21: Written by Mike Rutherford and Christopher Neil, “All I Need Is A Miracle” is about a guy who’s been indifferent and even abusive to his ex-girlfriend, but now he realizes what an asshole he was and desperately wants her back. If she decides to forgive him and return, it’ll be because God has smiled and lent a hand.

If you believe that a certain someone agreeing to be your boyfriend or girlfriend constitutes a “miracle”, you’ve got the wrong attitude, man. You might even be a loser afflicted with low-self-esteem. If you’re a good person with character and inner value and whatnot, you shouldn’t need a miracle to make things right in terms of a desired relationship. Some guy saying “left to my own devices my would-be boyfriend or girlfriend might blow me off or find someone better, but if a ‘miracle’ happens I’ll be saved!”…c’mon, man.

I had the same attitude back in my hormonal heyday. If I was the object of some woman’s intense desire and if she believed that if I reciprocated her feelings that a “miracle” would be at hand, my response would be “hold on a minute…there’s nothing miraculous about me or being with me…I have my good and not-so-good qualities but if you think that our falling in love or moving in together or whatever…if you think that would be some kind of miracle, then you’re dreaming.

Nobody is a miracle, nobody’s a perfect catch…it could be a good or better-than-good relationship or not, but come down to earth….we’re all flawed, all struggling…nobody’s a gleaming prize.

Clint Eastwood: “Show me a drop-dead beautiful woman with an elegant education and great business acumen, and I’ll show you a guy who’s tired of fucking her.”

I won’t divulge his name or even the country where he operates from, but yesterday HE spoke to a real-life, honest-to-God streaming pirate.

I was poking around about the pirating of Fast Charlie and the apparent inability or unwillingness on the part of Vertical Entertainment to do very much about it.

I’d been told that Vertical’s communications with pirates basically boils down to AI threats and warnings. Pirates don’t listen because AI threats are bullshit. So I asked this guy…call him Long John Silver…about who, if anyone, he might actually be afraid of? Who does he take seriously?

Long John Silver: “We don’t know much about Vertical. We know Muso and other similar services, and we know that they use AI for notices but (a) they don’t follow up, and (b) what can they do when our servers are in countries they have no control over? Servers change so much, and it’s not worth it for them to chase one or two movies.

“Plus takedown notices only come when we host on services such as Dropbox or Google drive. They’re not effective when chasing torrents.

“Why should we take companies like Vertical or anyone else seriously? It’s been 25 years and they haven’t done anything. They can’t do a thing if they don’t know who/where we are.

“If it’s a genuine movie or a fake movie pretending to be real, we still earn from ads. You might find it interesting that when fakes are floating around, real movies get downloaded much less.”

Ed Harris‘s “happiness is bullshit” rant is a glorious retort to Sally Hawkins‘”Poppy” character, an emotional fascist who taunted people left and right with “are you happy?” sentiments, in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (’08).

It’s from the under-appreciated Kodachrome, and was written by Jonathan Tropper.

I hated Jason Sudeikis‘ character, an overly sensitive 40ish candy-ass who still can’t get past his dying dad’s (Harris’s) show of parental indifference when they were both younger.

Sudeikis to Harris: “When’s my birthday?” 

My father wasn’t much in the affection department either, weenie.  Man up.

I’m trying to figure out how Lesley Gore‘s “You Don’t Own Me” ties in with Jeremy Allen White doing gay pull-ups on a lower Manhattan rooftop. The ad is saved by the very last bit…flopping on the couch, doves fluttering off, the camera arcs northward.

HE’s favorite local workspace, the Wilton Library, is closing two hours early this evening because of wet weather…good heavens! For it’s not only raining but windy outside…batten down the hatches!…mommy!

What are wind and rain? Nothing…nothing at all. Wear a hoodie, carry an umbrella. It’s not like we’re in Act One of the sepia-colored The Wizard of Oz and a twister is coming our way. Tomorrow it’ll be dry and fair skies.

This isn’t about rain, of course. This is about a lack of intestinal fortitude among the local 50-plus administrative class. Where are the men?

I have a feeling that Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 western classic is closer to the hearts of boomers and GenXers, and that under-40s are kinda “meh” if not altogether disinterested. Too sexist (all the women are depicted as disloyal and whore-ish), too violent (especially for Zoomer candy-asses), too fatalistic and end-of-the-roadish. At least it’s not racist.

“Simply the finest film ever produced between these American shores. The masterpiece of masterpieces. Film achieves its highest calling: art, incitement, revelation, challenge, elegy, physical redemption of reality that sets a bar no one else, including Peckinpah, ever reached. Yeah. I kinda like it.” — Steven Gaydos, 8.27.19.

Ditto: When The Wild Bunch opened it was regarded as the last revisionist wheeze of a genre that had peaked in the ’50s and was surely on its last legs. It was also seen, disparagingly, as a kind of gimmick film that used ultra-violence and slow-mo death ballets to goose the formula.

Now it’s regarded as one of the best traditional, right-down-the-middle westerns ever made. This kind of writing, acting and pacing will never return or be reborn. Lightning in a bottle.

“What Citizen Kane was to movie lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969,” Michael Sragow wrote, adding that Peckinpah had “produced an American movie that equals or surpasses the best of Kurosawa: the Gotterdammerung of Westerns”.

“After a reporter from the Reader’s Digest got up to ask ‘Why was this film even made? I stood up and called it a masterpiece; I felt, then and now, that The Wild Bunch is one of the great defining moments of modern movies.” — from 9.29.02 article by Roger Ebert.

Vincent Canby on William Holden‘s performance as Pike Bishop, from 6.26.69 N.Y. Times review: “After years of giving bored performances in boring movies, Holden comes back gallantly in The Wild Bunch. He looks older and tired, but he has style, both as a man and as a movie character who persists in doing what he’s always done, not because he really wants the money but because there’s simply nothing else to do.”

Edmond O’Brien: “They? Why they is the plain and fancy ‘they’…that’s who they is. Caught ya, didn’t they? Tied a tin can to your tails. Led you in and waltzed you out again. Oh, my, what a bunch! Big tough ones, eh? Here you are with a handful of holes, a thumb up your ass and big grin to pass the time of day with.”

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