Jeff Wells

I’ve just decided to re-watch Lawrence Kasdan‘s Mumford (Touchstone, 9.24.99). It’s about a fraudulent but extremely charismatic small-town therapist (Loren Dean), whom almost everyone loves to chat with and confess to. I loved it from the get-go (it has a dead perfect ending), but too many critics disapproved and it managed only a lousy $4.5 million gross. But it’s a really, really good film, I swear. Exudes a certain sly, low-key charm.

Roger Ebert, 9.24.99: “There are no earth-shaking payoffs here. No dramatic astonishments, vile betrayals or sexual surprises. Just the careful and loving creation of some characters it is mostly a pleasure to meet. And at its deepest level, profoundly down there below the surface, it is something more, I think: an expression of Kasdan’s humanist longings, his wish that people would listen better and value one another more. It is the strangest thing, how this movie sneaks up and makes you feel a little better about yourself.”

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I’d love to re-see Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8) next week, but I’m obliged to wait until Monday, 12.4.

Just don’t forget — it’s eight or nine times better than Barbie!

I don’t feel an obligation to state what I’m thankful for today, just because the calendar says this is the day to put your feelings on the table. For I feel thankful 24/7/365.

I’m especially grateful, very grateful, for the luck that has come my way. And for the bad luck, in a way, as all misfortune is character-building. And for the daily opportunity to show love for my two sons and the overall community (old friends, business pallies, colleagues, cats) and the general feeling of loving or liking or aligning with others in whatever way.

Plus I’m hugely grateful that I wasn’t born to a downmarket family in Nebraska or Montana or to some resigned, lethargic, drinking-class environment. I’m very thankful, in other words, for what my parents and grandparents bequeathed.

“In the early scenes [of Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon], the titular figure seems to be another of Joaquin Phoenix‘s taciturn, unnervingly volatile, enigmatically damaged, violent men.

“The difference is that this Napoleon, with his bloat, scowls and consuming needs, often resembles nothing as much as an angrily petulant baby, one whose cruelty and pathological vanity make the horror he unleashes unnervingly familiar.” — from Manohla Dargis’s 11.22 N.Y. Times review.

It’s fairly uncommon for critics and the ticket-buying public to feel exactly the same way about a new release. To go by Rotten Tomatoes the elite know-it-alls and your Joe Popcorn types agree that Napoleon is the same kind of problem.

An old HE chestnut, updated:

There’s a very significant difference between all the big-screen King Kongs we’ve seen since Peter Jackson‘s 2005 disappointment and Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien‘s classic, stop-motion, herky-jerky version.

I’m not saying that Jackson and the others made the right or the wrong call in the fashioning of their Kongs, but here’s the thing:

Cooper’s Kong didn’t look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary monster of the id…a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of 1933 moviegoers.

O’Brien, the legendary stop-motion phtography pioneer, used three slightly different-looking Kong models during filming, but for me the master stroke was deciding to give his Kong a set of gleaming white teeth and a pair of very bright white eyes.

In some of the darker shots of Kong in the 1933 film those teeth and those eyes just pop right out, and the effect is still primal as hell. Those white eyes and black pupils look so fierce and almost demonic…contrasting as they do with that black bear fur that Kong was covered in…that they almost give you the willies, even now.

There’s no such aura with all the National Geographic Kongs we’ve seen this century. The realism element is awesome but the spook factor is nil. In going for anthropological realism Jackson and the others threw out that creepy, better-than-reality, only-in-the-movies element that gives the 1933 film a serious-nightmare quality.

It was Abraham Lincoln, remember, who, in 1863, officially proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the final Thursday in November. And that’s how it’s been ever since. I don’t know how Thanksgiving worked before that year — does anyone? All I know is that everything was cool until the wokesters came along and began to throw shade upon the origins of Thanksgiving, or more precisely the relations between white settlers and Native Americans.

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“Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

This Oswald family footage, taken on 11.22.62 or Thanksgiving Day, is indistinguishable from tens of thousands of home movies taken that very same afternoon. Family celebrations are pretty much all the same, and are always about facades. The insisted-upon emotions of these gatherings (happiness, contentment, alpha vibes) always mask the undercurrents.

Even the 23-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald wore a happy face that day…imagine.

American Thanksgiving celebrations are about hope and cheer and togetherness. In every home and at every dinner table everyone is presumed to be doing reasonably well or at least trying to do better, and planning for the best. But you never know.

Sasha Stone, currently in Ohio, just told me about joining her daughter, her daughter’s boyfriend, the boyfriend’s brother and other family members for a pre-Thanksgiving get-together. “And the vibes were really great,” she said, “because the family members seemed genuinely happy…unlike so many extended families today they don’t all hate each other….they get along.”

Happy Sliced Turkey Breast with Micro-Waved, Deli-Prepared Gravy plus Garlic Mashed Potatoes and Green Giant or Del Monte Peas and Beans.

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On 11.21.23, in the middle of a Brian Jonestown Massacre show at the Forum Theatre in Melbourne, an onstage brawl — a falling-down slapfight — happened between guitarist and lead vocalist Anton Newcombe, 56, and guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt. The remainder of their Australian tour was cancelled the next day. Many in the audience grew tired of the long gaps between songs – up to three or four minutes – and the “torrent of abuse” that Newcombe hurled at the crowd, and left early. And then the curtain came down.

Here’s an 1.22 report by NME’s Surej Singh.

Allegedly snapped at a London party in 1957, when Cary Grant was around 53 and Sean Connery was 27. Connery was then filming (or had just filmed) Another Time, Another Place with Lana Turner. His hair was still reasonably thick, or at least not thinning.

I don’t believe that story about Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli offering the 007 role to Grant roughly four years later, sometime in early ’61. The 57 year-old Grant had reached his dashing physical peak when he shot North by Northwest in ’58, and was at least ten years too old to play a hotshot British agent — Grant himself believed this. Plus Broccoli wanted Grant to commit to five Bond films, a proposition which Grant immediately declined.

Connery was hired to play Bond sometime between the late summer and early fall of ’61. Filming on Dr. No began in Kingston, Jamaica, on 1.16.62. It opened commercially later that year. Connery made it through the first two films without a full toupee, but was forced to wear one for Goldfinger.

1. Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro
2. Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (a ’70s character-driven thing, yes, but an absolutely first-rate resuscitation of this type of film)
3. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (rousing nutter filmmaking…bawdy, nervy, wildly imaginative and yet a tad over-praised at Venice and Telluride due to the hothouse atmosphere of those two gatherings)
4. Cord Jefferson‘s American Fiction
5. David Fincher‘s The Killer
6. Tran Anh Hung’s The Pot-au-Feu (aka Tbe Taste of Things)
7. Michael Mann‘s Ferrari
8. Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant
9. Christian Mungiu‘s RMN
10. Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge (official German submission for Best Int’l feature)

11. Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest
12. Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer — first-rate film but I groaned at the one-hour mark, knowing there were two full hours to go…my soul softly wept.
13. Aki Kaurismäki‘s Fallen Leaves (Chaplinesque, slightly glum relationship comedy-drama..quietly touching performances from costars Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen)
14. Greta Gerwig‘s Barbie [manosphere pissnado demerit]
15. Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One
16. Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel (richly visual, beautifully scored doc about John le Carre…enveloping and rather dazzling)
17. Eric Gravel‘s Full Time
18. Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon
19. Matt Johnson‘s Blackberry tied with The Burial, a formulaic but satisfying courtoom dramas featuring Jamie Foxx‘s best performance since Ray.
20. Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid

21`. Ben Affleck‘s Air
22. Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies.
23. Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance
24. Nicole Holofcener‘s You Hurt My Feelings

…if, after finishing his famous Thanksgiving dinner painting in 1943, he could somehow see 80 years into the future and contemplate the current American dysphoria.

…for many years. He doesn’t suffer fools, and since he became a spiritual guru type of guy I’ve never known him to say anything but the balls-out truth. But the below quote is the most full-of-shit thing anyone has ever said about being rich. Nobody of any intelligence or character or seasoning has ever suggested that having loads of money is “the answer.” But it sure as shit doesn’t hurt to be in the chips, I can tell you that. It’s never been a problem for anyone I’ve ever known or heard of.

Hollywood Elsewhere therefore rejects Carrey and sides with Frank Albertson‘s “Tom Cassady” character in Psycho. You know, the vulgar Texas oilman who saunters into Janet Leigh‘s place of employment (a Phoenix real-estate office) and says to her boss, “Lowery? I am dying of thirstarooney.” And then he pulls out two thick wads of bills and tells Leigh, “I’m buying this house for my baby’s wedding present. Forty thousand dollars, cash. Now, that’s not buying happiness. That’s just buying off unhappiness.”