Jeff Wells

The 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder in Dealey Plaza is four days off (11.22.23). Ditto the theatrical premieres of Maestro and Napoleon.

I haven’t taken the time to watch Barbara Shearer‘s JFK: What The Doctors Saw (streaming on Paramount +), but I’m not buying the occipital head wound claim. Never have, never will.

Two and a half years ago I explained very carefully why this dog won’t hunt. My argument is contained in seven irrefutable paragraphs.

Posted on 7.2.21: “I’ve watched many, many interview videos with those Parkland doctors, particularly around the time of the 50th anniversary (i.e., 2013), and not a single interviewer or moderator followed up with an obvious follow-up question, to wit:

“’Nobody’s challenging the accuracy of your first-hand observations,’ the doctors should have been asked, ‘but how do you explain the bizarre lack of ANY visual evidence in the Zapruder and Nix films…why is visual evidence that shows a rear-of-the-head blow-out…why is this supposed evidence completely missing in the Zapruder and Nix films? How do you explain this?”

“One could also mention the fact that LIFE’s Richard Stolley — the man who arranged for LIFE’s purchase of the Z film and who saw the raw Zapruder footage in Dallas right after it came out of the lab — it’s surely significant that Stolley never once mentioned any discrepancy between the raw Z film and the various color versions that eventually became ubiquitous after the Z footage was aired by Geraldo Rivera in the late ‘70s.

“Think of all the people who were ostensibly involved in the alleged alteration of the Z film…those at that alleged CIA secret Kodak lab in Rochester, not to mention Bethesda doctors who took pictures of Kennedy’s head wound during the autopsy, and how they all somehow managed to ignore or cover up the gaping occipital head wound WHILE AT THE SAME TIME creating ostensibly fake images of the top of the head and right temple wounds…

“Remember also how the blood and cranial brain matter somehow caught the sun’s reflected glare in Dealey Plaza in the Z film, and how difficult it would have been to fake this…

“Remember also that Jackie Kennedy’s white-gloved right hand touched the rear of JFK’s head right after the fatal shot and yet her glove wasn’t soaked in blood…

“And then imagine the number of people involved in this alleged conspiracy to hide and deceive, and ask why none of them — NOT ONE ALLEGED CONSPIRATOR — blurted out any kind of deathbed confession. People are generally terrible at keeping a secret, especially over a period of several decades. And yet every last photographic conspirator kept their yaps shut for decades on end. EVERY LAST ONE stuck to Moscow Rules to their last dying breath.”

This is one of my favorite passages from Roger Donaldson‘s The Bounty (’84). It contained Daniel Day Lewis‘s third screen performance, and the first that attracted limited attention.

The seven notable films that Lewis appeared in during the ’80s are my all-time favorites of his — The Bounty, My Beautiful Laundrette, A Room with a View, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Stars and Bars amd My Left Foot, which resulted in his first Best Actor Oscar. (I’ve never seen Eversmile, New Jersey — has anyone?)

The increasingly choosey DDL made only five films in the ’90s, although all of them were utterly first-rate — The Last of the Mohicans, The Age of Innocence, In the Name of the Father, The Crucible and The Boxer.

Archie (Britbox, 11.23), a four-part biopic of Cary Grant (aka Archie Leach), might be tolerable or even agreeable by direct-to-streaming standards. Give it a chance, right? But you have to wonder about the casting…God.

60 year-old Jason Isaacs, who plays the older, gray-haired, bespectacled Grant in his ’50s and ’60s, is a gifted actor and probably delivers some kind of acceptable Cary inhabiting. But he doesn’t begin to resemble the fellow. Not for a blink of an eyelash.

The producers were presumably aware that Grant had brown “cow eyes,” as Myrna Loy described them in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (’48). Isaac has icy blue eyes — intense, crinkly, a bit warlocky.

And 19 year-old Oaklee Pendergast, a young beanpole with rodent eyes, plays Grant at age 27 or thereabouts. Not a hint. Nothing. Why?

The producers probably figured “well, Isaacs doesn’t look like Grant so that lets us off the hook with Pendergast.” Except Pendergast doesn’t look like a young Isaacs either. Why do casting agents cast biopics in this crazy-ass way?

And yet Laura Aikman is a dead ringer for the young Dyan Cannon, who was married to Grant from the early to mid ’60s. And Ellie MacDowall seems like an acceptable stand-in for Jennifer Grant, the now 57-year-old daughter of Grant and Cannon.

A likely reason for these two resemblances is that Dyan Cannon and Jennifer Grant are executive producers of Archie.

Dainton Anderson and Calam Lynch reportedly also play Grant at different stages of his journey.

Archie was created and written by Jeff Pope; the four episodes were written by Paul Andrew Williams.

I’ve searched around over the years and have never found anything to dissuade me of the understanding that Joni Mitchell created the term “city of the fallen angels” (i.e., Los Angeles). Court and Spark, 1973. Taylor Swift would suffer cardiac arrest if she even tried to compose stuff of this depth and dimension.

Democratic Presidential hopeful Dean Phillips spoke earlier today with All-In’s Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg.

HE commenters can crack wise and be shitheads and piss all over everyone and everything as usual, but Phillips is a steady, all-right guy. He’s just trying to wake everyone up to (God help us) the potential tragedy of the ‘24 Biden candidacy, the expanding candidate field and (God help us) the potential Trump ascendancy.

Kim Jorgensen on Facebook: “Saltburn (Searchlight, 11.17) is my film of the year. We’re talking cinema, baby — attitude, style, irreverence, confidence, rebellion. It’s out there.

“I didn’t care for Emerald Fennell’s previous effort, Promising Young Woman, but this one makes up for it. She’s the most accomplished new European voice since Ruben Östlund.

“I really hate to harp upon our wonderful critics, but they gave it only a 58 Metacritic score. Most of them saw it at Telluride, where it screened AFTER the rhapsodically received All of Us Strangers (91 score), and they seem to have expected the same boring, method-acting, nuanced, character-driven piece of politically correct gay banality.

“[But with Saltburn] they got an expressionist opera: Brideshead Revisited meets Idol/Euphoria and Tom Ripley (with a dollop of Barry Lyndon). Giving away the plot would rob you of the constant unexpected twists, including the truly inspired last shot.

“Unlike Searchlight’s Strangers and its low-to-nonexistent theatrical potential, Saltburn at least has the feel of a possible commercial arthouse hit (to the extent that such creatures are not extinct). Here’s hoping.”

HE to Jorgensen: As you know, the Telluride reactions to Saltburn were sharply divided. I hated it so much that I had to take a brief lobby break. You can actually call it an extended bathroom break mixed with buying popcorn. I

I liked hanging with good-looking Jacob Elordi but that’s where it stopped. I spent most of the time staring at Barry Keoghan’s bee-stung nose. And the bulbous nose isn’t his only sizable characteristic, by the way, as the final naked Greek satyr scene makes clear.

Fennel can tell us that England’s wealthy and corroded elite are sick in the head…jaded, poisoned, appalling…until she’s blue in the face, but the conceit is standard woke positioning and the design is…okay, it’s inventive but also shallow and gaudy. I hated everyone except Elordi, and the film basically feels arch and perverse and eventually dull. Did I mention suffocating and oppressive? Well, I have now.

When Saltburn finally ended I let out a HUGE sigh of relief.

That said I agree with your remarks about All of Us Strangers.

Several days ago The Marvels director Nia La Costa shared some disapproving sentiments about Marvel fanboys with Variety‘s Angelique Jackson.

Now, wrote Jackson, The Marvels is “flooded with comments criticizing Disney for ‘going woke’ and rooting for the film to flop.”

Some of what La Costa said seemed to echo the complaints of last February’s sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis — all of whom claimed that their films got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.

“Andrea Riseborough + Duelling Concepts of Meritocracy vs. Equity,” posed on 2.15.23 or nine months ago:

We’re all familiar with the recent complaints about the Oscar nominations by the sore-loser quartet — Till director Chinonye Chukwu and lead actress Danielle Deadwyler, along with Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood and its star, Viola Davis.

In their minds they all got blanked by embedded white elitism or misogynoir or some other racist variant.

In response Everything Everywhere All At Once‘s Michelle Yeoh, a Best Actress nominee, suggested that they should cool their jets and wait their turn.

Prince-Blythewood: “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.”

Deadwyler: “We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”

The essence of the lament seemed to be “we’re looking for some equity here and we haven’t received it…progressive Academy members know that the BIPOC narrative is about giving us the respect and adulation that is our due for the work but also in a payback sense, considering the decades upon decades of racist exclusion in this industry…we know we delivered first-rate work and yet we got shut out…some of you won’t say what happened but we can smell it in the wind…Andrea Riseborough‘s white supporters pushed her though but perhaps at our expense, or so it seems.”

In short, the sore losers were saying that in this time of revolutionary overhaul and the diminishing of Hollywood’s white-male heirarchy, equity needs to count as much as meritocracy (and perhaps even a bit more) in terms of handing out Oscar nominations.

Prediction: Travis Kelce, 34, will either get dumped or leave on his own accord six to nine months hence, mostly, I’m guessing, because Taylor Swift will be increasingly unable to tolerate his less-than-progressive views about women. He’s a Cro-Magnon man.

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The night before last a friend who had seen Ridley Scott‘s Napoleon and scratched his heasd over Joaquin Phoenix‘s lead performance, said “what is driving Napoleon?…what is he out to accomplish?” Scott’s film never lays the French general’s cards on the table, but another film did….

Napoleon: “I judge my conduct by my conscience, and my conscience is not troubled. Day by day I too gave my life for my country. I made war in order to secure peace. Not for a year but for a dozen centuries. I dreamed of the United States of Europe. Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Poles, Russians and all the others. One law, one coin and one people. Was that so rash a dream?”

The screenwriter was Daniel Taradash (winner of Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for From Here to Eternity), the actor was Marlon Brando, and the film was Henry Koster‘s Desiree (’54). Could the dialogue have been more complex, or less staid and simplistic? Sure but at least it gives you an idea of where Taradash’s Napoleon was coming from.

The scene in question begins at the one hour and 45 minute mark…close to the end.