Jeff Wells

The last time I bolted out of a theatre because a character had yanked or otherwise torn off a fingernail was during a January 1993 screening of Lodge Kerrigan‘s Clean, Shaven. For the following 30-plus years I enjoyed a moviegoing experience that was free of fingernail trauma, but then along came Christos Nikou‘s Fingernails, which I saw last night.

Officially described as a “science fiction romantic psychological drama”, Fingernails is also a kind of dry absurdist comedy. I would also call it an odd form of psychological stress. It’s basically saying that aggressive technology and innovation are preying upon romantic couples, and that this situation is basically fucked up.

It’s about a cohabiting couple, Jessie Buckley‘s Anna and Jeremy Allen White‘s Ryan, and how their relatively healthy relationship runs aground when Anna lands a job at an institute that helps romantic couples determine if their relationship is on solid footing and fated to last. The institute’s clients are asked to submit to eccentric and occasionally bizarre exercises that will presumably reveal true emotional leanings or priorities.

Anna is assigned to work with Amir (Riz Ahmed), a soft-spoken, senior-level trainer. You know from the get-go that Ann and Amir (who has a steady girlfriend) will hook up and that the usual turbulence will result. But that’s nothing compared to the turbulence I went through last night during not one but two fingernail-yanking scenes. I made it through the first but freaked out during the second. I grabbed my computer bag and escaped.

It's just a feeling. Try to hold it in.

Enjoy this first look at Fingernails, a new Apple Original Film starring Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White, and Riz Ahmed. pic.twitter.com/fU7dnDiUDp

— Apple Original Films (@AppleFilms) August 29, 2023

It’s also worth nothing that during my 70 minutes of viewing my attention was constantly divided between (a) the usual elements (plot, dialogue, milieu, vibes) and (b) Buckley’s intensely annoying chopped-off hipster haircut. I’m sorry but it bothered the shit out of me.

Official synopsis: “Anna and Ryan have found true love, [and] it’s been proven by a controversial new technology. There’s just one problem: Anna still isn’t sure. Then she takes a position at a love testing institute, and meets Amir.”

Fingernails is produced by Cate Blanchett, Andrew Upton and Coco Francini for Dirty Films and Lucas Wiesendanger for FilmNation Entertainment. Executive producers are FilmNation Entertainment’s Glen Basner, Milan Popelka and Alison Cohen, alongside Ashley Fox, Kevin Lafferty and Jerome Duboz.

Supporting cast members include Annie Murphy, Luke Wilson and Nina Kiri.

The official world premiere happens at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival, followed by a limited theatrical release on 10.27. Apple TV will begin streaming it on 11.3.

“Then I awoke / Was this some kind of joke? / Much to my surprise / I opened my eyes” — from Bill Wyman‘s “In Another Land“, a track from “Their Satanic Majesties Request.”

Silly me for observing a plain fact over the past six or so years. What I’ve said repeatedly is that woke flavors, sympathies and constitutions have been a ticket to Oscar glory by way of the New Academy Kidz. Movies about ethnic, non-white or outside-the-usual-mainstream characters and subject matter and/or films made by women or non-Anglos…good to go.

In the Best Picture category alone the winners have fit this paradigm…(1) the middle-class Asian family meets a Marvel-esque nerd sensibility in Everything Everywhere All at Once, (2) the hearing-challenged family in CODA, (3) the homeless woman saga, directed by a female Asian (Chloe Zhao), that was Nomadland, and (4) Parasite, the lacerating social drama directed by a South Korean genre nerd (Bong Joon ho). Green Book‘s Best Picture triumph was an exception to this pattern (and was fiercely condemned by woke critics and columnists) but Moonlight (Black director-writer, focus on Black gay males) adhered to it.

You can argue that all these Best Picture winners attained Oscar glory because they were simply very good or great films…you can claim that but as Quentin Tarantino would probably say, sell that bullshit to the tourists. Woke ideology has taken over, and everything is measured by this.

Yesterday morning (Thursday, 8.31) I was chatting with a couple of journo columnist acquaintances (i.e., not strictly critics) who, for political reasons or whatever, have seemingly bought into woke theology, or at least seem to have decided that siding with the wokesters is the safest way to go. The subject turned to Killers of the Flower Moon and my previously-stated view that Lily Gladstone, who plays the deceived and maligned Mollie Burkhart, will not only be Oscar-nominated but may win, partly for the quiet intensity of her performance but largely, be honest, because of her Native American heritage. Because a Native American has never won an acting Oscar before.

I opined that in terms of her actual performance Gladstone delivers sufficiently, although she isn’t allowed much in the way of emotional range and is given precious few lines. Mostly she stares a hole into the camera lens…quietly enraged, guilt-trippy, “God will get you,” etc.

Immediately upon saying that Gladstone’s ethnicity will be a significant factor in landing a nomination, one of the journos said this was “insulting” and that “I won’t have it…I won’t tolerate this.” He was essentially saying that my opinion was racist, although qualifying this with the fact that we’ve known each other for decades and that he likes me personally but this kind of talk (harumph) will not be allowed in his presence.

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4:25 am: Forget whatever impressions the trailer for Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (Focus Features, 10.27) may have instilled. That was an attempt to charmingly compress and whittle down a 133-minute movie that needs to breathe and unfurl on its own step-by-step, line-by-line terms. For in actual, bottom-line terms this is a high-end, whipsmart, skillfully seasoned, middle-class gourmet movie par excellence — the kind of brainy heart-and-soul flick, I was reminding myself over and over last night, that “they” refuse to make these days.

They’ve literally hung up a sign on their storefront windows that says “all right, yes, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away we used to be in the business of at least trying to make movies this good — smart, wisely constructed, finely crafted in every department, carefully finessed, character-rich dramadies.

“But that was back in the 20th Century, and for the 67th time you guys really need to absorb the ground-level fact that we’re literally no longer no longer in this business. Seriously — we’re not even trying to crank out films of this calibre so please stop complaining about their absence in theatres.”

Not to sound overly scolding, they’re saying, but what is it about the words “the film industry that you used to know and at least occasionally tried to make this kind of film no longer exists“…what is it about this blunt, straight-from-the-shoulder statement that you don’t understand?

The industry that every so often would hit triples or whack it out of the park in this fashion, back when character-driven movies like The Last Detail would at least occasionally surface…forget all that and shake it off and adapt to the way things are and have pretty much been since the Marvel/D.C. plague and Covid and the streaming of couch-potato product re-ordered the basic terms.

In fact to organically (i.e., not conspiratorially) enforce and regulate the present system, nature or God or the system of natural selection has created a whole strain of hugely annoying critics like David Ehrlich who will say stuff like “hmm, not bad as it gets some things right here and there but at the same time it’s too Scent of a Woman-ish and too thin according to my own grading system…not audacious or envelope-pushy enough,” blah blah.

Three movies on opening day — Jeff Nichols‘ The Bikeriders (2:30 pm, Werner Herzog theatre), Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (6:30 pm, Herzog) and Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (9:15 pm, Galaxy).

The Patrons Brunch was delightful as always, but the weather was extra sublime…warm, slight breeze, radiant blue skies.

No time to include photo captions….later this afternoon. The Bikeriders beckons; it’s now 1:50 pm.

Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho and birthday boy Roger Durling hosted a “hail, hail, the gang’s all here” dinner last night at La Marmotte, the top-rated French restaurant that’s been operating since the ’90s. Happy birthday, Roger, and thanks for a joyous (i.e., frequently hilarious) evening.

Those “les plats principaux” prices are…interesting? Quote from our table: “These Marmotte guys do not fuck around.” Hat tip to La Marmotte owner Mark Reggiannini.

(Top row, l. to r.) Betsy Martindale, Wight Martindale (excellent 1% name! better than Milburn Drysdale of The Beverly Hillbillies!), IndieWire‘s Anne Thompson, Netflix talent relations and award season strategist Kelly Dalton, Amazon award-season hotshot Justin Balsamo, Hollywood Reporter exec awards editor Scott Feinberg.

(Bottom row, l. to r.) Daniel Launspach, me, Durling, Miramax vp publicity Julie Fontaine.

Friendly note to La Marmotte waiters when asked to snap group portraits: Call out “one, two, three…cheese!” before snapping. If you don’t do that everyone has to assume the freeze-smile position. I’m like Frank Sinatra was when making a movie — best (i.e. freshest and most alive) in the first take, and then the energy drops with successive takes.

Those who contend that Jeffrey is a three-syllable name…I’ve dealt with these people all my life:

A friend whose movie tastes I occasionally agree with saw Annie Baker‘s Janet Planet and….uhm, wasn’t a fan. He actually expressed himself in stronger terms, but let’s hold back for now.

He calls it “the kind of pretentious, slow cinema thing that certain critics just overpraise. I must have looked at my watch five times. I didn’t give a shit about that 11-year-old learning to hate her mother.”

NY Film Festival synopsis: “It’s the summer before Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) starts sixth grade, and she is spending the lazy months with her acupuncturist mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), in their home in the woods.

“As the months drift by, the bespectacled, taciturn girl, fiercely observant, watches Janet and three enigmatic adults who drift in and out of their lives, whether romantic interests or reconnected friends.

“Set in 1991 rural Western Massachusetts, the superb debut film from Pulitzer Prize­–winning playwright Annie Baker is a work of surreal tranquility that moves at a different, lost pace of life, and which perceives heartbreak just as Lacy is beginning to grasp the world and her place in it.

“Baker has created a film about a mother and daughter quite unlike any other, heightening the viewer’s senses and expressing oceans of feeling with the smallest gestures. Nicholson and Ziegler perform their roles with an inspiring lack of sentimentality, and the wondrous supporting cast includes Elias Koteas, Sophie Okonedo and Will Patton. An A24 release.”

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…that Emerald Fennell‘s Saltburn (MGM, 8.31 in Telluride) looks like a possible sophomore slump.

20 or 25 seconds into the trailer and I’m way ahead of it. The movie, set in the mid aughts, will basically say that British rich folk are diseased shits. A middle-class Oxford student named Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is invited by a friend and fellow student named Felix Catton (the Paul Bunyan-sized Jacob Elordi) to hang at his family estate for a few days. Twisted upper-class shit happens, and Oliver emerges…well, what do I know?

Update: Okay, there’s more to it. A guy who’s seen Saltburn tells me the trailer doesn’t reveal what the film is actually about, which is basically a riff on The Talented Mr. Ripley with Keoghan as Matt Damon and Elordi as Jude Law.

The trailer for David Fincher‘s The Killer is triple-A brilliant…I want to see it right effing now. The trailer for Michael Mann‘s Ferrari, also first-rate, feels like a ’60s film on some level. Nice shadings, very primal.

HE picks are in boldface. The high-profile films that are giving me bad or iffy vibes…okay, I won’t highlight these. Let’s just take it as it comes.

It’s still fairly devastating that there’s no Pot au Feu, no Coup de Chance, no The Killer, no The Palace, no Maestro, no Killers of the Flower Moon, no Ferrari. I’m even sorry there’s no Priscilla in the lineup.

What happened to the time-honored tradition of Venice premieres concurrently (or almost concurrently) showing at Telluride? There’s some really brutal elbowing going on this year.

“All of Us Strangers” (d. Andrew Haigh, U.K., 2023)
“American Symphony” (d. Matthew Heineman, U.S., 2023)
“Anatomy of a Fall” (d. Justine Triet, France, 2023)
“Anselm” (d. Wim Wenders, Germany, 2023)
“Baltimore” (d. Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy Ireland-U.K., 2023)
“Beyond Utopia” (d. Madeleine Gavin, U.S., 2023)
“The Bikeriders” (d. Jeff Nichols, U.S., 2023)
“Cassandro” (d. Roger Ross Williams, U.S., 2023)
“Daddio” (d. Christy Hall, U.S., 2023)
“El Conde” (d. Pablo Larraín, Chile, 2023)
“Fallen Leaves” (d. Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 2023…I’ve been warned off)
“The Falling Star” (d. Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, France-Belgium, 2023)
“Finally Dawn” (d. Saverio Costanzo, Italy, 2023)
“Fingernails” (d. Christos Nikou, U.S., 2023)
“Food, Inc. 2” (d. Robert Kenner, Melissa Robledo, U.S., 2023)
“High & Low-John Galliano” (d. Kevin Macdonald, U.K., 2023)
“The Holdovers” (d. Alexander Payne, U.S., 2023)
“Hollywoodgate” (d. Ibrahim Nash’at, U.S.-Germany, 2023)
“Janet Planet” (d. Annie Baker, U.S., 2023)
“La Chimera” (d. Alice Rohrwacher, Italy-France-Switzerland, 2023)
“The Mission” (d. Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss, U.S., 2023)
“The Monk and the Gun” (d. Pawo Choyning Dorji, Bhutan, 2023)
“Nyad” (d. Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin, U.S., 2023)
“Occupied City” (d. Steve McQueen, Netherlands-U.K.-U.S., 2023)
“Orlando, My Political Biography” (d. Paul B. Preciado, France, 2023)
“Perfect Days” (d. Wim Wenders, Japan, 2023)
“The Pigeon Tunnel” (d. Errol Morris, U.K., 2023)
“Poor Things” (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, U.S.-Ireland-U.K., 2023)
“The Promised Land” (d. Nikolaj Arcel, Denmark-Germany-Sweden, 2023)
“The Royal Hotel” (d. Kitty Green, Australia, 2023)
“Rustin” (d. George C. Wolfe, U.S., 2023)
“Saltburn” (d. Emerald Fennell, U.S., 2023)
“The Teacher’s Lounge” (d. Ilker Çatak, Germany, 2023)
“Tehachapi” (d. JR, France, 2023)
“Thank You Very Much” (d. Alex Braverman, U.S., 2023)
“Tuesday” (d. Daina O. Pusić, U.S.-U.K., 2023)
“Wildcat” (d. Ethan Hawke, U.S., 2023)
“The Zone of Interest” (d. Jonathan Glazer, U.S.-U.K.-Poland, 2023)

There is one way and only one way to respond to the soon-to-screen Venice Film Festival films by Woody Allen (Coup de Chance), Roman Polanski (The Palace) and Luc Besson (DogMan). And that way is this: Judge these three movies according to classic standards — how well do they work according to their own scheme and aesthetic? — and leave your 100% repulsive, nickle-and-dime woke moralizing out of it.

Many influential artists have lived problematic lives (however you want to define that), and nobody gives a shit about this when they’re staring at a Paul Gaugin painting in a museum, or watching Mel Gibson in the first two Mad Max films or in Peter Weir‘s The Year of Living Dangerously, or listening to the music of James Brown or Richard Wagner or considering the work of any other flawed creator.

It’s called “separating art from the artist”…period. There is no mature or realistic way of responding to art without doing this. You’re not a bad person for finding spiritual payoff and transcendence in art created by questionable artists, but you are a bad person when you insist on ostracizing and diminishing artists not for their work but for certain personal, private behaviors.

Talk about their moral failings all you want (it has been the HE position all along that the accusations against Allen are exceedingly flimsy and unreliable, and strongly contradicted by official investigations), but keep them in a separate box.

Oh, and on a personal note? Aside from the woke-nutter chorus (some of whom unfortunately reside in the HE comment threads), most sensible humans out there despise judgmental scolds. I’m speaking in this instance of tiresome people like THR‘s Scott Roxborough, Agence France-Presse editor Eric Randolph and French feminism activist Ursula Le Menn. Wokesters are the plague dogs of our time. They are proponents of Soviet-styled social propaganda and the absolute enemies of free thought and free cinema.

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When the New York Film Festival announced on 8.17 that The Pot au Feu (i.e., The Taste of Things) would be among their selections, they didn’t claim that this constituted a North American premiere. Therefore there had to be another festival venue (pre-NYFF) that would be showing Tran Anh Hung‘s foodie classic as a North American premiere, and it wasn’t TIFF so it had to be Telluride…right? But it’s not showing here. The list is out and it’s missing. What the hell happened?