Jeff Wells

As long as we’re acknowledging major anniversaries, Errol Morris‘s The Fog of War is now 20 years old. It won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar as well as the Spirit Award for Best Doc Feature. In my book it’s Morris’s best film, easily.

The Fog of War actually premiered on 5.21.03 (Cannes) but was screened in this country for the first time at the ’03 Telluride Film Festival.

I’m mentioning it because I’ve been thinking about great film scores, and for the last 20 years I’ve lietened over and over to Phillip Glass‘s original techno score. My favorite track, which arrives at the 1:08:13 mark on the YouTube soundtrack video, is titled “No Second Chance.”

Robert McNamara died on 7.6.09 at the age of 93.

Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin‘s The Last Party was a 96-minute doc about Robert Downey, Jr. surveying the political-cultural landscape of 1992. It opened on 8.27.93 — almost exactly 30 years ago — when Downey was 28.

The film wasn’t about ravenous Wall Street hustlers but that’s what this clip examines. One immediately thinks, of course, of Stratton-Oakmont and the real-life Wolf of Wall Street guys (Jordan Belfort, Danny Porush, Brian Blake) who were riding high at the time. Stratton-Oakmont closed in ’96.

The Wall Street section of the film begins around the 33-minute mark.

“The more one looks into the origins of the [2009 financial] disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years. For Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.” — from Paul Krugman‘s “Reagan Did It,” posted in the N.Y. Times on 5.31.09.

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With the Venice Film Festival’s Maestro premiere only two weeks away (9.2) and the overblown Schnozzgate finally starting to fade, I thought I’d drop this decades-old video of Leonard Bernstein speaking admiringly and, of course, knowledgably about the Beatles’ musical innovations.

Lenny focuses almost entirely on Revolver. 95% of then-current pop music was crap, he said, but 5% of it was sublime.

I wonder what Bernstein thought of the Left Banke‘s “Pretty Ballerina“?

On Friday afternoon Jeff and Sasha faced the music…uhm, the issues of the moment. Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein schnozz. Rachel Zegler’s woke Snow White flick. The sad finances behind the “Blind Side” situation. “The Pot au Feu” (aka “The Taste of Things”) and other Telluride forecastings.

Again the link.

In the thread for yesterday’s “Speaking of Blind Sides,” Seasonal Aflac Disorder mentioned that the young Steven Spielberg was a film nerd “so you’d expect he’d be listening to film scores as a young man.”

To which I replied that I, too, was listening to film scores as a lad — Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rosza, Maurice Jarre, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman. Bronislau Kaper, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Hugo Friedhofer. Except I never bought a compilation album of Freidhofer’s best film music, and I dearly love his scores for One-Eyed Jacks, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Young Lions, Hondo, Vera Cruz, Soldier of Fortune, The Harder They Fall, The Sun Also Rises, An Affair to Remember, etc.

Two…no, three observations abut the bizarre persistence of the Bradley Cooper-Leonard Bernstein-Maestro nose thing, which really didn’t warrant much attention in the first place.

One, the Maestro makeup team obviously wanted to create a strong resemblance between Bradley Cooper and Leonard Berstein, which partly meant creating a correctly proportioned Bernstein prosthetic nose. They just wanted the resemblance factor to stand out in the right way, and that’s all — nothing more. I find it astonishing that anyone would ascribe any ulterior motives of any kind.

Two, it is beyond bizarre that the Maestro makeup team nonetheless got the nose wrong. It’s close to the Bernstein original but a bit too extreme — almost Pinocchio-like from side angles.

And three, what possessed Mark Harris to want to write such a long Slate piece (11 heavyweight paragraphs) about this kerfuffle?

Just a slight reminder about Disney’s woke-feminist Snow White (’24), which everyone hates thanks to Rachel Zegler‘s remarks about how profoundly tiresome the 1937 animated version was (who wants a sappy love story featuring a stalker Prince Charming?) and how the forthcoming version is about Snow White becoming a progressive leader of some sort (perhaps vaguely similar to 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsman)…just a slight reminder that this proto-feminist version was co-written by Greta Gerwig and Erin Cressida Wilson. in other words, a fairy-tale version of manosphere pissnado…right?

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Two days ago I was standing next to a Bridgeport shopping complex, waiting to meet Vinny-the-mechanic so he could fix my injured car window. To pass the time I decided to visit a sporting goods store. The glass door opened out and was manual.

As I opened it two middle-aged women of color were close and approaching, so I stepped back and gave them full leeway. The glass door had one of those cylindrical metal-washer devices so it was slowly closing (i.e., not slamming) in their direction.

Naturally one of the women got huffy about this — offended that I hadn’t quickly stepped to my right and held the door open like Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabethan England. “You don’t hold doors?” she snorted. If I had said a single questioning word in response, it would have been a whole big thing. It could’ve been a TikTok or YouTube video. Lucretia McSnippy was ready to get down and have it out…I could feel it.

I thought I was doing the right thing by getting out of their way…not actually! What I should have done was disappear into thin air.

[Posted seven and 1/2 years ago — 1.18.16] Three days ago I was on my way to returning a SIXT rental car (La Cienega south of Wilshire) when I decided to pick up my Beatle boots from a West Hollywood shoe guy. Acting on impulse and very suddenly, I swerved into the shoe guy’s parking lot.

The boots were too tight so I’d asked the guy to stretch them out. I wasn’t wearing socks but I put them on and they fit well enough. I impulsively decided to ask the guy to repair the banged-up suede mocassins I was wearing, so I wore the Beatle boots from then on.

Or I did, at least, until I dropped the car off and began walking back to the pad. My bare heels began rubbing against the inner boot leather and were starting to really hurt. So I went into a men’s store opposite the Beverly Center and bought a pair of socks. No, not gold toe socks.

But with the socks on I discovered that the Beatle boots were too tight again. So the hell with it — I walked the rest of the way home in the socks, carrying the boots in a plastic bag. At that moment I was the only sober guy in Los Angeles who was walking on a major boulevard in socks — nobody else was doing that. I had to stare at the sidewalk the whole way, of course, as I had to watch for stones or shards of broken glass.

I’m realizing now that the Beatle boots will probably never work out. Because I used to be a size 12 but now I’m a 12 and 1/2 or so.

Back in the mid ’90s Robert Evans told me the following: “When you get older your feet get a little bigger, your ears get longer, your teeth get smaller and your nose gets bigger. And women won’t fuck you as much. Or you don’t want to fuck them as much. Or something like that.”

Flash forward to 8.18.23: I still have the same Beatle boots. I can wear them as long as I’m not walking several blocks.

Justine Triet, the director of the Palme d’Or-winning Anatomy of a Fall, would be in a stronger position with woke critics if she was gay. Unfortunately she’s straight with two kids. (Her boyfriend is director Arthur Harari, who co-wrote the Fall script.) The film will almost certainly play Telluride. Pic stars Sandra Hüller (The Zone of interest) as “a writer trying to prove her innocence in her husband’s death.”

Yesterday afternoon I met Vinny-the-mechanic at the same vaguely-down-at-the-heels Bridgeport shopping center. It took him about 90 minutes to take everything apart and repair the up-and-down driver-side window, which involved replacing the whirring, battery-driven electric motor that controls the movement.

Everything apparently back to normal…great! I paid Vinny, thanked him, drove back home.

25 minutes later I pulled into a Balducci’s parking lot in Southport, and pulled the latch that opens the door. Nothing…door wouldn’t open. Vinny had forgotten to connect the inside-the-door whachamacallit. I crawled over the console and escaped through the passenger side door. To my relief the outside driver-side door latch still worked, but the inside latch was kaput.

I called Vinny…silence. He made a mistake, okay, but he’s still a smart, methodical mechanic. Having a bad day, I presumed.

Nonetheless a sixth sense told me I should hire someone else to fix the door-latch problem. This morning I drove the VW Passat up to a Georgetown Shell station, as I know and trust the mechanic. I dropped it off around 8:30 am. Two hours ago they told me I’m good to go.