Jeff Wells

Any agent or talent manager will tell you that once an actor has broken into the Hollywood big leagues by starring or costarring in a critically hailed or commercially successful film, they need to score again within, say, the next five to ten years. They can’t just cruise along indefinitely in a moderate or mezzo-mezzo fashion — they need to equal what they accomplished with their first flurry of hits.

Ten years ago Margot Robbie was launched with a spritzy, attention-getting role as Leonardo DiCaprio‘s gold-digger wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, a critical knockout that earned over $400 million.

Robbie has done relatively well for herself since, save for her recent losing underwhelming streak of the last four years — Harley Quinn in Birds of Prey (’20) and The Suicide Squad (’21), a puzzling, dead-end lead performance in David O. Russell‘s perplexing and calamitous Amsterdam (’22) and especially her abrasive and misbegottten Nellie LaRoy in Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon (’22), a breathtaking critical and commercial flop.

Then again Robbie delivered an appealing cameo in Adam McKay‘s enjoyable, critically praised The Big Short (’15). Two years after that (’17) she not only starred in but produced I Tonya (’17), an indie-level mockumentary that was mostly critically approved (I hated it) and earned $53.9 million — not bad for a hand-to-mouth indie that cost $11 million to produce. Two years later she played Sharon Tate in Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (’19). The same year she played a fictitious character in Jay Roach‘s Bombshell, a Fox News / Roger Ailes expose. The following year she produced Emerald Fennell‘s Promising Young Woman (’20).

So she’s hung in there pretty well, but Barbie, it appears, will be Robbie’s first heavy-throttle, high-octane hit since The Wolf of Wall Street.

Whether or not it’ll score critically is another story.

A regional friend who gets around says he’s hearing “very mixed” reactions to Barbie. There are tea leaves to be read…tea leaves under a cloak of secrecy. A couple of pallies saw Barbie over the last couple of days and were asked to signed NDAs.  If Barbie was some kind of great or exceptional, wouldn’t exciting buzz be circulating now, like the Mission Impossible 7 buzz was all over the place for the last several months? In the same sense downbeat reactions to Indy 5 were detectable for months on end. So if Barbie is a big winner, why would you have industry vets sign NDAs? I’ll tell you why. Because loose lips sink ships.

Posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy about a week ago:

Better to get Barbie out of the way early, allowing myself time to tap out a brief, in-depth review before settling in for the main course at 7 pm.

I stared at Adele Lim‘s Joy Ride (aka Joy Fuck Club) like an Egyptian sphinx. I was honestly hoping to laugh but I didn’t. At all. I just fucking sat there…sorry. I seem to recall having the same reaction to the Hangover movies. I hate movies about people drinking shots. I really do.

Others in the audience laughed, however, so there’s that. High-pitched hyena laughter, I mean. And certain critics have called it funny. So blame me….it’s my fault that I didn’t so much as smirk or guffaw or even crack a smile.

Actually, that’s not true — I smirked at the sex scenes. Particularly an oral sex scene with two guys eating out Ashley Park‘s character at the same time, and I don’t mean one of them licking her anus while the other does the clitoris…I mean both of them chowing down side by side. That I laughed at.

And I did respect much of what I was watching. Joy Ride is not some sloppy-ass, improvisational bullshit anarchy comedy like…I don’t know, What’s New Pussycat or something. It’s a real movie with a sense of structure and three acts and an aspirational heart. It emotionally touches bottom during the last 20 or 25 minutes.

And I respected the decisive, highly sprung energy…the shallow but spritzy feel of it…the lively performances…Lim’s fast-paced, high-velocity direction…the screwballish, His Girl Friday-like script by Cherry Cheva (aka Chevapravatdumrong) and Teresa Hsiao. It’s really not bad.

It’s silly and shallow and formulaic but comedies like this are expected to dive into this kind of jaundiced fuckwad swimming pool.

I didn’t much care for Sabrina Wu‘s “Deadeye”, the obligatory trans-non-binary character with (not a pun) slightly dead eyes, but I pretty much loved the other three — Park’s “Audrey Sullivan”, a lawyer and an allegedly Chinese child of adoptive white parents who lives in White Hills, Washington (there has never been any town or village or real-estate district in the world called White Hills…a completely bullshit and thoroughly racist name of a cliched Anglo hamlet), Sherry Cola‘s “Lolo Chen”, and Stephanie Hsu‘s Kat.

And I really loved Daniel Dae Kim, who plays the husband of Audrey’s birth mother.

Much of Joy Ride feels inhabited by at least a semblance of recognizable human behavior. Not actual human behavior, mind, as it adheres to the rules of farce, but at least it tries to go there now and then. I respected that effort.

Don’t let the fact that I smirked at only one scene and sat stone-faced throughout the rest of it….don’t let that stop you from giving it a whirl.

The first two thirds to three-quarters of Joy Ride made me feel like my life is winding to a close and that perhaps I need to think about killing myself, but I gradually got past that. What matters, I think, is that it pays off during the final 20 or 25.

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by Zach Baylin, Frank E. Flowers and Terence Winter, Bob Marley: One Love is a rise and fall of a superstar biopic. Green (King Richard) is an excellent director and Marley (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) is a fascinating subject, so why is Paramount sidestepping award season and opening it on 1.12.24?

Irritating Canadian director Xavier Dolan, 34, has announced that he’s quitting filmmaking.

El País has quoted him saying “I no longer have the desire or strength to commit myself to a project for two years that barely anyone sees…I put too much passion into it to have so many disappointments…it makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad, and I know it’s not.”

HE reaction #1: Don’t be a quitter…keep at it, never say die, refine your game. HE reaction #2: What’s Dolan going to do, become a bartender or a travel guide? He could direct more Adele music videos until inspiration taps him in the shoulder. No respect for guys who throw in the towel. HE reaction #3: I’ve never really liked a Dolan film. The best that has happened (when I saw Mommy in 2014) is that I felt a certain respect or tolerance.

The French-speaking Dolan was born on 3.20.89. Last May another major-league, French-language film star quit the business — Adele Haenel, who is also 34 and was born one month earlier than Dolan.

Posted on 5.22.16: In a sharply phrased piece about Sunday’s Cannes Film Festival awards and particularly Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only The End of the World, which won the festival’s Grand Prix (or second place) award, L.A. Times critic Justin Chang has let go Sam Peckinpah-style.

“Quebec’s Xavier Dolan, the 27-year-old world-cinema enfant terrible, pretty much horrified the press audience by inexplicably winning the runner-up Grand Prix for It’s Only the End of the World.

“In my 11 years of attending Cannes I cannot recall a worse jury decision than this one. A badly shot, shrilly performed and all-around excruciatingly misjudged dysfunctional-family torture session that felt far longer than its 97-minute running time, World was by far the least endurable film in competition (and that includes Sean Penn’s dreadful but dreadfully entertaining The Last Face).

“Far inferior to Mommmy, the director’s 2014 jury-prize winner, World failed to win over even Dolan’s many fans, and I have counted myself among them on more than one occasion.”

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Could this possibly have something to do with…I don’t know, concerns about stuff being taught in schools that Average Joe & Jane parents don’t agree with? And other stuff like…I don’t know, maybe drag queen performances?

For a hinterland-focused Jim Caviezel movie like Sound of Freedom — a grassroots thing, not much mainstream media publicity — to come out on top on Tuesday, July 4th…this means something. Mira Sorvino and Bill Camp costar.

In Jesse Green’s 2009 New York profile of the late playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, Laurents briefly discusses Rope, the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Laurents adapted Patrick Hamilton‘s 1929 play for the screen.

Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, the Leopold and Loeb-like main characters who’ve strangled a young acquaintance, are gay, of course, and are respectively played by gay actors, John Dall and Farley Granger.

But Laurents tells Green that James Stewart‘s Rupert Cadell, an advocate of Nietzschean notions of selective superiority who inspired the strangling, was gay also, although Laurents’ hints to this effect were so subtle that Stewart probably didn’t realize what they amounted to.

I should be included. Before reading Green’s article last night I’d never even flirted with the idea of Cadell being “musical.”

HE to Sensible Centrist Multitudes: There are many excellent choices if you want to buy great ice cream or gelato. You now understand which brand not to buy. Fuck these guys and the horse they rode in on. Ben & Jerry’s need to be Bud Light-ed to death.

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Few critics have angered me more over the years than David Ehrlich, but when he’s right, he’s right:

“The frantic and extremely funny mid-film chase through the streets of central Rome, during which Hunt is handcuffed to the sexy pickpocket (franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell) who might be able to lead him to the MacGuffin. A jaw-dropping ‘how the fuck did they do that?’ mega-flex in an age when movies are seldom magical enough to beg that question, the city-wide jailbreak combines artfully destructive slapstick with the loudest car crashes you’ve ever heard to create the kind of cinematic euphoria that still can’t be faked or forged at home. VR headsets might allow rich people to enjoy IMAX-sized screens on their living room couches, but Dead Reckoning is a bone-shaking reminder that sound is the real secret weapon of the theatrical experience.

“Not since La Dolce Vita has a film more effectively transformed ancient Rome into a modern playground, a fitting touch for a blockbuster so desperate to squeeze a few new dollops of joy from the ruins that surround it.”

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The emphasis on tribal chanting and drum beats tells you that Killers of the Flower Moon (Paramount, 10.6 and 10.23) is an angry lamenting thing…anger and outrage felt by increasing numbers of Osage natives in 1920s Oklahoma, and for good reason.

That’s not what Martin Scorsese‘s movie actually conveys — it presents more of a mixed-bag perspective (evil whiteys plus noble natives plus FBI investigators) — but it’s a very effective trailer. Hats off to the agency that cut it together.

After re-appearing at one or two of the early fall festivals, Killers of the Flower Moon will open select theaters on 10.6 before a wide release on 10.20.

It’s already been decided that Lily Gladstone‘s performance as Mollie Burkhart will not only be Oscar-nominated (I would recommend the Best Supporting Actress category) but will most likely win because of her Native American heritage. 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.

Posted from Cannes on 5.20.23:

It pains me to report that Killers of the Flower Moon-wise, there’s a little bit of trouble in River City. Not a huge amount of trouble, mind. I was moderately and at times actively engrossed and l certainly wasn’t in any kind of pain but…

It holds and occasionally fascinates in a dutiful, believable, step-by-step fashion, and it certainly radiates profound moral lament and heartache for the many Osage victims, but overall it doesn’t quite get there.

It’s basically a bit more than two hours of scheming and murder and fiendish plotting between Robert De Niro’s “King Hale” and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, and a bit less than 90 minutes of Jesse Plemons and his FBI team arriving in Oklahoma and getting to the bottom of it all — but at the end of the day Killers doesn’t really generate enough juice.

Killers is certainly watchable in a steady, methodical way, but it never really builds up a head of steam. Authentic period atmosphere (early to mid 1920s) and beautifully shot. It certainly feels real and lived in, but also lacking a certain fire in the belly quality — a bit too measured and matter of fact and low-flamey.

It’s a good film but it feels too quiet and subdued and even…no, I won’t say mezzo-mezzo. It holds your interest and never bores. But it never really excites either.

All I can say is thank God for Plemons and the G-Men, whose arrival kicks up the dramatic tension and delivers a certain limited gusto.

Cheers for sad-eyed Lily Gladstone (it’s definitely her movie — Native American actress wins acting Oscar!!) and a superbly suffering DiCaprio as the yokelish, none-too-bright, puffy-faced Burkhart — but the film is slowish and drawn-out and kinda plodding at times…obviously dialogue-driven but altogether rather quiet and far from any definition of incendiary. It never really combusts.

Was the 206-minute length really necessary? And was the massive budget really justified? Minus the stars and the enormous budget and visual sprawl it could have been a modest four-episode HBO movie that would earn respect…at least that. But with few jumping and shouting for joy.

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When it opened on 12.25.06, Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men (’06) was a dystopian foretelling of social breakdown and urban degeneration 21 years hence. The opening scene is captioned “16th November, 2027,” and the general London atmosphere (are we looking at Regent Street?) instantly tells us that this once-great city — once a nourishing spiritual watering hole for Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Alfred Hitchcock, Tony Richardson and The Beatles — has become a bit bedraggled and third-worldish, air-polluted and populated with riff-raff…over-crowded, cacophonous and generally down-at-the-heels.

Not all of it (there are still pockets of order and tranquility with green-lawned parks and red-coated king’s guards marching along) but London is clearly edging toward some kind of ruffian, seen-better-days anarchy.

As we speak 11.16.27 is only four years hence or just around the corner, and I have to say that as I was walking east on 42nd Street last week in the mid-evening (following the AMC Empire all-media screening of Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One) I was glancing at the overweight, sandal-wearing, presumably under-educated animals and feeling the general decay and lack of couth and even fraying civility and saying to myself “Jesus, this is almost like Children of Men…not classically dystopian in a Cormac McCarthy or Mad Max sense but drifting in that direction…even when 42nd Street was a grindhouse rathole in the ’60s it had a certain regimented order and aspirational vibe….no longer.”

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