Jeff Wells

Media types (critics, editors, bloggers, podcasters) love to perform for each other whenever they congregate, which mostly tends to be at all-media screenings. A lot of them live lonely, concentrated lives in front of screens (myself included), and so the emotional spigots tend to flow when they all get together, and boy oh boy, do they turn on the personality and the charm and do what they can to wow each other!

If you’re sitting solo but not too far from the crowd, you’ve no choice but to listen to all the jokes and repartee and sage witticisms and smart-ass cracks, etc. Very few of these guys are into quiet murmurings or sharing thoughts of an earnest nature. They’re all “on-stage” in a sense, and listening to them is…I don’t want to sound like a curmudgeon but listening to them can feel like a faint form of hell. The only cure is to have a conversation of your own, which is probably what I should have done, looking back.

Chickenshit Budweiser execs pretended like Dylan Mulvaney didn’t exist when the shit hit the fan. They should have reached out, maybe offered a little cover or protection or a warm word or two…something. I feel badly about what Dylan went through, and the blonde hair, by the way, works better than the dark.

[Filed this morning at 8:05 am] Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro on modest box-office fate of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny:

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I never saw Alan Arkin in Enter Laughing or Luv on the Broadway stage, but for me he was the king of fickle neuroticism and glum irreverence for decades and decades, and for decades and decades I loved him like few others. And now the journey has ended. He was 89.

If I had to pick my favorite Arkin performances in descending order, I would restrict my list to four. I would begin with his grumpy but compassionate, heroin-snorting grandpa in Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘s Little Miss Sunshine (’06). In second place is Captain John Yossarian, the numbed-out pacifist Air Force bombardier in Catch 22 (’70). Third is his wonderfully anxious ands panicky dentist in Arthur Hiller‘s The In-Laws (’79), Fourth but not least is his moustachioed Russian submarine captain in Norman Jewison‘s The Russians Are Coming (’66).

Everyone remembers a concluding line in a certain Catch 22 conversation between Lt. Milo Minderbinder (Jon Voight) and Cpt. Yossarian. It wasn’t written by original novel author Joseph Heller but Buck Henry. Heller reportedly approved.

Minderbinder: “Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.”

Yossarian: “What difference does that make? He’s dead.”

Minderbinder: “Then his family will get it.”

Yossarian: “He didn’t have time to have a family.”

Minderbinder: “Then his parents will get it.”

Yossarian: “They don’t need it, they’re rich.”

Minderbinder: (beat) “Then they’ll understand.”

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CNN’s Abby Phillip, temporary host of The Lead, vs. author Kenny Xu (“An Inconvenient Minority: The Harvard Admissions Case and the Attack on Asian American Excellence“) and a board member of Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in an historic argument over race-based admissions which the Supreme Court found in favor of yesterday.

Phillip: “If you take race out of it, let’s call it socioeconomic status, whether or not they grew up wealthy or poor. Is that not something colleges might have an interest in considering?”

Xu: “The reason why you shouldn’t consider that is because you should consider the success of an applicant. Because of affirmative action, Black Americans graduate from law school at the bottom 25 percent of their classes, largely speaking. And we don’t want that. We want Black students to succeed. We want every student to succeed. Low-income students to succeed.

“You have to put them in scenarios in places where they’re likely to succeed. And lowering your standard to admit somebody of a socioeconomic status or race would not help them do that. In fact it would harm their graduation rate and excellence.”

Phillip: “Well, as the case also points out, the standard isn’t necessarily lowered because the students are all admitted. It’s the question whether race can be an added consideration, a tipping point…”

Xu: “The standard is lowered.”

When Xu said “the standard is lowered.” Phillip obviously decided to shut down the discussion:

Phillip:: “Kenny…”

Xu: “The standard is lowered. As the Students for Fair Admissions data shows, an Asian has to score 273 points higher on the SAT to have the same chance of admission as a Black person…”

Phillip: “Kenny…”

Xu: “So the standard is lowered for Black applicants.”

Phillip: “Kenny Xu, thank you for your perspective. We really appreciate it.

If, like myself, you’re a foot man, you probably agree that the recent hoopla over that Barbie shot of Margot Robbie‘s arched feet brought about a certain realization. It reminded me of an unfortunate or at least a lamented reality, which is that over 99% of the female peds out there (and I often have my eyes peeled) are no match for Robbie’s.

Outside of the Hollywood and modelling worlds, exquisite, perfectly shaped feet are such a rarity that numerical percentages are almost unworthy of mention.

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All hail the young anonymous woman behind Nerdworld, a YouTube channel that I discovered last night. She’s a brilliant 20something Canadian feminist of a different order — a woman who’s felt increasingly annoyed by aggressive feminist, anti-male posturing in movies and laments the trashing and diminishing of straight-up, non-toxic masculinity, not just in cinema but in all corners of the progressive community these days. She seems to have been strongly influenced by the great Camille Paglia, and for that alone HE is an instant fan.

Nearly ten months ago I saw Nancy Buirski‘s Desperate Souls, Dark City, and the Legend of “Midnight Cowboy” at the ’22 Telluride Film Festival. It’s a sprawling, large-canvas capturing of a revolutionary and fairly breathtaking moment in American cinema — a constantly probing look at not just the making of John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic but everything that was happening back then…culturally, creatively, the whole magillah.

Zeitgeist and Kino Lorber opened Desperate Souls on 6.23.23 — it’s now playing at the Film Forum.

It’s been noted that Buirski’s film doesn’t really answer why Midnight Cowboy received its X rating, which was later downshifted to R. I’ll tell you why — it was because of that scene in the 42nd Street theatre when Bob Balaban goes down on Jon Voight and gives him an off-camera blowjob. That was it, cut and dried.

Apart from Peter Glenville‘s oblique and non-sexual Becket (’64) and outside of Andy Warhol‘s experimental, barely-seen Blowjob and even Lonesome Cowboys, no mainstream film had ever grappled with gay activity quite as frankly as Midnight Cowboy, especially in its acknowledgements of down and dirty street life and gay street hustlers, not to mention Ratzo’s derisive reference to cowboy garb as “fag stuff”.

Variety‘s Rebecca Rubin is reporting that Universal has yet to announce a Japan release date for Chris Nolan‘s Oppenheimer, which opens everywhere else on 7.21.

Oppenheimer is the saga of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the father of the atom bomb and quoter of Vishnu’s statement in the Bhagavad Gita — “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

I don’t know if Japanese distributors are åntsy about screening Oppenheimer or not, but it’s obviously understandable if they are. 200,000 Japanese civilians died after A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 8.6.45 and 8.9.45, respectively. If I was a Japanese citizen and my great-grandfather had been incinerated in one of those blasts, I would have issues.

And yet, oddly, Oppenheimer reportedly doesn’t dramatize these attacks upon Japan. It’s only fair to ask why. The essence of Oppenheimer’s personal tragedy and the A-bomb terror itself, after all, manifested less in the 7.16.45 Trinity explosion than in the murder of 200,000 Japanese civilians the following month. The story is the story.

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The appearance of Haley Atwell in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (Paramount 7.12) threw me off slightly. For a few minutes it put me into a kind of Twilight Zone.

Chris McQuarrie and Tom Cruise‘s film has 10 or 11 significant characters played by actors with facial and name-brand recognition, you see, and as I sat down at the AMC Empire two nights ago I hadn’t committed each and every name to memory, Atwell’s in particular.

So when I first laid eyes I thought “wait, who’s this again?” Then a thought flashed — “wow, Kate Mara must be around 40 but she’s looking good, except she looks chiselled…has she had work done?” Plus she was speaking with a hint of a British accent but I figured this was part of the performance.

In fact Atwell and Mara, who look like sisters, were born only 14 months apart — Mara on 2.27.83 and Atwell on 4.5.82.

Then Atwell’s name came to mind, but I haven’t paid much attention to her career. I don’t even recall her performance in Ant Man, nor do I remember her from Woody Allen‘s Cassandra’s Dream, and the only Haley that was coming to mind was Haley Bennett, except she’s a ginger and roughly five years younger than Atwell and Mara.

I put it all together when the film ended, of course, and I started researching.

I’m sure that HE’s wretched slimy bedbug commenters will call me a moron for mistaking Atwell and Mara, but they’re determined to be dicks no matter what. The photos speak for themselves. Maras’s nose is a bit smaller and narrower.

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled to eliminate affirmative action — i.e., racial preferences in college admissions. In other words, no more college or university acceptances based on “this kid’s grades aren’t what they could or should be but he/she has experienced everyday racism and a culturally disadvantaged life in other respects so let’s cut him/her a break, and in so doing try to redress social wrongs.”

Affirmative action, in short, was about addressing the inescapable fact that life is unfair. From the vantage point of the early to mid ’60s, life had always been deeply unfair for persons of color.

The term was first heard via “Executive Order No. 10925“, signed by JFK on 3.6.61 — over 62 years ago. On 9.24.65, LBJ issued Executive Order 11246, which required government employers to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

As a lad I was subjected to a standardized educational meritocracy, which I personally found brutal and exclusionary because the system back then wasn’t geared to recognize and accept, much less encourage, intelligent rule-breakers and clear-light-seekers like myself.

If you wanted to get into a top university you had to play along, ace your SATs and manage an excellent grade-point average…period. Alas, like Oliver Stone, Jim Morrison and others from a certain spiritual congeregation, I was more into the poetry of experience and upheaval and transformational rock music and pyschedelic Bhagavad Gita fulfillment than studying and brown-nosing my way into a sanctified community of Ivy League shitheads who play golf on weekends.

Affirmative action dismantled much of that for certain under-privileged youths, but now it’s back to struggling and scrambling and trying to out-point or out-maneuver those brilliant Asians and those smart white kids with rich parents. The unfairness of life has once again reared its head.

If I was a diehard progressive on a university admissions board, I would probably be telling myself “fuck those conservative Supremes…I’m going to finagle and pull strings and administratively pretzel-twist in order to approve disadvantaged kids of color anyway.” I can’t imagine that admissions criteria geared to favor non-whites and non-Asians whenever and wherever possible is going to just screech to a halt like that.

In a 6.28 letter, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has announced it is inviting 398 artists and executives to join. Below are the actors who’ve been invited.

If you subscribe to the view that invitations should be based upon the value and importance that artists bring to the Academy and not flash-in-the-pan topicality, HE has boldfaced the invitees who seem to really and truly deserve the honor.

Everyone knows Brooke Smith, right? First-rate character actress — Silence of the Lambs, Random Hearts, Melinda and Melinda, In Her Shoes. Her name was recently forwarded to the Academy for membership, but they zotzed her.

Friendo: “Smith is representative of what the Academy used to be. She’s just a reliable, hard-working character actress. Whatever the Academy is now, it’s lost or sacrificed that expert class prestige it used to have. And maybe they think that ethnic criteria makes it more modern and fresh and maybe it does…who knows?”

Zar Amir-Ebrahimi – “Holy Spider,” “Bride Price vs. Democracy”
Sakura Ando – “A Man,” “Shoplifters”
Selma Blair – “Hellboy,” “Legally Blonde”
Marsha Stephanie Blake – “I’m Your Woman,” “Luce”
Austin Butler – “Elvis,” “Once upon a Time…in Hollywood”
Raúl Castillo – “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” “The Inspection”
Chang Chen – “The Soul,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”
Ram Charan – “RRR,” “Magadheera”
Kerry Condon – “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Gold”
Robert John Davi – “Licence to Kill,” “The Goonies”
Dolly De Leon – “Triangle of Sadness,” “Verdict”
Martina Gedeck – “The Lives of Others,” “Mostly Martha”
Bill Hader – “Trainwreck,” “The Skeleton Twins”
Nicholas Hoult – “The Favourite,” “Mad Max: Fury Road”
Stephanie Hsu – “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”
Tin Lok Koo – “A Witness out of the Blue,” “Paradox”
Vicky Krieps – “Corsage,” “Phantom Thread”
Joanna Kulig – “Cold War,” “Elles”
Lashana Lynch – “The Woman King,” “No Time to Die”
A Martinez – “Ambulance,” “Powwow Highway”
Noémie Merlant – “Tár,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”
Paul Mescal – “Aftersun,” “The Lost Daughter”
Richard Mofe-Damijo – “Oloibiri,” “30 Days in Atlanta”
Keke Palmer – “Nope,” “Hustlers”
Park Hae-il – “Decision to Leave,” “Memories of Murder”
Ke Huy Quan – “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”
NT Rama Rao Jr. – “RRR,” “Nannaku Prematho”
Paul Reiser – “Whiplash,” “Aliens”
Rosa Salazar – “Alita: Battle Angel,” “The Kindergarten Teacher”

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