Jeff Wells

I was re-watching Ellen Barkin‘s testimony during the 2022 Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard defamation trial, and really loving it.

Barkin is balls-up here. Her words and delivery are so real and plain and unaffected, but I was telling myself it was almost a kind of “performance” because she really knows how to sell. I believed all of it.

I was asking myself what the vibe might be if Angelina Jolie were to take another, similar-type stand and answer questions about her years-long relationship with Brad Pitt.

And you know what? Jolie couldn’t do what Barkin did three years ago. She doesn’t have the character to just tell it straight without posturing or performing. She’s so wrapped up in her turbulent emotional past that she can’t see the forest for the trees.

Jolie is beautiful and personable (I once chatted with her on a film set, and again during a brief junket interview) but off-balance, or so I came to believe.

The bottom line is that Jolie lacks conviction and steady hands while Barkin is made of sterner stuff.

In her Thursday (5.19) testimony in the Depp–Heard defamation lawsuit trial, Ellen Barkin was persuasive in recollections about her “sexual” relationship with Depp (she said she preferred that term to “romantic”), which began sometime in ‘94 and lasted for maybe “five or six months”, give or take.

But they had a friendly relationship, both pre- and post-sexual, for roughly ten years, she said. Things were platonic at first, Barkin said, but then Depp “switched the buttons.”

Things were largely defined by Depp almost always being drunk (i.e., “red wine”) or ripped or high in some way, Barkin said. In addition Depp was a “controlling, jealous man,” she testified.

Depp was nine years younger than Barkin (31 to her 40) when their relationship first became carnal during the second year of the Clinton administration. They later costarred in ‘98’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Barkin’s snow-white hair, cut short as if she was playing an anti-Nazi freedom fighter in a Sidney Lumet or Michael Mann film, is striking. Ditto her “I have nothing to prove one way or the other” no-bullshit street vibe, and that wonderfully raspy New York accent.

Barkin was married to Gabriel Byrne between ‘88 and ‘99: she subsequently married billionaire Ron Pearlman, who divorced her in ‘06. Barkin reportedly emerged from that union with a $20 million settlement plus $20.3 million in a Christie-supervised jewelry auction.

Posted on 11.10.11:

I don’t have the time now to write anything about my talk earlier this afternoon with Another Happy Day star-producer Ellen Barkin and director-screenwriter Sam Levinson, or even to post an mp3…later. But the time just flew. The conversation was mostly on-point but digressions happened from time to time. Barkin and I reminisced about early ’80s Manhattan, sharing anecdotes in particular about the Hellfire Club and the old Edlich Pharmacy on 1st Avenue. Don’t ask.

Another Happy Day star-producer Ellen Barkin, director-writer Sam Levinson — Thursday, 11.10, 2:55 pm, Sunset Tower hotel.

I firmly believe that John Clifford White‘s musical theme for Romper Stomper is one of the best of its kind, ever. Because you can immediately sense the downhead mood of racist skinheads, and because the instrumentation is incredibly spare and economical.

It’s just as effective in terms of vibe-summoning as Max Steiner‘s Skull Island music is for King Kong.

It proves that White is just as gifted of a film composer as any of the classic-era greats. He’s certainly just as talented as Bill Conti, whose Broadcast News theme summons the vibe of that whipsmart James L. Brooks film in a perfect, spot-on way.

Nearly everyone agrees that rich assholes who pay big fees to kill African lions are despicable. I certainly feel this way. I also feel that Wilton deer hunters are cruel sadistic scum.

Two years ago 110 deer were killed in Wilton. Out of a total population of how many? Deer vibes are blessings…the mere sight of these gentle creatures ushers calm, grace and beauty into our souls.

According to Connecticut officials, 76 local deer were killed in ’23 by archery, 20 by shotgun or rifle, 10 by muzzleloader, three by cropkill and one via roadkill.

Does anyone recall the feeling in their hearts when Bambi’s mother was killed?

I would really and truly love it if two or three bow-and-arrow hunters from Wilton could be hunted down by some wealthy, Count Zaroff-type eccentric….see how you like it, fuckers.

Australian film critic David Stratton, justly admired for being a devotional Film Catholic and a Roger Ebert-like TV critic and (occasional) evangelist, has died at age 85.

Stratton was best known for the Australian film review show, At The Movies, which he co-hosted with Margaret Pomeranz for 28 years. He also reviewed for The Weekend Australian for over 30 years.

Did Stratton fully deserve Geoffrey Wright’s wine splash in the face at the Venice Film Festival for panning Romper Stomper? In my opinion, yes. Stratton didn’t even rate Wright’s film, citing pic’s depiction of racist violence and its potential to incite further unrest….what a pedestrian!

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In their just-published Esquire chit-chat (8.13), which is about promoting One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.25), Leonardo DiCaprio says this to director Paul Thomas Anderson: “You’re considered a very art-house director. Would you call it that? What do you call it?”

Anderson: “Well, there’s no need to be insulting.”

DiCaprio: “No, what’s the term? You don’t do incredibly commercial movies, let’s put it that way. You are a writer, director. You have your own vision. What’s the term?”

Anderson: “Box-office challenged?”

HE translation: “Let’s face it — since Inherent Vice I’ve been red ink. Especially now in the case of One Battle After Another, which has dodged Venice and Telluride and is expected to more or less flop when it opens in late September. It cost a big pile of dough and, die-hard PTA mavens aside, nobody’s especially interested. Jordan Ruimy has declared it all but D.O.A. You can smell the lethargy in the social media chat threads.”

Anderson also delivers the best quote, which addresses the film’s theme as well as a general observation about getting older:

They also descend into nostalgia about beepers.

All I’m asking or hoping for is that the audience will be spared the default #MeToo trope, to wit: “The white middle-aged guy is odious, venal and reprehensible.”

Please don’t sink us into that fetid swamp yet again. Anything but that. Puhleeze.

Comment thread from “When Priggish Moral Standards Were At An All-Time High“, originally posted on 8.11.24:

If the 32 year-old Martin Scorsese, livid about the MPAA’s demand to cut much or most of the Taxi Driver shoot-out finale, had somehow stolen the original work print and thereby preserved the original look of this climactic sequence…if Scorsese had manned up and done this, he would’ve found himself in a heap of legal trouble but would nonetheless have behaved like a dude of resolve and consequence.

In Rebecca Miller‘s forthcoming Mr. Scorsese (Apple TV+, 10.17) the now 82-year-old director tells the story of this traumatic episode. He definitely intended to steal the work print, he says. He also bought a gun and was thinking of waving it around or something.

Scorsese should have somehow gotten hold of that Taxi Driver work print and sent it to a lab and copied it. At least that. His failure to preserve the original color scheme of that shoot-out scene was nothing short of an artistic tragedy. It remains a stain upon his legacy to this day.

“Son of Brown Blood,” posted on 8.22.20:

On 3.11.11 I ran a piece called “Taxi Driver‘s Brown Blood“. It was about (a) Grover Crisp and Martin Scorsese‘s Bluray restoration of Taxi Driver (4.5.11). and more particularly (b) a technical question asked of Crisp by The Digital Bits‘ Bill Hunt.

Hunt asked about the brownish, sepia-tone tinting of the climactic shoot-out scene, which had been imposed upon Scorsese by the MPAA ratings board. Scorsese had always intended this scene to be presented with a more-or-less natural color scheme, in harmony with the rest of the film. Hunt to Crisp: “Why didn’t you and Scorsese restore the originally shot, more colorful shoot-out scene?”

“There are a couple of answers to this,” Crisp replied. “One, which we discussed, was the goal of presenting the film as it was released, which is the version everyone basically knows. This comes up every now and then, but the director feels it best to leave the film as it is. That decision is fine with me.”

HE response: “There can be no legitimate claim of Taxi Driver having been restored without the original natural color (or at least a simulation of same) put back in. The film was shot with more or less natural colors, was intended to be shown this way, and — with the exception of the shoot-out scene — has been shown this way since it first opened in ’75.

“There’s nothing noble or sacred about the look of that final sequence. The fact that it was sepia-toned to get a more acceptable MPAA rating is, I feel, a stain upon the film’s legacy.”

Crisp explained that even if Scorsese wanted to present the natural color version, the original Taxi Driver negative is gone and there’s no way to “pump” the color back in.

Steven Gaydos 2011 comment: “Jeff’s right that it’s a shame a filmmaker had to alter his film in order for it to be seen in wide release, but according to my in-house expert (Monte Hellman, who oversaw the digital restoration/release of his 1971 film Two Lane Blacktop), if the negative is gone, as Crisp clearly says it is, then ‘you can put the color in but it will never look right, and certainly won’t look anything like the original footage.'”

And that was that.

But two or three years later I came upon this image of the wounded Travis Bickle, and damned if it doesn’t look like the original probably did before the MPAA stepped in.

I wondered right away where it came from, and I asked myself “if someone could satisfactorily manipulate a single frame from that shoot-out sequence to make it look right and natural, why couldn’t someone manage the same trick for the whole sequence?”

Who knows how Josh “wackadoodle” Safdie‘s Marty Supreme will play as a feature? Trailers never lay their cards on the table. They always lie.

But the trailer is certainly telling us that Marty Supreme isn’t a ping-pong competition movie, but a film about the power of positive thinking…confidence, swagger, self-promotion. There’s one little snippet of a ping-pong game — the rest is about Timothee Chalamet‘s Marty Reisman seducing or otherwise selling himself to women, businessmen, everyone.

I’m especially looking forward to the supporting performance by Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary.

The only “uh-oh” element is in the final clip…a massively obese guy (a Josh Gad lookaike) saying that the tangerine-colored ball is “an original [ping-pong] ball for an original guy. It’s the Marty Supreme ball, not the Marty normal ball.”

The problem is that by the standards of the late ’40s to mid ’50s, which is when table tennis maestro Marty Reisman was peaking, fat guys weren’t the size of circus tents. They looked like Jackie Gleason or Andy Devine or Oliver Hardy for the most part, and not like Jabba the frickin’ Hut…350-pound sumo wrestler types were pretty much confined to travelling circus side shows.

I’m a semi-fan of The Studio, but missed the “Cinemacon” episode, primarily because I was in Cannes when it aired on 5.14.25. And then I forgot about it or something.

I finally watched it a half-hour ago…excellent! The tonal atmosphere of hyper-aggressive farce is energized by the flickings of shroom psychedelia.

Posted on 2.17.25: “The second Boston Tea Party (the one on 15 Lansdowne Street, just off Kenmore Square and across from Fenway Park) was in business only a year and a half — July 1969 to December 1970. But man, what a hallowed place, what a holy temple of purification.

I attended several ear-pounding, spirit-lifting sets inside that fabled venue, but my most vivid memory isn’t musical — it’s my LSD freakout episode…a psychedelic meltdown that led to my forsaking hallucinogens forever and eventually renouncing marijuana. Yes, even that.

I was living with a crew of upper-middle-class drug dealers…friends from Wilton who were moving huge amounts of weed, heavy amounts of LSD inside clear plastic bags, and Vietnamese heroin. We lived in a large basement apartment at 467 Commonwealth Ave., and we all felt happy and churning and generally delighted with everything. Plus we were fastidious and flush and wore Brooks Brothers shirts….we had it all down.

On New Years’ Eve (’69 into ’70) we all attended a Boston Tea Party featuring the Grateful Dead and The Proposition, a Cambridge-based improv comedy group that featured Jane Curtin.

Except before walking over we all passed around a kind of rubber-lined goatskin container of Kool-Aid, which had been liberally spiked with LSD. Too liberally. It was soon apparent that the Kool-Aid was way more potent than anticipated, and roughly an hour into the Proposition set I began to feel increasingly anxious and creeped out, and then full-on paranoid.

I remember several details about the Curtin/Proposition performance as my psyche devolved into pudding. Curtin and and some schlumpy-looking guy played young married tourists from the Midwest who were experiencing Boston’s counter-culture scene for the first time, and feeling disoriented and a bit frightened.

Later in the set a comedy bit struck some kind of cosmic wowser chord, prompting a none-too-bright audience member to exclaim out loud, “Whoa, that’s heavy!” In response to which a Proposition performer looked at the guy and said “yeah, wow, man…too many tabs!”

That was me — too many ground-up tabs in the Kool-Aid had led me me into a place of, like, quaking disorientation. As in “uh-oh….uh-oh.” I began to feel as if I was standing next to a manhole-sized opening, and I knew that if I somehow fell into that hole I would lose my mind and never know sanity again.

Hunter S. Thompson knew this all too well. He called it “the fear.”

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