Jeff Wells

Not So Glum Now

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A month ago I learned I was afflicted with atherosclerosis….hardening of the arteries. So I arranged to submit to a stress test, the results of which might have warranted a balloon agioplasty and maybe a stent for good measure.

So I finally had the stress test done five days ago, and two days later I got the verdict. And it wasn’t alarming or even that concerning. My situation is “normal“, according to my primary care physician.

I don’t believe that altogether. I still think I need to do something about the plaque, which is what stents are supposed to be good for. But my diet has improved, and my bad habits have been amended. Well, some of them.

Phony Baloney Radio City Music Hall Ads

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Billy Wilder‘s Sunset Boulevard opened exactly 75 years ago — August 10, 1950. Everyone involved is dead, of course, except for the intrepid Nancy Olson, who turned 97 a month ago.

The Paramount marketers who created the below newspaper ad on behalf of the Radio City Music Hall took the art of lying to new absurdist heights, of course. Sunset Boulevard remains one of the darkest and most acidic portraits of Hollywood psychology ever crafted, and they were selling a happy, smiling, lovey-dovey glamour ride.

“Gillis Was Too Hung Up on Morality,” posted on 12.8.18:

The thing about Sunset Boulevard that doesn’t quite play in today’s terms is Joe Gillis‘s refusal to confide to Betty Schaefer what he’s up to — that he’s become a kind of screenwriting gigolo, living high on the hog with a 50 year-old silent movie star.

Gillis cares for Schaefer and vice versa — audiences can tell they’d be a good match — but he’s too consumed with self-loathing to let her know what’s up. That doesn’t figure. He was broke and ready to skip town when he met Norma Desmond. Now he’s hustling a rich meal-ticket while he plots his next move. What’s so shameful about that?

The first 30 minutes of Sunset Boulevard are sharp and catchy, and the last 15 are grand-slammy. But the middle 65 of this 110-minute film are a little slow and frustrating.

And why hasn’t Gillis insisted to Desmond that he has to be paid an actual weekly salary? If he got one he could save up enough to buy a new car and move back into his apartment and get his career going again, especially with Schaefer as his new writing partner.

Cameron Crowe: “There is a famous story from the first Hollywood screening of Sunset Boulevard [in 1950]. Louis B. Mayer [head of MGM] was standing on a stairway, railing about ‘How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?’ What did you say to him when you overheard all this?”

Billy Wilder: “I am Mr. Wilder, and go fuck yourself.”

Crowe: “What did he say to that?

Wilder: “He was astonished. He was standing with the great MGM bosses who were below him, there at the studio, Mr. [Eddie] Mannix and Mr. [Joe] Cohen. And that so astonished them, that somebody had the guts to say, “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” [And that’s when] I knew that I had a good picture there. — from October 1999 Vanity Fair piece, “Conversations With Billy.”

Richter Refrain

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I’ve been on the Richter train for decades.

Posted on 11.16.20: The famous animal bone sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey lasts one minute and 54 seconds. It shows the moment in which Moonwatcher (Dan Richter) discovers a certain killer instinct that will save his tribe from extinction. My favorite part is the final six seconds, starting at 1:48. This is when Moonwatcher says “okay, that was cool, I now understand how to kill prey for food…and now that I’ve figured this out I’m going to throw the fucking bone in the air and forget about it.” Which he does. And then he runs his fingers through the sand and starts…whatever, daydreaming. I love this part…”fuck it, fuck the bone, I’m not doing this all day, I’m taking a break.”

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20% of Critics Couldn’t Resist Dissing RoPo’s 2019 Masterpiece

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Two days ago and nearly six years after debuting at the 2019 Venice Film Festival, Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy finally opened stateside, courtesy of a two-week booking at Manhattan’s Film Forum.

80% of the critics reviewed the actual film as opposed to Polanski’s decades-old personal history, and were naturally, totally thumbs up. There is simply no intelligent way to pan this brilliant film.

20% of the critics chose to review Polanski instead of the film, and these virtue signalling prigs were mixed-positive (but mostly kinda mixed).

You can feel Manohla Dargis’s clenched discomfort at having to acknowledge that An Officer and a Spy “is well-crafted…Polanski’s movies generally are.” And her subsequent relief when she adds that the film’s “contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.”

Will there be any other theatrical bookings? Will an HD streaming version be made available? Right now, as before, the only way to see AOAAS is via some pirate torrent or by buying the English-subtitled Russian Bluray, a copy of which is sitting on one of my Bluray shelves.

Unrequited Love Isn’t Just The Only Kind That Lasts

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It’s also the only kind that never dims in intensity, and certainly never runs out of fuel.

The fact that the bearer is guaranteed to suffer is almost rote as almost everyone who’s fallen head-over-heels knows (or eventually comes to know) that “love hurts”…that emotional anguish and even humiliation are almost always part of the deal.

And I don’t want to hear about enduring love between longtime silver-haired marrieds being just as strong and blissful and life-sustaining as ever. That kind of love-through-the-=decades is fine and good and certainly nourishing in a quietly slumbering, almost-nodding-off sort of way, but it doesn’t hurt, and if you can’t feel that terrible stab in the chest, where’s the dimensional residue?

Excellent Lolita montage by HD Film Tributes.

Heaven-Residing Brando Is Enraged

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However honestly or dishonestly, this Waltzing with Brando trailer is presenting a film that is more or less a low-key goofball farce. Ghosts can’t throw up, of course, but at the very least Brando’s ghost is wretching.

Yes, I realize that trailers routinely lie and that the film (Iconic, 9.19) may be better than the sell.

On top of which Waltzing, directed and written by Bill Fishman and set between 1969 and 1974, side-dips into the whole Last Tango in Paris thing with Maria Schneider and Bernardo Bertolucci, only a few months after Being Maria screened in NYC.

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Bad Teacher?

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Sharp-minded friendo to HE: “Go see Weapons.”
HE to sharp-minded friendo: “Out Friday.”
Sharp-minded friendo: “Don’t read anything about it. The less you know, the better.”
HE: “Horror.”
Sharp-minded friendo: “It’s a film.”
HE: “Missing kids, all from a single classroom, outraged parents.”
Sharp-minded friendo: “Just see it.”
HE: “It’s…what is it, a metaphor for middle-class hostility…anger vented at woke women? Something like that?”
Sharp-minded friendo: “Don’t go in with baggage and preconceived expectations.”
HE: “Is it okay if I watch the trailer?”

Jessie Buckley’s Heaving Seas

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Yesterday Alice Newell-Hanson’s N.Y. Times Style Magazine profile of Jessie Buckley, an endlessly flattering exercise in kiss-ass portraiture, appeared online.

It’s a longish, elegant, very well-written article, but given Newell-Hanson’s commitment to flattery, it totally ignores what in-the-know types are allegedly thinking and saying about Buckley’s next two envelope-pushing films.

These would be (a) Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet (Focus Features, 11.27), an allegedly glum historical fiction about Agnes Shakespeare (Buckley) and her errant, responsibility-shirking playwright husband, William (Paul Mescal), and (b) Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s The Bride! (Warner Bros., 3.6.26), apparently some kind of feminist, toxic-male-hating take on James Whale‘s The Bride of Frankenstein (’35).

Key Newell-Hanson passage: “Buckley has earned a reputation for playing complicated roles with devastating power. Zhao, the director of Hamnet, says that as soon as she read Maggie O’Farrell‘s book, she knew the role had to be Buckley’s. Few other actresses of her generation can gain access to such a wide spectrum of emotions, or seem as willing to risk being disliked for exploring the tougher ones.

“‘She has no fear in terms of how she’s perceived,’ says Mescal. ‘She’s never trying to hide or draw lines.'”

Buckley’s choppy scarecrow haircut, posted below and featured in the Times article, lends a certain credence to Mescal’s observation.

Straight Hamnet dope, as reported two weeks ago (7./25.25) by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy:

Excerpt: “While Buckley and Mescal’s performances are said to be solid, Zhao’s direction — and especially her screenwriting — are being called flat, with a tone that feels completely off. One viewer summed it up as ‘two hours of Buckley looking miserable,’ without much emotional depth or nuance to her grief.”

Straight Bride! reporting, dated 3.19.25:

Obviously The Bride! was bumped into ’26 because…well, WB distribution certainly didn’t do this because it’s some kind of glorious knockout.

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The Night The ’70s Died

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Initially posted on 6.17.22:

Joseph McBride to Hal Ashby after early Star Wars screening: “Your kinda days are over, Hal.”
Ashby to McBride: “What about yours, film critic?”
McBride to Ashby: “The difference is I know it.”
Ashby to McBride: “All right, so we’ll all turn in our Arriflxes and Avid editing machines to the Academy, and we’ll all go to work at Pink’s. Is that it?”
McBride to Ashby: “Not quite yet. [turns to George Lucas, standing nearby] We haven’t heard from your friend here.”
Lucas: “I wouldn’t push too far if I were you. Our fight ain’t with you.”
McBride: “It ain’t with me, Lucas?”
Lucas: “No, it ain’t, Joe.”
Ashby: “I wouldn’t pull on Lucas, Joe. [to Will Atkey] Will, you’re a witness to this.”
McBride: “So you’re George Lucas.”
Lucas: “What’s that mean to you, Joe?”
McBride: “I’ve heard about you.”
Lucas: “And what’ve you heard, Joe?”
McBride: “I’ve heard that your movies are injecting an infantile serum into American commercial cinema, and in so doing are helping to destroy a cinematic golden age. You and Steven Spielberg, I mean.”
Lucas: “Prove it.”