Jeff Wells

…and yet from an opposing perspective it all feels fine. You just have to hang on tight to what you know and are sensing all around, and what you deeply believe.

The EEAAO sweep (I’ve actually just typed those words!) is about cultism and political industry upheaval and a dynamic assertion of Millennial and Zoomer power by the under-45s along with various older lapdogs who want to profit by or otherwise get in on the action.

EEAAO worshippers know that the Daniels film is a peculiar head-trip thing and VERY pulpy, Marvel-esque and Millennial-minded and therefore a huge turn-off for tens of millions of over-40s or over-45s (the loathing for this film is, make no mistake, intense) or anyone, really, who’s acquired a semblance of classical taste.

And they don’t care. They love the fantasy tropes and the hip urban minority identity stuff (queer daughter, Asian family, Jamie Lee Curtis‘s crabby neurotic white woman representing the IRS) and they know it’s a film that has confounded, alienated and/or infuriated the majority (including moderate people like myself as well as your generic flyovers).

The whole woke Oscar brand of the last four or five years (i.e., films that are into apologizing for the venality of Anglo Saxon culture or at the very least are seeking to minimize its presence in films while simultaneously branding those who may object to the venalizing of their identity as the carpings of racists…quite the rhetorical imprisonment mechanism you’ve created there, fellas!) means little or nothing to most Average Joes, hence the plummeting viewership.

If it wasn’t certain before, James Hong locked in Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Best Picture win at the Oscars with this part of his speech pic.twitter.com/qsaSPjEVyk

— Karl Delossantos (@karl_delo) February 27, 2023

EEAAO fans know that the viewing public regards industry voters as curious or eccentric or myopic and to a large extent unconcerned about (or even hostile to) anything except their own cultural power — largely an island unto themselves…a largely anti-straight, anti-white-majority (at least in a rhetorical or social-fashion sense), mostly or at least significantly woke. The in-crowd know this is why the show has no across-the-board cachet, and why there’s no general interest in the Branch Davidian aspects of wokeism, and they absolutely love this state of affairs.

They’ve decided that emphasizing their apartness is a way of emphasizing their moral superiority, which they regard as the only path, the only way. [See “the David Ehrlich bubble”.]

Enough of straight, women-suppressing Anglo-Saxon white male dominance, and up with non-white or multicultural or women-favoring, LGBTQ-trans-embracing identity and stories about same, hence the Best Picture celebrations of Moonlight (anti-“Oscars so white”), Nomadland, Parasite, The Shape of Water, CODA, EEAAO. Six movies that — are you listening? — have ridden on the back of the woke tiger and thereby seized the brass ring.

I latched onto the Ukraine situation yesterday (“Shattered Into Shards”) because from a moralistic perspective it’s a no-brainer. Moral clarity = lacking in moral ambiguity. There is similarly no ambiguity in the essence of what EEAAO is deep down. You either (a) understand what it’s saying and what it represents, or (b) you don’t, or (c) you’ve chosen to ignore the obvious because you don’t want to be seen as an anti-woke contrarian because that might challenge or weaken your political standing and therefore your economic security.

This is what motivates so many out there, including (and I mean no offense in mentioning this) HE’s own Bob Strauss, whom I love like a brother. I feel for him and his situation. I feel for everyone in a sense. Except for the Ehrlich bubble fanatics on Twitter. I really hate those guys.

This isn’t a dream. This isn’t a delusion. This is actually happening. What I’ve described here is as real as the behaviors in Emily The Criminal or the Sicily episodes of The White Lotus.

I thought Sam Elliott might be in trouble a year ago after his blunt comments about Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog, which he basically called inauthentic. but he took his manager’s’ advice and apologized and the problem pretty much went away. As evidenced by Elliott winning Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Television Movie or Limited Series for playing Shea Brennan in his 1883.

Just after noon eastern on Sunday, IndieWire‘s David Ehrlich fiddle-faddled with my 2.26 reaction piece to Saturday night’s PGA Awards (Shattered Into Shards“), which sadly made the Best Picture crowning of Everything Everywhere All At Once seem all but inevitable.

I’m not understanding why Ehrlich decided to highlight the paragraph that mentioned Russia’s attempted Ukraine takeover. I was simply alluding to clarity of mind. If you understand the moral dynamic within the Ukraine-vs.-Russian situation, you should be able to divine what an infuriating crock EEAAO is — simple.

Key paragraph: Either you understand that Everything Everywhere All At Once represents not just an aesthetic pestilence but a terrible forced banality…a film that’s a good deal less about verse-jumping and spiritual dreamscapes and a lot more about pulp Marvelism and the relentless drumbeat of identity politics (Asian + queer), or you don’t. Or you do get this and you don’t care, in which case we’re all fucked anyway.

“Love has to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.

“Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy…we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a pack of cards?

“[The answer is] carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, [so] you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake.

“Knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone EVERYTHING IS PAIN. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.”

— Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. It opened at the former Plymouth Theatre (now the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre) on 1.5.84.

Frank Rich’s N.Y. Times review, 1.6.84.

I feel so depleted after last night’s Producer’s Guild nightmare. I tried to stay awake for the climactic announcement and failed. I was dreading the likelihood of EEAAO taking the Daryl F. Zanuck award. and I was asking myself, ‘Do I really want to watch the watch the live-death moment?”. Two minutes later I was out like a light. I woke up at 5:45 am, turned on the iPhone…thud.

This is when you get to see who some people really are deep down. The EEAAO fans who are gloating or cackling and taking pleasure in my expressions of sorrow.

From Peter Glenvile‘s Becket (’64)…King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) is bare-chested and kneeling in a rear, cellar-like space of Canterbury cathedral, right next to the tomb of Thomas Becket (Richard Burton). He looks over at four leather-hooded Saxon fellows, who are getting ready to whip the King as part of a ceremony of penance:

HENRY: “Look at them lurking there…gloating.”

Five and 1/3 years ago I passed along a brief personal tale about sexual molestation. It happened in New Orleans when I was 19 and blind drunk. Suffice to say that I woke up in a French Quarter hotel room with a heavy-set 50 year-old dude in New Orleans. That’s as far as I’m going to go, detail-wise, but I’m 99% sure nothing happened. And if it did, I don’t want to think about it.

Yesterday I was having lunch with an ex-girlfriend from 40-odd years ago and her husband, plus a friend of theirs. The three of them were roaring along with conversation at a fairly high speed, and I was trying to jump into the chatter like a 1930s hobo hopping on a freight train, but they were going too fast. Every so often I’d hear a word or a phrase and would try to jump on…”hey, hold on, guys, slow down…I’ve got an observational nugget here! Wait, wait!…okay.”

I began to lose track of time but there I continued to be, running alongside the freight train and starting to feel winded and then a tad despairing.

So eventually I figured, “What the hell…the next observational nugget will have to be a conversation stopper…I won’t even look to precisely add to the topic of the moment…I’ll just drop something into the conversation like a hand grenade.” Hence the drunken New Orleans thing.

All to say I might not have inserted this sordid tale if I could’ve figured some way to jump on the train, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t fast or fleet-of-mind enough.

There’s an anarchist that lives inside me. He takes orders from the rationalist and the humanist, but he has a voice and sometimes gives me great ideas for column topics and is very much the free-thinker, but there are some stories that should probably not be shared during a nice lunch.

Directed and written by Jon “Spiderman” Watts (helmer of Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home), Wolves is a star-driven (Brad Pitt, George Clooney) urban thriller of some kind. Maybe a little goofy…maybe a stab at clever.

Logline: “Two professional fixers find themselves hired for the same job.” I would be interested anyway because of what it apparently is, but also because I’m a huge fan of the second half (but not the first half!) of No Way Home.

Wolves had been shooting in the New York area for three or four weeks. Clooney and Pitt are also producing. Has anyone read the script? Is it boilerplate or a level or two above? Will Apple release it later this year or what?

Last posted on 12.21.19: “Sometime in the late winter or early spring of ’83 I flew from New York to Los Angeles for a job interview, and during the visit I went out to Universal studios to poke around. I wound up climbing a chain-link fence and walking onto a sound stage where, lo and behold, Scarface was being shot. The huge set contained a portion of Tony Montana‘s Miami mansion — the upstairs office, the red-carpeted foyer and staircase, a portion of the white-painted exterior with royal palm trees outside.

Hanging on a wall near the base of the staircase was a fairly large (at least six or seven feet tall) oil portrait of Al Pacino‘s Tony and Michelle Pfeiffer‘s Elvira Hancock. I’m no authority on oil portraits, but it looked like an absolutely first-rate effort. Someone had taken the time to make it look like a serious artist (one who knew from color and shadow and subtle gradations) had worked on it. In the film the painting is seen for maybe 1.5 seconds, if that.

I’ve long wondered what happened to this grand portrait. Did Brian DePalma or [the late] producer Marty Bregman make off with it? Online you can buy cheap knockoff versions with bullet holes, but the real thing was quite impressive.

The real-deal, full-size portrait presented a somewhat darker image that the one you see here.

Read more

Obviously Peter Weir‘s direction, Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley‘s screenplay and John Seale‘s cinematography, coupled with Lucas Haas and Harrison Ford‘s performances. But the most active ingredient is Maurice Jarre‘s score. That’s what really siezes and brings you in.

Jarre, who passed in 2009 at age 84, was unquestionably pantheon-level. I know that Doctor Zhivago is generally regarded as sappy and that we’re not allowed to praise it too strongly, but Jarre’s music for David lean’s 1965 film melts me down every time I hear. Not to mention his scores for Lawrence of Arabia, The Train (’64), Grand Prix (’66), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), The Year of Living Dangerously (’82 w/ Vangelis), Witness (’85), The Mosquito Coast (’86), Fatal Attraction (’87), Gorillas in the Mist (’88), Dead Poets Society (’89), and Ghost (’90)

Read more

A day or two ago I read about about Ashley Morgan Smithling recanting her allegation of sexual abuse against Marilyn Manson, which appeared nine months ago in People magazine (5.5.21). But I was afraid to re-post and discuss for fear of the #MeToo brigade using it to say I’m defending Marilyn Manson. You know how they are. It seemed safer to bypass it. Yes, I am capable of cowardice.

Friendo: “Yeah, I think it’s the Armie Hammer thing…kind of a domino effect. No one wants to be exposed like that so they get ahead of the story. It’s the right thing to do to tell the truth. I never bought her story, and I can’t stand MM.”

Boilerpate: Marilyn Manson accuser Ashley Morgan Smithline has recanted her sexual abuse allegations against the musician. As in “oops, never mind.”

In a 2.19.23 Los Angeles Superior Court filing, Smithline has stated she was “manipulated” by actress and ex-Manson fiancée Evan Rachel Wood and others to accuse Manson of sexual and physical abuse. “I succumbed to pressure from Evan Rachel Wood and her associates to make accusations of rape and assault against [Manson] that were not true,” the statement says.

Smithline stated that she had a “brief, consensual sexual relationship with Brian Warner,” aka Marilyn Manson, in November 2010.

Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, asked for the grief he’s in. He said some blunt stuff that might be true in some respects (i.e., deep down there’s probably not a great amount of love for white people among a good portion of black people, and who could blame them?) but it was crazy unwise to say this stuff on social media.

The trigger, Adams said, was this 2.22.23 Rasmussen poll.

Friendo: “Yeah, agreed. Like the severe anti-trans stuff, all it does is feed the beast. It vindicates the crazies. Like suddenly they found a real witch in Salem.

“The only part I agree with is that no matter what you do the woke crazies call you a racist, because they believe every white person IS racist. You’re either flat-out racist or unconsciously racist, but either way you’re pretty bad.”

Read more

Hollywood Elsewhere will be submitting to Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear sometime around 5:25 pm eastern. Call it 5:30. I’ll post some kind of half-assed, lean-and-mean, “don’t fuck with me” reaction by 8 pm…okay, no later than 9. Meanwhile the early birds are saying it’s not awful, “reasonably silly”, “gonzo goofy,” etc.