Jeff Wells

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.

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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)

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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.”

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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.

HE readers know that Martin Scorsese‘s Killers of the Flower Moon will almost certainly have its big debut at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. So what follows is mostly water under the bridge.

I know that I popped in for a little taste on 7.26 (i.e., seven months ago) after Mike Fleming and Justin Kroll reported that Flower Moon would be skipping a late ’22 release in favor of “a possible ‘global showcase premiere’ at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.”

On Jan. 12 World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy reported that “two sources” had told him Flower Moon would play Cannes.

I was told privately on February 1st that this would indeed happen.

The last columnist to report same was Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman, on Monday, 2.20.

And now (Thursday, 2.23) Variety‘s Elsa Keslassy and Justin Kroll have posted a Cannes caboose story, timidly reporting that Killer Moon is “eyeing” a Cannes debut. Their story qualifies three times that the Cannes booking isn’t 100% firmed, but it is, I’ve been told. Plane fares and hotels are booked — done deal. Probably in an out-of-competition slot.

Nearly three months ago bbc.com’s Nicholas Barber explained why Top Gun: Maverick is the only film that deservers to win the Best Picture Oscar….okay, he didn’t say that but he might as well have.

Barber also made it clear that anyone who votes instead for Everything Everywhere All At Once is a cinematic philistine and a sworn enemy of the Movie Godz ethos…okay, he didn’t say that but he might as well have.

Barber: “Top Gun: Maverick was a romantic-comedy-drama-action-thriller – which is another way of saying that it was simply a Hollywood movie that everyone could enjoy. To people who had stayed away from cinemas since before the pandemic, TG:M felt like a warm welcome home.

“Still, it was a bittersweet feeling — as if we were being welcomed home, but we had to leave again soon. Even while we were cheering, laughing and crying at the film, we were aware, on some level, that it was a one-off. Top Gun: Maverick won’t set any trends because it isn’t part of a trend. It’s unique, the last of its kind — just as its hero was the last of his. It marked the end of an era. But as long as the film was on the screen, we could tell ourselves that it hadn’t ended yet.

“The screenwriters put it best. ‘The future is coming, and you’re not in it,’ says Ed Harris says to Tom Cruise. ‘Your kind is heading for extinction.’

“‘Maybe so, sir,’ says Cruise. ‘But not today.'”

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Will you listen to this freshman kid’s voice? Remind you of anyone? Ben Shapiro‘s perhaps? The reedy-voiced kid says that he wrote “ALL LIVES MATTER” on a blackboard and was soon after told by school supervisors that this sentiment is politically problematic (i.e., racist). This is why we need Seth Rogen to school this little prick.

Freshman in high school SMOKES the school board. pic.twitter.com/Gv489lQqq5

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) February 22, 2023

In Matt Ruskin‘s Boston Strangler (Hulu, 3.17), Boston Record-American reporters Loretta McLaughlin (Keira Knightley) and Jean Cole (Carrie Coon) combat sexism and corruption among fellow Boston journalists and within the police ranks in order to investigate a serial killer who later became known as the Boston Strangler. Mclaughlin and Cole have to fight tooth and nail, but their diligence gradually prevails.

Boston Strangler is apparently a one-off feature.

In Ali Abbasi‘s Holy Spider, journalist Arezoo Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) arrives in the Iranian Holy City of Mashhad to investigate several murders of local street prostitutes. She uncovers evidence that suggests a serial killer, but her hunches are not taken seriously by male journalists and policemen. Cultural misiogyny blocks or restrains at every turn, but by posing as a prostitute and placing herself in danger Rahimi manages to identify and incriminate the killer, Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani). Soon after police arrest him.

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…but a fascinating casting idea. Imagine!