Jeff Wells

…then I’ll find a way to scrounge my way over there. Ditto if Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers plays there, although I doubt it will. All the hotshot publicists agreed long ago that presumed award-season headliners (which The Holdovers is definitely said to be — ditto Killers of the3 Flower Moon) are not helped by even a glorious reception in Cannes, as they’ll just have to start the engine all over again when the early fall festivals launch. Who knows? Playing it by ear.

Here’s Jordan Ruimy’s latest Cannes ’23 spitball.

…Variety critic Peter Debruge is dead wrong in calling M. Night Shyamalan‘s Signs a “letdown.” (Which he does in the subhead of his Knock at the Cabin review.)

At age 12, my younger son Dylan was so scared by Signs that he left his seat and went out to the lobby to calm down. I’ll never forget that — Westwood all-media, August ’02, 20 and 1/2 years ago.

I didn’t care about the religious symbolism in Signs and all the rest of that crap — I tuned that stuff out and just focused on the aliens.

So far Knock at the Cabin has a 72% rating, and you know what that means. It means that the whores are giving it a pass, and if weren’t for the whores it would have a failing grade.

Please absorb the basics of (a) the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, (b) Stanley Kramer‘s Inherit the Wind (’60), and (c) the small-town Christian zealots who condemn the sensible, scientific-minded Bertram Cates (Dick York), his defense counsel Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) and especially Baltimore Herald journalist E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly).

In damn near every scene, the holy-rolling Bible-thumpers are positively throbbing with the spirit, completely convinced of their God-given righteousness, and unwavering in their conviction that Cates, Drummond and Hornbeck deserve to suffer the pains of hell and then some.

Now remove yourself from this small Tennessee town (i.e., Hillsboro) of nearly a century ago, and ask yourself if these Old Testament wackazoids remind you of any particular group or social movement today. Think about it. Take your time.

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From HE commenter “joshsleeps” (opsted last night): BREAKING: TRANSCRIPT OF JASON WEINBERG‘S SECRET MOTIVATIONAL SPEECH LEAKED [wee below]:

“Alright, you fucksticks. Kate, Edward, Charlize, Jennifer, Amy, Susan…if you ever want another nomination you’d better get your asses in line and start tweeting about Andrea right effing now.

“Oh, what’s that? I don’t give a shit if you haven’t seen the movie. As far as you’re concerned this is the greatest female performance of all time. I’m talking all day, e’ryday — I wanna see tweets and grams.

“Jamie Lee! Put. That. Coffee. DOWN. Oh, you think I’m fucking with you? I assure you, I am not fucking with you. Who do you think bought your nod this year? I’ll take it back faster than you can say ‘It’s an honor just to be nominated.’

“Katie, honey, you want Avatar 5? You better sign up to host a screening right fucking now.

“Gwynnie, you wanna keep that sweet sweet Goop cash and avoid an IRS audit, you’ll ‘gram that Andrea deserves all the awards — even the ones that haven’t been invented yet! Yes, I’m dead fucking serious.

“Howard! Don’t think your washed-up ass is exempt from any of this. Next time I’m in gridlock on the 405 and trapped with your shit radio show, I’d better hear nothing but Andrea’s name comin’ out your mouth.

“Are we clear, dipshits? It’s fuck or walk, post or host. Guy doesn’t come to a special screening ‘less he wants to vote. You can’t close him, you can’t close shit, you are shit, hit the bricks, pal! Cuz you are finished.

“I have no sympathy for you. Close this nomination, the world is yours. But I don’t hear Andrea’s name come Tuesday morning, you’ll all be shining my shoes. And you know what you’ll be saying? Buncha losers sitting around a bar, ‘Oh, I used to be an actor, tough racket.’

“You’ve been warned. Now go out and make this happen. For Andrea. For me. For you. Or else.”

I’m sorry but that’s a likely no-go on M. Night Shyamalan‘s A Knock At The Cabin (Universal, 2.3).

Bullshit premise: “A family is abruptly held hostage by strangers while vacationing in a woodsy cabin…’one of you must die in order to avert the apocalypse'”…bullshit. Then again this situation is one of the few instances that would seem to justify owning a Glock.

I would be delighted if M. Night could somehow re-ignite or rediscover what he had going 20 years ago (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), but you can’t go home again. Filmmaker-auteurs only have so much psychic essence. Once the well runs dry, there’s no refilling it as a rule.

Dave Bautusta: “[My character] is this giant child. Which is actually his role in the film…a child” Not sure if Mr. Tankbod Ripplehead is being literal; if so this feels like a reveal.

“…comes bob-bob-bobbin’ along…along!”

Whenever I’ve thought of Cindy Williams, I’ve thought of The Conversation. Her character, Ann, and Frederic Forrest‘s Mark, her lover or husband or whatever, strolling around San Francisco’s Union Square, bugged and haunted and up to something pretty bad. I’ll always think of her in this context…her finest moment.

Honest confession: I’ve never seen a single episode of Laverne and Shirley.

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Speaking as a onetime friend and promotional colleague of Robert Englund, the livewire, ready-for-anything actor who played Freddie Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, I’ve always slightly regretted how Englund wasn’t more fully appreciated for his witty, snap-crackle, quasi-Rennaissance Man personality.

Just as the Frankenstein monster image always seemed to diminish or at least darken the classy gentleman aspect of Boris Karloff, there’s always been a lot more to Englund than that red-and-green sweater and those long razor fingers.

Which isn’t to say that Hollywood Dreams and Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, a forthcoming doc about Englund, won’t be worth a watch. Pic will have a brief theatrical run in late spring before the streaming launch on June 6th.

“Brief Shining Moment of Freddiemania,” posted on 1.17.15:

“I’m recalling my efforts as a freelance public relations guy for New Line Cinema in ’85 and ’86, and particularly my promotion of Jack Sholder‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, and even more particularly the semi-phenomenon know as ‘Freddiemania,’ which originated with spottings of movie fans dressed as Freddy Krueger a la Rocky Horror for midnight showings of Wes Craven‘s A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84).

“There weren’t that many Freddy freaks to be found, to be perfectly honest, but it was an interesting and amusing enough story to persuade Entertainment Tonight and the N.Y. Times and other big outlets to run pieces on it and to speak with Sholder (who later directed The Hidden, one of the finest New Line films ever made) as well as Freddy himself, Robert Englund, with whom I became friendly and hung out with a bit. (Producer Mike DeLuca was a 20 year-old New Line assistant at the time.) One of my big Freddy promotional stunts was persuading Englund to march in New York’s Village Halloween Parade on 10.31.85 from Houston Street up to 14th or 23rd or something like that.

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The below image was captured yesterday morning (dawn) during a balloon ride over the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. You can disagree and that’s fine, but it immediately struck me as being in the same aesthetic realm as Freddie Young‘s work on Lawrence of Arabia (’62).

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We all understand that first-class Blurays of 1950s big-studio features that were captured on large-format celluloid (VistaVision, Cameras 65, Technirama, Super Panavision, etc.) are glorious eye candy.

Last night I was in heaven as I savored the just-right compositions in Joshua Logan‘s Sayonara (’57), which was shot by Ellsworth Fredricks in Technirama (35mm film run horizontally at 8-perf, or the same as VistaVision). 1080p resolution is great but 4K UHD is better, etc. My God, the fine threads in those Air Force uniforms, Marlon Brando‘s gistening brown hair, the naturally luminous Kyoto exteriors, etc.

But where are those other 4K large-format titles? Why are we still waiting for a 4K UHD Bluray of John Ford‘s The Searchers, which was one of the first Blurays on the market (released on 10.31.06) but which desperately needs to be remastered and 4K’ed and generally brought uo to to speed. Ditto Ben-Hur, shot in Camera 65 and expensively and immaculately transferred to Bluray 11 years ago, but no 4K upgrade on the horizon. Ditto North by Northwest, also shot in VistaVision but not even a promise of a 4K version.

Nobody’s in a hurry, dragging our feet, we’ll get there when we get there, etc.

You can therefore understand my initial excitement when I discovered a claim on Home Theatre Forum, posted on 9.25.22 by a Danish film buff named Kevin Oppegaard (aka “titch” on HTF), that he’d seen “a beautiful, absolutely flawless 4K DCP…if Warner Bros. ever decides to release this on 4K UHD, there will be much rejoicing.”

And yet Oppegard, I’ve been told, is apparently full of shit. A guy who’s reliably in the know informs that Warner Home Entertainment’s DCP of The Searchers is only 2K, and represents the work done 16 years ago.

Somewhere in the Copenhagen area, Kevin Oppegard has just put on a pair of dark sunglassas and a lumpy fishing hat, and is shuffling off into the crowd.

Also not to be trusted is a website claim by Seattle’s Grand Illusion theatre, stating that a “new 4K restoration” was screened a year ago (2.3.22). The same insider informs that WHE’s DCP of North by Northwest is 4K, but if the Grand Illusion presentation really was a true 4K finish (as the web page implies), it would not be of sufficient quality for a 4K UHD release.

The Searchers and North by Northwest are candidates, of course, for eventual 4K UHD release, but there’s nothing to spill at the present time.

I’m not saying that the argument put forward by the “get Andrea Riseborough and her supporters” crowd (Variety‘s Clayton Davis, Puck’s Matthew Belloni, Till director Chinonye Chukwu) ever had any real traction, but for a day or so the anti-Riseborough contingent made some noise and seemed to generate an “uh-oh” atmosphere.

But I think it’s fair to say now that their side in this debate (i.e., the wokester position) is weakening as we speak and they’re basically adopting a rope-a-dope stance. Reasonable, fair-minded human beings are standing against them and their vague allusions to some kind of conniving, elitist, white-person, anti-equity cabal…that’s all going away, I’m afraid. I can feel it.

Director Rod Lurie put it nicely earlier today on Facebook:

Set in present-day Los Angeles, Jonah Hill and Kenya Barris‘s You People is a fuck-all racial culture-clash comedy (Jews vs. blacks) that isn’t half bad. In fact it’s darkly, brilliantly funny during the first 25% (I was actually laughing out loud and I never do that), and…okay, slightly less funny but still clever and diverting during the middle section, or roughly 60% of the running time.

The only part that massively sucks is a truly astonishing copout happy ending that occupies the last 12 to 15 minutes, give or take. If you can ignore this huge miscalculation You People doesn’t deserve the mostly shitty reviews — it really doesn’t. 85% to 90% of this well-produced film is not a burn

It’s been described as a 2023 riff on Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, but it’s a lot nervier and crazy-good than anything Stanley Kramer ever had in mind.

Hill is note perfect as a bearded, chunky, vaguely depressed 35 year-old fellow of the Hebrew persuasion; ditto Laurene London as the Muslim-raised cappuccino girl he falls in love with and wants to marry. (And vice versa.) Hill’s trying-way-too-hard-to-be-hip parents are broadly played by David Duchovny and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Eddie Murphy (best of show after Hill) and Nia Long play London’s Baldwin Hills parents. All the major supporting performers are spot-on, especially Sam Jay, Travis Bennett, Deon Cole and Mike Epps.