Jeff Wells How many underwhelming or dud-level Paul Mescal performances will it take to convince the HE cognoscenti that I’ve been right about this mook all along? The coup de grace, I’m presuming, will be delivered by Mescal’s Paul McCartney performance in Sam Mendes‘ Beatles quartet.
“New York City today is optimized for two [kinds of] people. It’s optimized for really rich guys in their 40s and 50s, and for really hot women in their 20s and 30s. And for nearly everyone else, it’a a soul-crushing experience. If you are not in one of those two demographics, do not move to New York City. For it is capitalism meets Darwin meets Three’s Company and I Dream of Jeannie meets reality TV.” — Scott Galloway.
Manhattan-residing friendo: “Pretty damn accurate! Except NYC is also welcoming to hot finance guys in their 20s and 30s.”
I lived in Manhattan for six years, between the spring of ’78 and the early summer of ’83. I lived in five (5) small but livable apartments on Sullivan Street, West 4th Street, Bank Street (right across from HB Studios), West 76th Street near Amsterdam, and West 99th west of Broadway. I was never flush, but I was able live a spunky, flavorful, often exciting life supplanted by elite screenings, paid-for parties and occasional bar sippings, comped tickets to B’way plays, clubs and downtown club visits. I wasn’t deliriously ecstatic about everything, but I was certainly what most of us would call moderately happy. And oh, the women back then…
Life was actually pretty great at times, looking back, but a youngish journalist earning a moderate 2025 salary couldn’t possibly have fun today in NYC the way I did 40-plus years ago.
…does NOT mean you’re not, in all the ways that really and truly count, a sentient, spiritual being with a soul.
I’m totally with this woman. It’s insulting to call a dog “a dog”…really insulting. Same deal with cats.
All hail the great Helen Joyce, author of “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality“…. thank you from the bottom of my heart.
At long last, a reasonably decent trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another (Warner Bros., 9.26) has finally surfaced.
The first reaction to Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson character — a grizzled, anti-government leftie blowhard — is that he’s overly verbal about everything, and that Leo seems to be half-improvising his dialogue.
Obviously a must-see for people like myself, but what will Joe and Jane Popcorn say and do? I smell trouble in this regard.
Having suffered grievously from the watching of Inherent Vice, HE stands foursquare against any further Thomas Pynchon adaptations.
Last night I caught Part One of Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin‘s Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO Max). It runs 140something minutes but flies right by.
I was a little worried at first — the beginning is way too obsequious and celebrative and adoring — but it soon after settles down into the basic story of Joel’s youth and early career (late ’60s to early ’80s). And it motors right along.
And it’s really not half bad. It generally feels honest, fairly raw. I didn’t feel the least bit distracted or bored. It’s a solid, well-crafted, first-rate thing. No shade or complaints.
I was reminded what a shrimp Joel is — 5’5″. Which is the same height as James Cagney and Dustin Hoffman, and one inch shorter, even, than Alan Ladd, who was very hung up about standing only 5’6″.
Part One mainly examines Joel’s New York area upbringing (Hicksville, Long Island) and how he had tightly curled, Afro-like hair, and how his mother insisted that he learn the piano, etc. Then comes his deep plunge into suicidal despair (he tried to off himself twice) and then his gradual rocketing to fame between the early and late ’70s (“The Stranger,” “52nd Street”), focusing mainly on his relationship with longtime wife and business manager Elizabeth Weber, from whom he split in ’82.
It ends before Christie Brinkley (four inches taller than Joel and almost certainly with bigger feet than his) strolls into the arena in ’83.
The most surreal moment is Weber recalling how there was a “Stranger” listening party with a few Columbia Records execs and other cool cats in ’77, the idea being to pick which tracks would sell best as a single. And guess what? Nobody responded with much enthusiasm to “Just The Way You Are.” Joel himself didn’t think it was good enough to put on the album, but was persuaded to include it at the last minute.
“Just The Way You Are” is the song that put Joel over the top and made him into a superstar. Paul McCartney says it’s the one Joel song he really wishes he had written and performed himself.
Rahm Emanuel is understandably antsy about defying the fanatical Stalinist wokeys by saying a man can’t be a woman, but you know what? I for one understand and believe that certain men can and do become “women”, so to speak. Because of what they feel in their hearts. They just can’t compete against biofemales in sporting events, and no prompting or goading minors to take hormones or have bottom surgeries….not until they’re 18 or better still 21. And if some of them feel depressed or anguished, say, because they’re stuck in the wrong body…well, poor baby. Man up and tough it out.
Rahm doesn’t have that special X-factor charisma that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have or at least had in their prime….true. But he’s obviously sensible, tough and brilliant, and he understands the importance of good educational basics and ditching all the fucking woke pronoun bullshit, and he believes that wokeys are essentially an insane cult…that they’re the reason Average Joes and Janes despise the Democratic party these days.
Given an academic choice between Emanuel and that authoritarian sociopathic blowhard in the White House, are you telling me that most Americans would prefer Trump over Emanuel? Or that they’d rather elect Vance to succeed Trump rather than elect a sensible, practical-minded Democrat like Rahm or Gavin or Pete?
Presuming that the WSJ has 100% confirmed that Donald Trump drew this, Trump obviously has a thing for women with nice boobs, zaftig bods, no “innie” navels and well-trimmed pubic hair.
His pubic hair signature tells us he’s into oral, because this is actually fairly well drawn…it has a certain professional flair, a certain facility. Some people can’t doodle at all — Trump isn’t half bad.
All hail the 2025 Venice Film Festival (Wednesday, 8.27 thru Saturday, 9.6) for having decided to not show Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, which will probably debut at Telluride before hitting TIFF….spared from another Paul Mescal endurance meditation!
But I’m also genuinely sorry that Scott Cooper‘s Bruce Sringsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere, won’t have its premiere screening on the Lido. Ditto Edward Berger‘s Ballad of a Small Player. The latter two, I’m guessing, will probably also debut in Telluride.
And seven or eight years after completing principal photography, when oh when will Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind finally peek out? What an indecisive coward-flake.
Otherwise HE is pleased and gratified by most of the official Venice selections (29 HE standouts), which popped early this morning and almost all of which were forecast by HE on 7.17:
Competition faves: (a) The Wizard of the Kremlin (d: Olivier Assayas), (b) Jay Kelly (d: Noah Baumbach), (c) A House of Dynamite (d: Kathryn Bigelow), (d) In the Hand of Dante (d: Julian Schnabel), (e) The Testament of Ann Lee (d: Mona Fastvold), (f) Father Mother Sister Brother (d: Jim Jarmusch…shockingly turned down by Cannes), (g) Bugonia (d: Yorgos Lanthimos…cuidado…bald Emma Stone), (h) Orphan, (d: László Nemes), (i) No Other Choice (d: Park Chan-wook…HE is no fan of this guy, who is almost all DePalma hat and not much cattle), (j) Sotto Le Nuvole (d: Gianfranco Rosi); (k) The Smashing Machine (d: Benny Safdie). (11)
Competition sans any particular interest or excitement: Frankenstein (d: Guillermo del Toro…no offense but how many times can we go to this same damn well?), L’Étranger (d: François Ozon); and La grazia (d: Paolo Sorrentino) (3)
Sans competition faves (fiction): (a) After the Hunt (d: Luca Guadagnino), (b) The Last Viking (d: Anders Thomas Jensen), (c) Dead Man’s Wire (d: Gus Van Sant). (3)
Sans compettion faves (documentaries): Cover-Up (d: Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus); Kabul, Between Prayers (d: Aboozar Amini),(b) Marc by Sofia (d: Sofia Coppola), (c) Ghost Elephants (d: Werner Herzog), (d) Nuestra Tierra (d: Lucrecia Martel); (e) Kim Novak’s Vertigo (d: Alexandre Philippe), (f) Broken English (d: Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth), (g) Notes of a True Criminal (d: Alexander Rodnyansky and Andriy Alferov); (h) Director’s Diary (d: Aleksander Sokurov. (8)
Sans competition faves (shorts): How to Shoot a Ghost (d: Charlie Kaufman). (1)
Horizons faves: (a) Rose of Nevada (d: Mark Jenkin), (b) Late Fame (d: Kent Jones); (c) Human Resource (d: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit). (3)
Grand total: 29 films over an 11-day period.
Presumably a fair percentage of the HE chorus saw Ari Aster‘s Eddington yesterday. I’m presuming that many are agreeing with my judgment from last May’s Cannes Film Festival, which is that it’s a strange, mildly interesting civil war drama that, boiled down, is a dull horror sinkhole laced with political satire…a pandemic atmosphere downer dive.
I should probably bend over backwards by re-watching it this weekend, but I really, really didn’t derive much enjoyment, much less any sense of cinematic satori, two months ago.
I’ve jumbled up some previous comments and thrown them out on the floor like Mia Farrow playing scrabble in Rosemary’s Baby…
Bingo #1: I’ll admit to feeling aroused or at least awoken during the last 45 when Eddington abandons all sense of restraint and it becomes The Wild Bunch on steroids.
Bingo #2: Yes, this is a smart and aggressive political satire of sorts, but it’s basically just a narrative version of the same X-treme left vs. X-treme right insanity that we’ve all been living with since the start of the pandemic, if not 2018 or ’19…
Bingo #3: I’m not calling it a “bad” or ineffective film or anything, but it’s basically unexciting and kind of drab and sloppy and not much fun, really. And the chaos is…well, certainly predictable. It has some bizarre surreal humor at times, but mostly it’s a fastball thrown wide of the batter’s box.
Bingo #4: Joaquin Phoenix‘s performance as Joe Cross, the rightwing-ish, initally not-too-crazy, anti-mask sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico…Joaquin’s performance is fairly weak…it’s almost like he’s playing Napoleon again, and that’s not even taking his thigh-slapping schlong prosthetic into account. I simply didn’t like hanging with the guy. There’s something flaccid and fumbling about him. He’s not “entertaining”.
Bingo #5: A smart, increasingly intense, ultimately surreal reflection of the stark raving madness of the COVID years. If you remove the over-the-top violence, it’s basically a movie about the same polarizing rhetorical shit we’ve all been living with since 2020 (or, in my head at least, since 2018). JUST YOUR BASIC AMERICAN POLARIZED MADNESS. Take away the bullets and the brain matter and it reminded me of the comment threads from Hollywood Elsewhere over the last five or six years.
Bingo #6: Pedro Pascal‘s performance as Ted Garcia, the sensibly-liberal mayor of Eddington, is much more grounded and appealing than Joaquin’s.
Bingo #7: The thing Eddington was selling never plugged in, never spoke to me beyond the obvious. It’s all about X-treme left bonker types vs. gun-toting, righty-right over-reactions.
Bingo #8: Emma Stone is pretty much wasted.
Connie Francis had a beautiful singing voice…smooth and silky pipes. She knew how to sell a song…she knew how to phrase and breathe just so.
But for the most part, her hit tunes ( “Who’s Sorry Now?”, “Where The Boys Are”, ““Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”, “Where The Boys Are”) sounded square and swoony.
Born on 12.12.37 and reared by a conservative Italian family in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and then Belleville, New Jersey, Francis never said, did or sang anything that sounded like anyone’s idea of “hip.”
In 1968 she actually recorded a theme song for Richard Nixon‘s presidential campaign. Not cool! Meanwhile her ex-boyfriend Bobby Darin was hanging out with Robert F. Kennedy during his ’68 primary campaigns.
But Francis popped out of that straightjacket one time, at least, when she recorded Howard Greenfield and Neil Sedaka‘s “Stupid Cupid” (’58), a plastic pop tune that sold pretty well. Because it was about a young woman confessing to being more or less powerless in the grip of sexual attraction.
The way she sang “and I like it fine” made it clear she was a scamp who really liked making out and whatnot. “I like it fine” meant that when the right guy came along, the blouse was soon unbuttoned.