Jeff Wells

Robert S. Bader and Dick Cavett‘s Groucho & Cavett (PBS American Masters, 12.27) was shown yesterday or the day before at the Hamptons Int’l Film Festival.

Excerpt: “Cavett, a writer for Jack Parr on The Tonight Show, met Marx at the funeral of playwright George S. Kaufman in 1961. When Cavett made the transition from writer to comedian in 1965, he was encouraged and mentored by Marx. In 1968, Cavett became the host of his own talk show and Marx became a frequent guest, capturing what Cavett calls ‘the last of Groucho’s greatness.’

“Groucho & Cavett chronicles the pair’s relationship through new interviews with Cavett, footage from Marx’s visits to The Dick Cavett Show and other rare recordings.”

I’ve always heard about Groucho’s off-color and in some cases delightfully vulgar sense of humor, which he only shared in private or during commercial breaks on talk shows. Why do I have this feeling that Groucho & Cavett, obliged to defer to PBS decorum and gentility, won’t share any of this?

Start listening at the 6:20 mark…good goading between Maher and Christie…whether to offer an off-ramp option for Putin, or no off-ramp?

If you want to get on this injury-recovery train with Jennifer Lawrence and then write about what a great emotional release it is…fine. Go with God.

But I can see what this film is…a Jennifer Lawrence-bearing-the-weight-of-the-cross movie…her character is numb and banged-up and not very communicative, and then she gradually loosens up and responds to the Brian Tyree Henry love and so on. And at the risk of sounding heartless, I really don’t have a great interest in seeing this film. Sorry but what do you want me to do, lie?

Who in the HE community has given David O. Russell‘s Amsterdam a shot, and what are the reactions?

It left me heartbroken, almost in tears. On 9.28 I called it “a very busy and antsy period movie about an arcane, who-cares? bumblebee plot (something to do with ascendant U.S. fascism in the early 1930s) that won’t stop lurching to and fro and buzzing all around, and is totally irksome for that.

“It’s all plot and exposition, plot and exposition, plot and exposition…jabber jabber, talk talk…over and over and over. No subtext, no heart, no downshifting, no “things that are there but not said.” I was having serious trouble trying to understand who was who and what was happening for the first hour. Only when Robert De Niro‘s character (“General Gil Dillenbeck”) comes along at the 100-minute mark does the rubber begin to meet the road.

Posted this morning by Deadline‘s Anthony D’Alessandro: “Amsterdam is still DOA with $2.6M Friday, including previews, and an estimated $6.9M third place debut. The Russell fans who showed up gave the movie a B CinemaScore (Russell’s Oscar nominated all-star American Hustle earned a B+) and harsher reactions on PostTrak at 3 Stars and 72%. Pic skewed toward men at 56%, with the largest demo being 25-34 at 37%. Diversity demos were 57% Caucasian, 17% Latino and Hispanic, 12% Black, and 14% Asian/other. Men over 25 at 47% and women over 25 at 37% gave Amsterdam its best response at 75%. But the rest of the audience wasn’t on board, i.e. men and women under 25, who each showed up at 9% respectively and gave the movie a 61% and 55% grade.”

My sight-unseen enthusiasm for Maria Schrader‘s She Said (Universal, 11.18) was unfettered around three months ago. The trailer for the investigative journalism drama, which is basically the story of how N.Y Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey nailed Harvey Weinstein, seemed smart and sure-footed, and I figured that it had to at least rank as a respected cousin of Spotlight or perhaps even All The President’s Men.

But it didn’t appear at the big three festivals (Venice, Telluride, Toronto) and the buzz began to gradually simmer down. Now it’s only days from peeking out at the New York Film Festival. The first public showing happens on Thursday, 10.13.

Last week a guy I know passed along a friend’s reaction to a relatively recent research screening. “Intriguing and important, but somewhat formulaic in its story,” he said. “None of the performances stand out enough for traction in the awards race but apparently it’s a good ensemble piece, from what I’ve heard.”

On 9.27 THR‘s Scott Feinberg posted a list of likely Best Picture contenders, and placed She Said in seventh place, presumably based on a viewing. He put it behind the fifth-ranked Women Talking, the so-so Elvis and the sixth-ranked The Woman King. What does that tell you?

Reaction posted by World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy: “Better than a TV movie. Not sure about Best Picture, but Samantha Morton and Carey Mulligan are the MVPs. Very intelligently made and well-directed. They smartly show the effect of the abuse. Victims go back to the hotel rooms, reenact what happened in the bed and shower, but with their clothes on. It’s very Spotlight, maybe too much so. It also has a fantastic ending. We never get to see Weinstein’s face, only see his back and hear his voice.”

We’ll know soon enough.

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Some might regard me as an irritating asshole now, but I was a much more irritating asshole when I was 15 and 16.

Here’s an example of my behavior: A friend (Jack) and I were in a diner near the Jersey shore on a hot day, and we thought it would be be hilarious to slam one of those soft plastic mustard dispensers on the table top while simultaneously squeezing it. This sent little micro globs of mustard flying into the air, you see, and the goal was to hit the ceiling with a glob or two. We were red-faced with suppressed laughter. I hadn’t laughed like that in years, and that meant something at my age.

Things got even more hilarious when we both simultaneously realized that a white golf shirt worn by a middle-aged guy sitting in a booth behind ours…we split an even bigger gut when we saw that his shirt had been hit by five or six globs. The guy’s wife or son eventually noticed what had happened (or the waitress had told him or something) and he stood up, purple-faced and fuming and threatening to beat the shit out of us. His wife or son begged him not to get violent as Jack and I bolted out of there. A few minutes later Jack and I had decided that despite the trauma the episode was worth it for the laughs.

It was this episode that led me to title a short, decade-old riff “Mustard Droplets.” It was about the various names of a rock band that I’d drummed with. I was a mediocre drummer of the first order. Here’s the 4.23.12 item:

As I mentioned the other day, I once tried to play drums (i.e., none too successfully) in a semi-conflicted Connecticut blues band. It was fun but I was the weak link. The band had five names at different stages of the game — the Golden Rockets (which I hated), the Sludge Brothers, Blind Pig Sweat, Amos Bouldcox and Dog Breath. My problem wasn’t a lack of joie de percussion, but that I was obliged to bang it out on a conventional drum set when my true gift was in the realm of thigh-slapping and coin-jingling and simulating bass riffs in my throat. Today we have sensitive-enough microphones that would permit me to do that.

From “Reminder” thread, posted this morning(10.8.22):

HE: “Thomas Alva Edison is not wrong, and many billions of earthlings have found the idea of lights-out finality intolerable and terrifying and have therefore constructed comforting mythologies to fend off the sense of devastation that many philosophers have used to describe contemplations of The Big Sleep. And yet…

“I experienced a seminal and transformative LSD trip when I was 19, and at that moment and forever after I knew that as indifferent and scientific or mathematical as the universe could be defined in the minds of your average wannabe Albert Einsteins out there, it was nonetheless magnificent and unified and sublime and finally spellbinding in the George Harrison lotus position sense of that term.

“I knew that an eternal hum of profound cosmic perfection hovered above, within and without my mortal coil.

“Einstein himself spoke endearingly of a sense of soul-soothing tranquility that permeated when he, without dropping a tab of Orange Wedge or sipping from a ground-up Carlos Casteneda broth of peyote buttons and whatever else, had sailed into the mystic. He wasn’t expecting to flutter around on angel wings or hover over the earth like Dave Bowman at the end of 2001, but he felt profoundly settled and comforted by the infinite eternal-ness of it all.”

Franny P to HE: “What the heck are you saying? Sounds like you’re still on LSD.”

HE to Franny: “That’s because when you finally slip into the mystical, it never leaves you. So in a sense I am still on LSD, or swimming in the spiritual waters that my long-ago LSD awakening introduced me to.

“I’m saying that the eternal perfection of the cosmic scheme of things has been in place for eons and will remain in place for eons, and if you, Franny P., don’t want to tune into the altogether because it doesn’t interest you or because you feel too constrained by logical rules and regulations, then that’s on you and go with God. I’m okay and you’re okay.

“Travelling into the mystic means giving up thought and reason and boilerplate logic and just ‘letting it in.’ Read the Bhagavad Gita or listen to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows‘….it’s all there.”

“How did one decade change American cinema — and culture — forever? Elvis Mitchell explores the history of Black** representation and the cultural impact of witnessing unapologetic Blackness.”

IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!? debuts on Netflix on Friday, November 11.

Off the top of my head, I’m presuming that the “one decade” in which everything changed for Black movie actors and filmmakers was the ’60s, right? Or more specifically 1963 (Lilies of the Field) to early ’70s Blaxploitation?

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There are five Gold Derby guys (Brian Truitt, Kevin Polowy, Clayton Davis, Shawn Edwards, Chris Rosen) who apparently believe Rian Johnson‘s Glass Onion is a credible Best Picture contender. Then again they’ve all got it ranked low so they’re probably thinking “place-holder until further notice.”

On the other hand EW and TCM‘s Dave Karger has Glass Onion ranked fourth on his 10.5 Best Picture spitball list. And I’m telling you there’s no effing way that a way-too-expensive film that combines the traditional plot-schemings of Agatha Christie (or, more recently, Johnson’s Knives Out) with Herbert Ross‘s The Last of Sheila…I’m telling you there’s no way for such a film to be Best Picture nominated.

Because (and this is not a putdown) it’s just an expensive, presumably clever whodunit wank-off flick that’ll make a lot of money. And that’s all.

Plus it has Dave Bautista in a principal role, and it’s explicitly stated in the 2022 edition of the AMPAS rules and regulations that any movie costarring a musclebound meathead type wearing a backwards baseball cap can’t be nominated for Best Picture. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and check…I’ll wait.

If Karger is going to fantasize an Oscar future for Glass Onion why not also predict a Best Picture nomination for Ticket to Paradise?