Jeff Wells

A 9.17 IndieWire piece by Samantha Bergeson has attacked Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, 9.28) for being pro-life. I’m presuming that others in the wokester press membrane have had similar concerns. The objection is over a scene in which an unborn fetus talks to Marilyn Monroe / Norma Jean from inside her womb and asks her not to kill again, as she did during a previous abortion.

Excerpt: “The fetus who actually speaks to Monroe while she is gardening and asks if she will ‘do the same’ to it as she did to the other, i.e. terminate her pregnancy — results in a violently bloody miscarriage after Monroe trips over a rock at the beach and collapses in sand.

“Dominik [has] categorized his film as capturing ‘what it’s like to go through the Hollywood meat-grinder’ and [has] bragged that his magnum opus is ‘like Citizen Kane and Raging Bull had a baby daughter’…one who seems to have grown up to be Amy Coney Barrett.”

Industry friendo to HE: “Is Blonde a rightwing pro-life movie? That scene where the unborn fetus asks Merilyn not to kill again? This is a film from one of the most progressive production companies in the business. So I find it very surprising.”

HE argument: “As Blonde is completely absorbed by the mentality and emotions of Marilyn/Norman Jean, it’s reasonable to presume that the talking fetus is from her own imagination…that the guilt-wracked actress is hearing the fetus talk to her and beg for its life…it’s not crazy to interpret this as a reflection of Marilyn’s own thinking and is not as agenda being put forth by Andrew Dominik.”

Woody Allen has stated that his currently-lensing, Paris-based film will be his last. He told La Vanguardia, a storied Spanish publication, that we will not make any more films “in principle“, but that he plans to write his first novel.

Quote: “My idea, in principle, is not to make more movies and focus on writing these stories and, well, now I’m thinking more of a novel.” He added that he does not plan to publish more memoirs.

Smart-asses and Woody haters will say that his retirement decision was made for him years ago, and that the U.S. film industry retired or “cancelled” Allen over the Dylan thing back in the mid to late teens. That’s bullshit, of course. If he wanted to Allen could continue to make features for as long as he’s physically able.

I think having made 49 films, at least one-third of which are excellent and other third are regarded as very good to diverting to mildly approvable…that’s an extremely honorable track record, all things considered.

I’ve missed a couple but…

Allen’s Greatest (sequential order): Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, Stardust Memories, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, Bullets Over Broadway, Mighty Aphrodite, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris (15).

Solid Goods: What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Sleeper, Love and Death, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, Radio Days, Another Woman, Alice, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Celebrity, Sweet and Lowdown, Small Time Crooks, Melinda and Melinda, Irrational Man, Blue Jasmine. (18)

Pretty Good, Moderately Appealing, Mezzo-Mezzo: Shadows and Fog, Cassandra’s Dream, Whatever Works, Hollywood Ending, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Anything Else, To Rome with Love, Magic in the Moonligh, Café Society, Wonder Wheel. (10)

Not So Hot: Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Scoop, Rifkin’s Festival. (3)

Gina Prince Bythewater‘s The Woman King hasn’t tanked — it’s actually performing fairly decently. Analysts are projecting $18 million by Sunday night. For a 19th Century African war film starring a distinguished actress who’s barely a movie star, the box-office response isn’t half bad.

HE to Blonde spoiler whiners: This post discusses the August 1962 death of Marilyn Monroe, which is what Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix streaming, 9.28.22) ends with.

HE to friendo #1: “Yesterday I slogged my way through Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, which I regard as artful torture porn. And then I happened upon a Matt Lynch tweet that analogized Blonde and a landmark 1988 film, and the instant I read it I said ‘yes!'”

“I’m thinking not just of the incessant dismissals and degradations and spiritual uncertainties, but the anguished and agonized relationship between the main protagonist and the elusive ‘father.’

“Just as Willem Dafoe sips a goblet of sacramental wine before submitting to his final fate, Norma Jean swallows alcohol and barbiturates before her final episode of passion at her Fifth Helena Drive abode (the delivery man, the fuzzy tiger, the shattering note). And like Dafoe’s Jesus, a spectral Marilyn smiles and separates from death, and greets the immortality that she still enjoys today a la Andrew Dominik.”

Friendo #1 to HE: “That’s a brilliant interpretation. Celebrity is in its own way like religion. It still is. The fandoms online are like churches. Which says more about us than it does Marilyn. Lynch is saying we treat her like a kind of deity. Very smart. The myth is the truth.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “Well, there’s no doubt that she was a supreme martyr of 20th-century feminine glory and trauma. But the Jesus comparison feels a little abstract to me. What I think you’re possibly leaving out is that Blonde, dark as it is, is not torture porn. It’s a movie that’s trying to capture who Marilyn Monroe really was.”

HE to Friendo #2: “I really do think it’s primarily torture porn of an artful nature. Yes, it does capture who Monroe really was, but at what a price! Yes, it’s about the MYTH, or precisely THE TRAGIC but TRANSCENDENT MYTH. Marilyn suffered for our sins, but she’s lived eternally ever since and, in an underlined and undeniable sense, more splendidly and blessedly over the last 60 years than she did in her own biological life span, which lasted only a mere 36 years.

“The last thing Marilyn does, after dying, is become a happy ghost…she separates from her body as she smiles delightedly at the camera. As if to say, ‘The torment is finally over, and now the eternally blessed myth takes over, and I will revel in the glory of that myth for ever and ever.’” Or, if you will, “It is accomplished.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “That’s what I liked about Blonde. It’s probably the best account of what was truly occurring inside Monroe’s mind. Other depictions have failed in trying to convey the inner torture she was feeling.”

HE to Friendo #2: “Oh, it was torture, all right!”

Friendo #2 to HE: “I think it’s torture psychodrama. That’s what’s fascinating about it. She’s one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and I found the spectacle of what was happening inside her quite gripping. The cornerstone of her trauma, remember, isn’t all the men who exploited or didn’t understand her. It was her insanely abusive upbringing. It’s boring to say but that, in a nutshell, is why she was so fucked up.”

HE to Friendo #2: “Agreed. The mother and the father were demonic.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “Not just because the Hollywood system was patriarchal and exploitative and oppressive. But because the Hollywood system crumpled this already broken person.”

HE to Friendo #2: “After meeting and hanging with Montgomery Clift, Monroe told a friend ‘I’ve just met someone who might be as fucked up as I am, and maybe more so.'”

Friendo #2 to HE: “I don’t see how all of that, portrayed truthfully and with a fair degree of artfulness (although there are a number of things in the film I didn’t care for), adds up to ‘torture porn.'”

HE to Friendo #2: “Artful torture porn.”

Friendo #2 to HE: “And the bottom line is — this is the grand paradox the movie captures — Marilyn’s search for ‘daddy’ became the cornerstone of her art.”

HE to Friendo #2: “Good point. Especially the squinting, Arthur Miller-like daddy figure she speaks of in Some Like It Hot. Not to mention Clark Gable (The Misfits), Louis Calhern (The Asphalt Jungle), George Sanders (All About Eve), Laurence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl), and even, in a stretch, Charles Coburn and Cary Grant in Monkey Business.”

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Henry Silva‘s most memorable role was “Chunjin”, a Korean guide and turncoat, in John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate (’62). Silva’s biggest scene was a martial-arts duke-out with Frank Sinatra in the Manhattan apartment of Laurence Harvey‘s “Raymond Shaw”, for whom Chunjin was working for as a servant, cook and driver. (Angela Lansbury, playing Harvey’s malevolent mother, calls him “Chu Chin Chow.”)

Silva, however, was of Sicilian and Spanish descent, so he would have had a tough time playing a Korean under today’s woke theocracy.

During his ’50s and ’60s heyday, Silva also played a Mexican peasant farmer who confronted Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata (’52), a Manhattan heroin dealer in A Hatful of Rain (’57), a generic bad guy in The Bravados (’58), a forest-dwelling Venezuelan in Green Mansions (’59), a Vegas sharpie in Ocean’s 11 (’60), a Native American in Sergeants 3 (’63), a Sicilian assassin in Johnny Cool (’63), a Japanese detective in The Return of Mr. Moto (’65), and an Apache in Five Savage Men (’70).

Silva died two days ago (9.14) at the Motion Picture & Television Fund home in Los Angeles. He was 95. Respect & condolences. Woke fanaticism never touched him, and he lived a bountiful life for that.

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Bill Maher to Aaron Rodgers, starting at 1:12 mark: “The Republicans are actually more dangerous, and they’re certainly more…I can’t say the word anymore but it begins with ‘r’…we’re not allowed to say it anymore, which is why I hate woke because we need that word desperately because the country is…but the woke side is so much more obnoxious…the level of hate that they engender in me, with the kind of shit that they do…is like…”

Rodgers to Maher: “Why would they not move to the middle? They would get everyone on their side!”

Maher to Rodgers: “I say that every week. If they just would shed this skin…this woke skin of pregnant men and [equity over meritocracy] and ‘let’s make crime legal’…math is racist…whatever nonsense they’re into…all that shit, and it would be so easy to just leave it behind, and they would win every election.”

Initially posted on 4.27.22: Kasi Lemmons‘ I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Sony, 12.21.22), a cradle-to-grave biopic of the late Whitney Houston, was screened last night in Las Vegas, and the word (I spoke to two viewers) is definitely on the approving side.

It’s longish (150 minutes, give or take) and technically incomplete, as is normal for any film that’s more than eight months from opening. And it covers almost all of the biographical basics for Whitney fans — definitely a fan-service presentation.

For what it’s worth one guy’s reaction is through the roof about Naomi Ackie‘s Whitney performance. I know nothing about Ackie except that (a) she’s British and (b) played the smallish role of “Jannah” in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

What kind of movie is I Wanna Dance With Somebody? Honest response: “It’s a TIFF People’s Award winner…it’s not a Venice or Telluride type of film…it’s been made for your hoi polloi faithful. And yet it’s intelligent and well-written as far as biopics go…screenplay by Anthony McCarten, shot by Zero Dark Thirty‘s Barry Aykroyd. Nothing wrong with that. It takes all sorts of films to make a world.

It’s basically a six-character drama — Ackie as Houston, Ashton Sanders as Bobby Brown, Stanley Tucci as Clive Davis, Nafessa Williams as Robyn Crawford (Whitney’s girlfriend), Clarke Peters as Whitney’s father and Tamara Tunie as her mom.

Houston’s Bodyguard costar Kevin Costner isn’t a character in the film.

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…and is more or less ready to be shown commercially, what would your reaction be if you were a distributor in a position to purchase distribution rights?

I can tell you what my reaction would be. My reaction would be “this is such a good film that we need to not release it for another 15 or 16 months, just to be on the safe side….we need to put it on ice and let things just cool off and simmer down. Let’s not go into this situation half-cocked.”

I’m kidding. That wouldn’t have been my reaction. That was Focus Features’ reaction when they bought Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

A guy (or guys) who saw The Holdovers last Sunday (i.e., five days ago) in Toronto shared reactions with TheWrap‘s Brian Welk

Reaction #1: “Outside a screening of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto on Sunday, one attendee left feeling that he had seen the best movie playing at the festival, even though it wasn’t an official selection of TIFF, and almost no one knew the screening was happening.”

Reaction #2: “[An] individual close to the project described it as touching, funny and very emotional, blending comedy and drama in the way that Sideways or Payne’s other films have managed with ease. Not only does The Holdovers reunite Payne with his Sideways star Paul Giamatti, the film fits snugly into Payne’s larger repertoire, moving away from the high-concept social satire Downsizing and instead evoking Payne’s humanism and the frustrations about ‘life being bewildering.'”

…is whether or not WBHE’s Casablanca 4K Bluray (11.8) will resemble my all-time-favorite version, which is the slightly DNR-ed 2008 Bluray. If it has that clean and velvety look, fine. If it doesn’t and instead resembles the unfortunate 70th anniversary 2012 Bluray, which is crawling with billions and billions of digital mosquitoes, I will (a) be unhappy and (b) do what I can to spread the word.

I know that grain is integral to celluloid images, but I hate it all the same. Especially when it comes to black-and-white. I don’t want to know from grain, ever. Grain is a pestilence. I want clean, pristine, silvery images that look exquisite by present-day standards.

The new 4K Casablanca “was restored and remastered from a 2022 4K 16bit film scan of the best-surviving nitrate film elements. The 4K-scanned digital images went through an extensive digital restoration process to clean and repair the picture for an unprecedented and pristine ultra-high-resolution presentation. The restored images were then graded in High Dynamic Range for today’s premium 4K display experience, providing the highest fidelity in image contrast and detail retention. This work was meticulously handled by Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. The original theatrical mono audio has also been newly restored as well, providing a richer and broader frequency response than previously possible.”

I think it’s fair to ask Variety‘s Clayton Davis if he’s finally seen Casablanca. If he has, fine, but he should submit to extensive questioning. If he hasn’t, he needs to be a man and admit that.

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Oscar Expert (singular) stands for identical twins who are 24 or 25, and for my money they’re fairly sharp and articulate as far as their age and experience has taken them. (I still haven’t determined their actual names.) What’s interesting is that they’re simultaneously obsequious and ambivalent about The Fabelmans. Just listen.