Jeff Wells

HE agrees with certain choices among the top 20 in that N.Y. Times poll of the finest 21st Century films.

But where the hell is Alexander Payne‘s Sideways, guys? I’ve counted through the whole list of 100 and it’s not there. To which I can only say “what the fuck?”

I’m enthused or at least okay with #20 (Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street), #19 (David Fincher‘s Zodiac), #18 (Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mama Tambien), #17 (Ang Lee‘s Brokeback Mountain), #16 (Ang Lee‘s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), #15 (Fernando Meirelles‘ City of God), #13 (Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men), #10 (David Fincher‘s The Social Network), #6 (Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men) and #3 (Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, which delivers one of the best endings of all time).

But I’m not quite as enthused about or even a tad underwhelmed by #14 (Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, which I was actually repelled by to some extent), #13 (Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest…one-trick-pony film, driven by a scheme of austere virtue signalling), #11 (George Miller‘s Mad Max: Fury Road, quite admirable but not quite worthy of multiple cartwheels), #9 (Hayao Miyazaki‘s Spirited Away), #8 (Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, a racially-stamped take on Ira Levin‘s The Stepford Wives), #7 (Michel Gondry‘s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…lovely film, somehow not quite Ivy League), #5 (Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, which averts its eyes from the reality of drug-dealing and then falls apart in the third act), #4 (Wong Kar Wai‘s In the Mood for Love, which is too slow and staid), #2 (David Lynch‘s Mulholland Drive, which I can’t remember the plotline of to save my life) and the dreaded #1 (Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite).

Here are HE’s top 25 of the 21st Century, and I can’t convey how painful and silly it makes me feel to make these damnable choices, which basically boil down to the 21st Century flicks I like to re-watch over and over and which have zip to do with the chickenshit identity games played by the folks polled by Times.

1. Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse, 2. David Fincher‘s Zodiac, 3a. Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic; 3b. Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, 4. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, 5. Spike Jonze‘s Adaptation; 6. Polanski’s The Pianist, 7. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others, 8. Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton, 9. Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, 10. Todd Fields‘ In the Bedroom, 11. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men, 12. Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker, 13. David Fincher‘s The Social Network, 15. Asghar Farhadi‘s A Separation, 16. Bennett Miller‘s Moneyball, 17. Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, 18. David O. Russell‘s Silver Linings Playbook, 19. Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street, 20. Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave, 21. Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea, 22. Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name, 23.Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square, 24. Paul Schrader‘s First Reformed; and 25. Kent Jones‘ Diane.

And here, again, is my list of the 163 greatest films of this century.

Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite sitting at the very top of the N.Y Times‘ 100 best of the 21st Century poll — i.e., the views of “over 500 influential directors, actors, screenwriters and other film lovers” — is the piece of straw that has finally broken the camel’s back.

Serious film lovers who know what goes and who accept the reality of life on this real-deal planet and who aren’t driven by kneejerk identity politics…from this point on Average Joes are saying no to this semi-commendable (the first half works) but wildly overpraised South Korean social drama…from this point on Parasite‘s ranking will begin to sink and keep dropping every time a fresh best of 21st Century list is compiled. And thank God for that because we’ve fucking had enough.

An undisciplined, social-inequity geeksplurge that became woke-famous for winning the Best Picture Oscar five years ago, Parasite has become a totem for acclaimed, filmmaker-of-color achievement in a white-ass industry…a problematic work that too many people have been ignoring the flaws of for way too long. Brandishing one of the stupidest, most illogical plot turns in cinema history, Parasite is a prime example of ridiculous plotting + bloody finale = chaos cinema. Bong tried to make a Luis Bunuel film (Viridiana comes to mind), but his geek boy instincts spoiled the soup.

I think it was rather shitty of the Academy to not invite Karla Sofia Gascon to join the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences.

They’ve invited Mikey Madison, Kieran Culkin, Ariana Grande, Dave Bautista, Jodie Comer, Jason Momoa, Aubrey Plaza, Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Graham, Andrew Scott, and Danielle Deadwyler.

But they’ve snubbed a Spain-residing trans actress because she tweeted a few wrong things in the early 2020s. Thr Academy did so out of fear (i.e.,lack of backbone)..

“41% of the new invitees are women,” it says here. “45% are from underrepresented communities and 55% are from 60 countries and territories outside the United States,” blah blah.

How many straight white guys did they invite? Just curious.

This latest mass invitation signifies an overall AMPAS membership of 35% women, 22% underrepresented communities and 21% international.

The late Lalo Schifrin (6.21.32 — 6.26.25) was best known as the Mission: Impossible TV theme guy. From the ’60s through the aughts he was the guy you went to for suspenseful urban-razzmatazz music for your cop thriller or what-have-you. He scored some westerns for Clint Eastwood. His music was catchy in a pop-jazzy mid 20th Century way, but kinda TV level. Schifrin’s most interesting score was for THX-1138. Not to mention Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, Enter the Dragon, The Four Musketeers, Voyage of the Damned, The Eagle Has Landed, The Amityville Horror, the Rush Hour trilogy and the Paramount Pictures fanfare (1976 to 2004).

…either just before or just after seeing F1, or even if you’re not planning to see it at all.

The 20-minute “Making of Grand Prix” featurette (’06) is well worth the time.

Grand Prix “could never be done again…it could never be done now for a million safety reasons.”

Emma Stone was obliged to cut her hair quite short for her bitch executive role in Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Bugonia (Focus Features, 10.24) . That’s why she had a pixie during the Oscar telecast.

Bugonia began shooting in England last July. The dp is cinematographer Robbie Ryan (The Favourite, Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness).

Based on Jang Joon-hwan‘s 22-year-old Save The Green Planet!, which I never, ever want to see, Bugonia (Focus Features, 10.24) is about two submental lowlife beekeepers (Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis) who “kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet earth.”

Great — so we get to hang for a couple of hours with a pair of hoodie-wearing idiots. And it turns out that Stone’s character, Teddy, a CEO of a pharmaceutical firm, is in fact an alien…right?

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Denis Villenueve and the classic James Bond brand are not congruent. Because deep down Villenueve is kind of an asexual dweeb type.

Look at him — you can tell right off the bat he’s never catted around to any degree, much less been lucky in this regard.

He’s a brilliant fellow and a first-rate filmmaker, of course, and may create something fascinating when the next Bond film finally gets underway, but Villenueve was chosen, I think, in order to put progressive women (i.e., the Jen Salkes of the world) at ease.

In the realm of imaginative movie fiction, Bond is no longer (and will never again be) a sexual conquistador figure. That ship sailed way back in the Pierce Brosnan ’90s, and was certainly a dim memory by the time Daniel Craig stepped in to the role. Nonetheless the sexual vapors from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s (Connery, Lazenby, Moore) still linger to a certain extent, and on a gut level there’s something about Villeneuve that doesn’t quite fit the mold. That cerebral French-Canadian thing plus the dweeb vibes.

Again, I think Amazon producers know this and are saying with this hire that #MeToo-ers needn’t be concerned,as it’s invonceivable that a guy who looks like Villeneuve would even think about injecting 007 with any kind of sexual serum.

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If there’s one human activity that Ron Howard has pretty much steered clear of in the many films he’s directed, it’s sex for its own sake — the raw, hungry, illicit, tawdry, provocative kind. But he’s finally gone there with Eden (Vertical, 8.22), the opening of which which has been delayed forever but is finally happening in late August.

Based on a true story that unfolded on the remote island of Floreana, one of the Galapagos Islands, in the early to mid 1930s, the costars are Jude Law (as Dr. Friedrich Ritter), Vanessa Kirby (as Law’s wife, Dora Strauch Ritter), Daniel Brühl and Sydney Sweeney as Harry and Margaret Wittmer, and Ana de Armas as the sexual villain of the piece, Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn.

Don’t kid yourself: The Galapagos island of Floreana, where the turbulent real-life story unfolded 95 years ago, is no tropical paradise. And it’s widely presumed that Dr. Friedrich Ritter, the brusque German misanthrope (Jude Law), was so incensed by the flamboyant vulgarity of Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) that getting rid of her became an obsession.

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Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here (Hopscotch, 4.28.12) is about the fallout from a tragic Cambodian vacation that married, expecting parents Dave and Alice (Joel Edgerton, Felicity Price) have recently shared with Alice’s younger sister (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Star).

Jeremy vanished at the end of the getaway and nobody seems to know (or be able to admit) what happened, although it’s obvious that Dave knows and will eventually spill the beans by Act Three.

But the film is mainly about the reaction of Alice to a brief instance of infidelity that also happened in Cambodia. The kind of infidelity that happened so quickly with both parties so drunk or stoned that they don’t remember much.

And the minute Alice learns of this you’re muttering “oh, Christ, here we go.” Her anger gradually becomes a drag to be around.

Not that it’s wrong or unnatural for her to be outraged, but it becomes tedious — the same piano chord played over and over. If you remember Jeanne Tripplehorn‘s prolonged Defcon-1 reaction to Tom Cruise‘s infidelity in The Firm, you have a general idea what happens here.

After a while I started muttering to myself “get over it, for God’s sake…they were drunk and are both really sorry…Jesus.”

Indiewire‘s Kevin Jagernauth describes Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here (Entertainment One, 6.7) as a suspense drama about a good-looking guy (Antony Star) who goes missing on a Cambodian vacation.

Don’t you believe it. It’s mainly about a horse-faced pregnant wife (Felicity Price) who has a shit fit when she discovers her husband (Joel Edgerton) recently had drunken sex with her much hotter younger sister (Teresa Palmer). The missing guy aspect is strictly a subplot.

It’s basically a “get away from me, you fucked my sister!” movie with a side-plot about what happened in Cambodia. It’s about the cost of suppressing the truth and not coming clean, and the cost of coming clean about meaningless infidelity.

This is a fairly decent film as far as it goes (nicely composed, well acted, a fascinating montage of Cambodia), but I would have written a different story. Sorry.

Update: Strange as this may sound, I’m flirting with re-watching this. It’s streaming on Amazon.

I’ll never forget my initial reaction to Michael Bay‘s Armageddon after an Academy screening in June of 1998. It gave me a headache because of the machine-gun-like cutting. As Variety‘s Todd McCarthy famously said at the time, the pace felt like that of “a machine gun locked in the firing position.”

This over-accelerated editing, I was later told, was a result of a deliberate Michael Bay-Jerry Bruckheimer strategy of cutting out as many frames as possible in each scene order to make the film play as fast, hard and compressed as possible — i.e., “frame-fucked.”

I’m not saying that F1 plays exactly like Armageddon in this respect, but in F1‘s racing sequences the editing style feels at the very least similar to Armageddon‘s, as in quite aggressive…giving you very little room to breathe or even pause…very little opportunity to sink into anything…no time to reflect or meditate.

A little more than 18 years ago (4.28.07) I wrote about an evening with Walter Murch, one of the most renowned film and sound editors of our time, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Halfway through I stood up and asked Murch about machine-gun cutting in action movies, and at what point does it get to be too much? I was thinking at the time of the editing in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, portions of which had driven me crazy.

Murch said audiences do indeed start to go nuts if you use more than 14 set-ups per minute.

One can obviously cut back to the same set-up — a visual point of view — within a given minute, so Murch wasn’t necessarily saying only 14 cuts every 60 seconds. Nor was he necessarily putting a limit on the number of cuts per set-up.

But let’s say for the sake of simplicity that during an action sequence you use two cuts per set-up — by Murch’s rule that would mean no more than 28 cuts per minute, or a little more than two seconds per cut. That sounds too frenzied, doesn’t it?

All I can say is that while watching F1 last night, I started thinking about Murch’s 14-set-ups-per-minute rule.

And then I started counting the length of various cuts during F1‘s balls-out racing sequences (“one thousand, two thousand”, etc.) and a lot of the cuts, it seemed, were between two and three seconds long.

I’m not saying that F1 (which was edited by Stephen Mirrione) necessarily violates Murch’s rule, but it sure seems to at times.

Here’s a portion of Murch’s observations during that 4.28.07 master class.

It’s 2:19 pm, and over the last 120 minutes or so I’ve been working very hard on a review of F1 — an honest, well-written, fully thought-out one that I was fairly proud of. But about ten minutes ago WordPress jettisoned my most recent draft, and now it’s all totally gone. I’m too shattered and furious to start all over again. My soul is in pieces, shards. But here’s what I had three hours ago:

This may sound strange, but after seeing F1 last night in Manhattan and mostly getting off on it as far as it went but (I may as well be honest at the outset) concurrently not exactly swooning with delight, I’m going to see it again tonight because I want to give it another chance. Because what I absorberd last night was highly efficient formula and throttle, formula and throttle and then, just for variation’s sake, a little more formula and throttle.

F1 is obviously rousing and impactful and effective as far as it goes, but it’s a high-torque machine. An obviously powerful, resourceful, hard-charging machine but a machine nonetheless. It has some pockets of personality here and there, but very little in the way of oddball flavor or idiosyncrasies to speak of (okay, except for Brad Pitt’s deck of cards and that great “it’s not about the money” refrain).

But it’s pure raging formula, and it doesn’t generate all that much in the way of Zen spirit or natural oxygen — it doesn’t live and breathe, and as such lacks a certain organic humanity. It’s so aggressively mechanized and chiseled to a fine edge that it starts to wear you down, and much of it comes close to violating the Walter Murch rule about too many set-ups and edits per minute. It excites and throttles, for sure, but at times it feels as if it’s beating you up more than thrilling you.

Honestly? I felt whalloped by F1 overall and in certain portions genuinely excited, but not altogether delighted.

I re-watched John Frankenheimer‘s Grand Prix (’66) about five or six months ago, and I honestly felt more engaged by that living-room viewing than by watching F1 last night at the Kips Bay on Second Avenue. That’s not to say I didn’t have a fairly good time with it. I just didn’t love it.

I haven’t lost a longish draft of an HE piece in a long, long time. Knowing the WordPress potential for a total wipe-out, I always highlight and save the copy before pushing “save draft” or “publish” tab. For some dumbass reason I didn’t do that this time. I’m so enraged I can barely think.

Trailers lie all the time. The marketers who create them take great pleasure in deceiving people about the actual content of the film they’re trying to sell. They’re hustlers, racketeers.

Perhaps there’s more substance to Derek Cianfrance‘s Roofman (Paramount, 10.10) than what this trailer is indicating, but you can tell right off the top that as far as Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst‘s characters** are concerned, Roofman is definitely not Out of Sight. It’s going for easy sitcom laughs…a tone of light silliness and zero sophistication.

Tatum, 44, dropped some weight for this role. Dunst, 43, is too old to play the proverbial girlfriend (sensible, morally grounded). If she was ten years younger, okay, but she’s not.

The red powder exploding in Peter Dinklage‘s face is the best bit.

Tony Revolori was only 18 or thereabouts when he played a slender, poker-faced bellboy in Wes Anderson‘s The Grand Budapest Hotel (’14). Now he’s 29 and chubby.

** Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a polite, well-behaved stone sociopath felon who robbed a whole lotta McDonald’s restaurants in the early part of this century. Manchester is in jail as we speak, and looking at release in 2036…only 11 more years!