Jeff Wells

Felonious Criterion Teal-Poisoning…Busted!

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All hail the glorious menonfilmpod…@williammendoza, @adumbowerz, @Commihater, @ryancownie…brave men who are standing up to Criterion criminality as far as the teal-saturated Eyes Wide Shut 4K Bluray is concerned. HE to readership: Do you have eyes? Everything that was blue in previous versions is now tealed….even the formerly black cloaks of the orgy guys have been tealed….wake up!

,/p>

What Have Epstein Emails Revealed About Donald Trump’s Character and Behavior…

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…that hasn’t been widely “known” or certainly believed and presumed for several years now? What’s the big deal exactly? Trump = dog, animal, sociopath, crime boss. Is there something new here? What has changed?

Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Summers (2.28.17): “I have met some very bad people, but none as bad as Trump…not one decent cell in his body.” But what does that mean coming from Epstein, of all people?

Late to Changpeng Zhao Grift-Pardon

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Corruption in plain sight…no evasions or apologies. Par for the course…shrug, right?

Changpeng Zhao Wiki page excerpt: “Zhao resigned as the CEO in November 2023 after the U.S Department of Justice alleged he violated the Bank Secrecy Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison in April 2024. Zhao completed his sentence by September of the same year. In October 2025, Zhao was given a presidential pardon by President Donald Trump. The pardon was given amid extensive business dealings between Binance and World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump family.”

This Reminds Me

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Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a really good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that Ryan Coogler‘s writing and direction of the second half of Sinners…the blood-and-fangs section that begins with the arrival of the Irish vampires…I was increasingly annoyed all through that damn film. Honestly? I’m not a huge fan of the first half either.

How do the leading 2025 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? I’ll bang this out tomorrow.

I wish I could subject Chloe Zhao‘s Hamnet to the Hawks test. All I’ve heard from admirers is that it ends with a really great scene (i.e., a performance of Hamlet inside the Globe theatre), but no one has mentioned two other standouts. Do they exist? I’d really like to know.

Feel-Good Messaging

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Sincere message to all the Facebook friendos who’ve been sending along good wishes…it’s always nice when this happens.

Message from ex-Manhattan girlfriend, received this morning: “Happy XX Birthday. I’ve actually kinda forgotten how old you are and even, for that matter, where you geographically might be now. But wherever that is, I hope you’re well and celebrating.”

HE reply: “Thanks, [name]! Happy birthday to you also, being another Scorpio.

“Have you guys seen Sentimental Value, by the way? Renate Reinsve plays [you] in your mid 30s.

“Rather than resort to standard fiction, let’s just say that age-wise I’m still being born. Go ahead and laugh, but I often…okay, I sometimes feel close to or even imbued with the Obi Wan Kenobi-ness of it all…a John Lennon universe, which is to say a realm that is age-less, time-less, and occasionally radiating ‘oh, such loveliness,’ as Paddy Chayefsky once put it.

“That loveliness dissolves into anxiety and defensivness, of course, whenever I read the thoughts of certain progressive HE commenters, battery-acid scolds, alarmists and shriekers. But Chayefsky also described this head-space as the ecstatic embrace of ‘what the Hindus call prana.'”

Ex-Manhattan girlfriend reply: “I have not seen Sentimental Value. Interesting comment. Now I have to see it, of course.”

Jeff Sneider: “Happy Birthday, Jeff! I’ll spare you any jokes, but rest assured that those of us with taste know you’re a real one. A daily read. I’ve read every word. Big respect. Enjoy the day, Monsieur Motherfucker.”

Prana is a Sanskrit word meaning “life force” or “vital energy” that is believed to pervade the universe and animate all living things. It is considered a vital principle in Hinduism and is closely associated with breath, as breathing is a primary way to take in this energy. Practices like yoga and meditation, particularly the art of pranayama, focus on controlling and expanding one’s awareness of prana to promote physical, emotional, and spiritual health.

Mel Gibson: “The Industry Is Dying….Some Kind of Atrophy”

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As revealed a month ago by a Brian Entin interview with Mel Gibson, Gibson needed to do a one-day reshoot, which he figured could’ve been handled in Los Angeles. No muss or fuss. But it finally made more sense to fly to effing Bulgaria.

Gibson: “It was cheaper — more cost effective — to fly the entire American crew…buy their air tickets, fly them to Bulgaria, house them and feed them for three days and do the shooting there, rather than just shoot for one day, locally, in Los Angeles, where they all lived.”

Critical Drinker, 7:22 mark: “There’s no avoiding this…Hollywood’s obsession with identity politics has been slowly klilling [the industry] over the past ten years…I’ve talked at length about the self-righteous actors who make it their business to lectue the worl dabout how to think and act. But now, it finally feels like the culture of Hollywood is slowly trying to distance itself from a culture war they’ve clearly lost.”

More To Life Than Tending To Bees

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Any film that ends, flippantly or sincerely or ironically, with the total obliteration of humanity is obviously selling a misanthropic view of things. We get it, we get it…conscience- free human beings are basically destructive cockroaches and better off exterminated.

But at least give Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Bugonia a measure of credit for sticking to its nihilistic doomsday guns and not copping out like Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite, which is too chicken to show the obliteration of a major city (i.e., Chicago) and doesn’t even end like Sidney Lumet‘s Fail Safe (’64), which only suggested the nuclear destruction of New York City with zoomed-in freeze frames.

Venice Film Festival review, posted on 8.28:

I saw Yorgos Lanthimos‘s Bugonia at 11 this morning, just after Jay Kelly. I guess you could call it an extreme hoot — a bloody, ultra-violent rant about nutters, aliens and environmental destruction, and is fittingly strange and crazy for the eccentric kidnapping saga that it is.

I completely agree with and support what the film says about the ecological ruination of the planet and how thoughtless humans pretty much deserve extermination.

Emma Stone is fine and fierce as a corporate snap-dragon, and Jesse Plemons, playing one of her two kidnappers, certainly commits to his character’s greasy grubbiness and his none-too-bright delusions and theories. Aidan Delbis‘s fat simpleton with the big curly Afro is irksome, of course. All such characters are.

Why, I wondered, did Plemons’ beekeeper, deranged though he was, decide upon this mentally handicapped fool for a close friendo?

Jerskin Fendrix‘s pounding musical score is certainly striking.

I didn’t much like Bugonia but I respected the aliveness. And ah-delia-delia-delia-delia-delia that’s all she wrote.

Funniest Feinberg Observation in Months

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From Scott Feinberg‘s latest Oscar spitball-predictions column (dated 11.11.25, paragraph #5)…

“Ella McCay (20th Century, 12.12) began screening last week, but reactions remain under embargo for social through Nov. 24 and for reviews through Dec. 10 — read into that what you will. It’s James L. Brooks’ first feature in 15 years.”

Any film that forbids the posting of reviews until 36 hours before a film’s commercial opening…the name of that tune is called “hide the ball.”

“Never crap a crapper” — Kirk Douglas on the set of Eddie Macon’s Run in Laredo, Texas — directly overheard by yours truly in the late summer of 1982.

Streep Re-Emphasizing The Haughty in “Prada 2”

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No Milan footage? The Devil Wears Prada 2 guys were shooting there in October, and HE was there only a few weeks earlier so what gives?

Miranda Priestly‘s red, gold-studded pumps look great, but that hand-on-the-hip gesture in the elevator says one thing: “Okay, here we go again.”

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is basically about the internet elbowing aside print — Priestly’s Runway being on the financial ropes with Emily Blunt, 42, now a major Priestly competitor with an online fashion presence of some kind…app, website, something. I don’t know where 43-year-old Anne Hathaway fits in.

Whiff of Bygone Psychedelia

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I was never an ardent Moody Blues fan. I like “Stop” a lot, but that was recorded before their mushy spacey trippy phase (’67 to ’70). But two days ago while driving (what else?) I happened to listen to “Legend of a Mind”, the “Timothy Leary‘s dead” song, and portions of it got to me. Portions, not the whole. It’s such a crusty psychedelic timepiece thing — I can’t imagine any self-respecting Millennial or Zoomer not turning it off. But some of it seeped in.

GoodyVibe61 (posted on on 4.21.21): “So many of the British rock royalty started out with blues or rhythm-and-blues groups. They all seem to have a before-and-after story. The early editions of the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd were heavily blues-influenced. And groups such as the Yardbirds and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers can claim just about every British rock god as being one of their early members. I was amused to discover when I looked up the writers of ‘Stop’ that it was blues-rock legend Eric Burdon that passed on Justin Hayward‘s demos to the MB. And we shouldn’t forget where Denny Laine ended up — Wings!”

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Take The “Frankenstein’ Pain

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I really, really didn’t want to see Guillermo del Toro‘s Frankenstein. And so I ducked it at the Venice Film Festival…I didn’t want that bruising, pulverizing visual burden. I knew it would be a struggle to sit through…19th Century atmospheric wealth porn…over-budgeted, over-produced, over-CG-ed…every frame intended to wow your ass off…so damp and cold, so much snow and blood, so much cruelty and ferocity…so exactingly detailed, so sumptuous, such a deluge of production design…a period gothic extravaganza with a superman monster…can’t be killed!

I knew all this instantly because I know Guillermo, and so I continued to duck it after Venice. But two friends told me yesterday that it’s really good and rich and even quite touching toward the end, and therefore well worth-seeing. So fuck me…I sat down and began watching it today.

I’m now 130 minutes in (20 minutes to go!), and it’s certainly the most compassionate version of this over-told, over-adapted tale. Guillermo has always loved his monsters, and so, as you might expect, he loves Jacob Elordi‘s scarfaced “creature” and not even to death, and there;s no question that Elordi delivers his most soulful, career-best performance. So wounded, treated so cruelly, and yet he finds it within himself to not be totally consumed by rage…poor fellow. I felt for him. I almost wept but I was too gutted and whipped to do that.

Never let it be said that Guillermo’s Frankenstein lacks heart. It also vibrates, trembles and shudders with pain, and is constantly damp and cold and covered in ice crystals, but it ends up — surprise! — on a note of compassion and forgiveness. Good Lord, even a discreet kiss!

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.” — Lord Byron

But it’s cold outside in Wilton and even snowing a tiny bit now, and watching this damn thing added to my personal physical discomfort…”It’s starting to feel a lot like ‘fuck this'”…and guess what? Frankenstein is 19th Century atmospheric wealth porn…it is over-budgeted, over-produced, over-CG-ed…every fucking frame intended to wow your ass off, and in so doing this icy elephant of a Netflix film wears you down…so damp and cold, so much snow and blood, so much cruelty and ferocity…so exactingly detailed, so sumptuous, such a deluge…a period gothic extravaganza with a gentle superman monster…don’t fuck with him because he can’t be killed, but try giving him a hug, It is all of these things.

Okay, it’s over. I’ve gotten through it. 150 minutes, and thank God I’ll never have to watch it again.

I’m not kidding about Elordi giving a breakthrough performance. He really and truly deserves Best Supporting Actor consideration. Seriously!

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