Jeff Wells

“Materialists” Racial Scolding, Instruction

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As I noted a few days ago, Celine Song‘s Materialists (A24, now playing) is a better-than-decent romantic drama about a Manhattan matchmaker (Dakota Johnson‘s 35-year-old Lucy). And yet I said in the headline that it might not charm average ticket-buyers.

The fact that Materialists currently has a Cinemascore rating of B-minus doesn’t mean it’s dead in the water, but it certainly indicates that Joe and Jane Popcorn aren’t altogether happy.

People don’t liked being lied to, as I mentioned yesterday, plus (this is admittedly a peripheral issue) they probably don’t like being instructed about the advisability of interracial dating and marriage.

@baileys.bookmark Materialist (2025) Review #materialist #celinesong #pedropascal #chrisevans #dakotajohnson #booktok #filmtok ♬ original sound – bailey |

I mentioned this in my original 6.11 review but here we go again: In a second-act scene Song is clearly casting negative aspersions upon one of Lucy’s female clients, a paleface, because she’s said she’s mostly interested in finding a white boyfriend or husband. Lucy doesn’t scold the client when she hears this, but she’s obviously a bit put off.

Question: What’s so awful about a bird of a particular feather wanting to mate with someone from her own flock? Song is presumably aware that some POCs prefer the romantic company of men or women from their own tribe. She’s also presumably aware that some years ago Denzel Washington stated that he’s uncomfortable kissing white women in his films, and that he prefers hooking up with women of color. And yet in Song’s world, whites aren’t allowed to voice similar feelings.

Toward the end of the film Lucy and Chris Evans‘ John, an under-employed actor, happen to observe an inter-racial GenZ marriage ceremony in upstate New York. (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm exchanging vows with a 20something Jimi Hendrix in a gray tux.) We all understand that black-white marriages are increasing among Zoomers, although the percentage of such unions is relatively small (between 5% and 10%). What we know for sure is that Song is conveying her approval by way of virtue signalling. I hate this shit but that’s me.

Robertson Could’ve Done The Gentler Thing

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Having taken three or four weeks to re-read David McClintick‘s “Indecent Exposure“, a fascinating, well-detailed saga of the David Begelman/Columbia Pictures check-forging scandal of ’77 and ’78, I’ve come to a conclusion that two mistakes were made.

Inner-sanctum Hollywood was always a tawdry, slippery, self-protecting community, and McClintick’s portraiture makes that extra-double clear. But even in this environment Begelman’s pattern of felonious thievery — not only forging a $10K check made out to Cliff Robertson but also checks for $85K and $25K that had been made out respectively to director Martin Ritt and resturateur Pierre Groleau (mistake #1 in the aggregate) — went beyond the pale.

And yet it all blew up because Robertson, fearful of possible tax consequences and under advice from his attorney, reported Begelman’s check-forging to the authorities. And that was arguably the biggest error, certainly in a political sense. At the end of the day Begelman was mostly forgiven while Robertson wound up being blacklisted by Columbia for a long stretch.

Cliff, his wife Dina Merrill and his attorney should have kept it all within the family. They should have gone to Columbia CEO Alan Hisrchfield and said, “This is obviously illegal and sticky if the feds get wind, but if you can offer absolute assurance that Begelman’s criminality stops here and now and if you make this right as far as my standing and interests are concerned, I’m willing to sit on his whole business in order to save Columbia from embarassment and possible scandal. But don’t fuck with me.”

Scorsese’s Most Tiring and Infuriating Film (Even More So Than “Kundun”) Called Laugh Riot

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In a 6.13 chat with Variety‘s John Bleasdale, Geoffrey Rush insisted that one of the most difficult to endure films in movie history — Martin Scorsese‘s New York, New York — as well as one of the biggest cocaine movies of the ’70s was and is a comic joy.

I’m not saying Rush is wrong or deluded, but it certainly takes all sorts to make a movie-loving world.

Rush is certainly permitted to hold this opinion, of course, but there is exactly one “funny” scene in New York, New York — the one in which Robert DeNiro‘s Jimmy Doyle is thrown out of a nightclub by a couple of bouncers, and while literally being carried through a lengthy, well-lighted entranceway DeNiro manages to kick out a dozen or so lightbulbs…pure malice and spite.

The scene isn’t humorous by Average Joe standards. It’s perverse guy humor — the same kind of only-in-the-midtown-Manhattan thing that Joe Pesci got into with the late Frank Vincent in that Raging Bull Copacabana fist fight.

Otherwise New York, New York mostly gives you a headache. Honestly? During my first and only viewing I was hoping that DeNiro would get clipped or hit by a taxicab.

Rush: “I have memories of being in the Leicester Square cinema when I first went to London in the 70s and seeing New York, New York. I’ve never heard laughter like it. When you watch that film on your own, you don’t realize it’s such a big comedy.”

Define “Dumbass”

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Randy Newman didn’t mean that LSU grads “went in dumb, come out dumb too”…he meant they began college as relatively ignorant freshmen and by the time they’d graduated four years later hadn’t much broadened their knowledge base or enriched their minds or immersed themselves in the output of great philosophers, historians, poets, politicians, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, biographers or cultural trailblazers of whatever stripe…so in love with thinking, feeling and behaving like good ole yokels that they were kinda proud of it.

But songwriters are generally obliged to boil it all down to basics, of course, and so that lyric from “Rednecks” reads like it reads, and I chuckle every time I hear or read it.

And yet putdown-wise, I regard “dumb” in the same light as “ugly” — fundamentally cruel terms because they allude to fixed afflictions, like blindness or dwarfism or some other deformity, that a person can’t do much about. I’ve never once described anyone as being physically ugly and I never will, although I’ve alluded many times to certain persons coming from a spiritually or emotionally ugly place (certain HE comment-threaders come to mind in this regard…repeat offenders like Glenn Kenny and several others I’ve deep-sixed over the years…ditto a few toxic film critics and columnists I’ve run into over the years).

And yet what most of us mean when we say “dumb” or “dumbass” or “dumbshit” is “ignorant”, which is to say a person who’s not only under-educated but hasn’t the slightest interest in trying to remedy this situation. I’ve been accused of ignorance many times in my life, and quite often accurately. But more often than not or at least a fair amount of times I’ve not only taken this criticism to heart but have, ahem, tried to do something about it.

It’s easier today to eliminate ignorance than at any previous time in human history…the joy of encountering new information or discovering fresh knowledge is one of the most sublime and simple pleasures within reach, and it’s all on your phone.

But the more I read and learn and contemplate the sprawling toxic wilderness out there, the more I’m reminded that honorary enrollment at Louisiana State University is something we’re all kinda sorta stuck with.

A24’s Big “Materialists” Lie Comes Home To Roost

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According to Rotten Tomato comments thus far, Joe and Jane Popcorn are reacting negatively to Celine Song‘s Materialists.

Instead of respecting it or giving it a stamp of moderate approval (as I did) for digging down into the odd vagaries and downish moods of the 2025 dating scene, they’re angry that it’s not a romcom — they’re angry that they were deliberately lied to, and now A24 is paying the price for that deception.

The Prophet

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Justine Bateman is the Scott Galloway of the film industry…as important of an industry seer as Scott Feinberg, Richard Rushfield, Sasha Stone, etc. Her impressions matter. So much is generated by Apple, Amazon and Netflix these days, and how many people out there really enjoy streaming their bullshit? Remember when movies (even the shitty ones) were really movies as opposed to soul-stifling “content”? It’s hard to completely divest ourselves from the simple romantic equation of theatregoing as it existed as little as 25, 30 or 35 years ago. Forget ’70s nostalgia — I miss the glorious ’90s! Hell, the early to mid aughts even!

“Spaceballs 2” Opening Crawl Is Pretty Good

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Friendo: “Who asked for this? A half-century ago Mel Brooks has made some hilarious comedies — The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein. Spaceballs wasn’t in that league. Then again Brooks acknowledges this in the teaser.”

HE: “Spaceballs was a genre parody that arrived too late — Mad magazine mixed with Carol Burnett-level spoofery, but with an emphasis on silly meh. And yet I still chuckle at Brooks’ “Yogurt”.

Friendo: “Spaceballs has one good joke. Brooks gets teleported, Star Trek-style, and comes out the other side with his head on backwards. He looks down and says, ‘How come nobody told me my ass was so big?!’

Late to Newsom’s “Go To Hell” Speech

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Abraham Lincoln on Gen. Ulysses S. Grant following the victorious but costly Battle of Shiloh: “I can’t spare this man — he fights.”

Gavin Newsom‘s anti-Trump rant following the Los Angeles street conflicts was grandstanding…of course it was. Of course he’ll be running for president in ’28…so? Of course the anti-ICE violence was flaming and anarchic and ignoble to a great extent, but then Trump’s federalizing 4000 California National Guard troops, followed by the Pentagon sending in an additional 700 Marines, was pure authoritarian brutalist theatre….needless, unrequired, inflammatory. But who else is standing up to Donald Trump and giving him what for? The HE Newsom haters can’t deny the fact that earlier this week Newsom stood up for state sovereignty and pushed the hell back.

“In five days Gavin Newsom did more practical damage to Trump, and more importantly gave more practical encouragement to Democrats….he did more good than the rest of the zombie Democratic party has done since Joe Biden was elected [in 2020].” — Keith Olbermann on “Newsom’s ‘Eff It’ Moment” (6.12.25). (And yes — Olbermann supplied the Lincoln-Grant anecdote.)

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Insufficient Attention Paid

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HE to Joe Dante: Thanks for sending this Bette Davis article along, bruh. I had never read this.

William Wyler’s assessment of Davis’s intense personality and what their marriage might have been like was very…uhm, illuminating.

Howard Hughes told her he’d never achieved orgasm before being with her? What shameless bullshit!

Honest confession: I’ve never seen any of Davis’s William Wyler films. Not even Jezebel! I’ve had this idea all my life that she was some kind of Ultimate Super-Bitch, and I never wanted that vibe in my head. Even with Bob Dylan‘s endorsement and all.

The only old Davis films I’ve seen are 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Elizabeth and Essex with Errol Flynn and The Bride Came C.O.D. with Jimmy Cagney. Plus All About Eve, of course.

I’ve never even seen the one with Paul Henreid when he lights two cigarettes and gives her one of them. What is that, Now, Voyager?

Why did she have an affair with George Brent, of all people? He always struck me as a dullard.

“The Girl Who Walked Home Alone” is a fascinating biography title.