Jeff Wells

I’ll admit it — I’m emotionally invested in F1 enjoyment, regardless of however good or great or so-so it might turn out to be. I’ve read that it has issues, but I don’t want to play in that playground.

“F1 isn’t deep or layered or complex enough, dammit! Adrenaline highs are well and good, but we’re hoity-toity film critics, and and we want more. We want something that’s friskier and woolly-bullier and deeper and more emotional than a proverbial ‘dad movie’. Something that attempts the unexpected.

“Why wasn’t F1 directed by James Cameron of the ’80s and ’90s? Or by the Michael Mann of the ’90s and aughts? You know what we mean…by a director who’s more inward and contemplative and a bit less formulaic and synthetically-minded than Joseph Kosinski seems to be.

“Why couldn’t it have been directed by the Tony Richardson who made The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner, say? Or the Karel Reisz who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning? Why are we stuck with a hugely exciting but very standard slam-bang vroom-vroom?” — the Rotten Tomato & Metacritic pissheads (Owen Gleiberman, Kevin Maher, Whitney Seibold, Ian Sandwell, Wiulliam Bibbiani)

From Gleiberman’s review: “There have been very good auto-race dramas, like Ford v Ferrari, centered around conventional macho-rivalry plots. That F1 flirts with cliché isn’t necessarily a problem; just look at how commandingly Pitt takes a character we’ve seen before and paints him with a fresh coat of rusty glamour.

“But what a movie like this one needs is for the drama to play out within the races themselves. That’s what happened in Ford v Ferrari, and in the aerial dogfights of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick (which were shot and edited with bedazzling precision), and in the car-race film that raised this sort of thing to the level of art — the staggeringly underrated Ferrari.

“But as F1 sprawls across the Formula One World Championship, moving through the last nine Grand Prix contests of the season, the races generate a surface buzz, but the stories they’re telling are less than razor-sharp.”

HE to Gleiberman: I wasn’t totally floored by Ford v Ferrari, but I really like Grand Prix, and you’ve just called the non-racing portions of that 1966 John Frankenheimer film “late-studio-level claptrap.” The hell you say! The non-racing portions are assured and acceptable as far as they go, and don’t hinder the basic scheme.

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According to a 6.16 Variety aricle by Abigail Lee, Dakota Johnson‘s matchmaker character in Materialists — Lucy — pays $3,200 per month for her apartment in Brooklyn Heights (technically a region between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill).

Lucy’s annual salary is $80K, which works out to $6153 monthly and $1538 weekly before taxes. Subtract her rent from her pre-tax monthly gross and she’s left with $2953 monthly or $738 weekly to cover everything else — food, utilities, MTA card, savings, clothing, entertainment (dinners, movies, clubs). God knows what her income is after taxes. But to live like a human being, Lucy would have to earn an annual salary of $125K, no?

I went last Friday to an ear doctor and discovered that my left ear canal and especially the left ear drum were totally jammed. I was told to go home and squeeze several drops of Debrox into this afflicted ear two or three times on Saturday and Sunday. Which I did.

I returned to the doctor’s office this morning and an assistant whirred and vacuumed me out with warm water, and guess what? Both ears are now totally clean and semi-purified, and now my hearing is better…really.

What I mean is that I can now hear as well as I did 20 or 25 years ago, or maybe even 30. My hearing isn’t as good as my granddaughter’s, but I feel renewed regardless.

And if I can’t quite hear what you just said in the midst of a loud clattery party, it’s your fault because you’re slurring your words and/or failing to speak with the diction of a RADA-trained Shakespearean actor. Learn to project and enunciate like Ian McKellen (whom I’ve hung with on a couple of social occasions so don’t tell me) and we’ll both be better off.

…but it’s still funny regardless. Especially the “Jesus, I really need to take a dump” sequence.

What the hell happened to Paul Walter Hauser? He used to be much, much fatter.

What Dustin Hoffman achieves in this second-act portion of Kramer vs. Kramer would never, ever happen, but it’s fun to ride with it regardless.

The best part is the contrast between Hoffman’s anxious isolation as he waits for a decision amid all the boozy pre-holiday gaiety.

The general consensus has sunk in all over, and it’s this: Trump’s military parade in Washington, D.C. felt rote, pallid and under-attended while the NO KINGS demonstrations across the nation were broadly supported and far more vigorous. I think that’s fair to say.

“I have never experienced such a joyless, lifeless, and sterile mass event in my entire life. Grim-faced soldiers, marching past half-empty grandstands, many of them obviously wanting to be somewhere else. No bands. Little bunting. Just piped-in rock music and MAGA hats. If this truly was meant to honor the 250 years of the United States Army, all we got was an endless procession of uniformed troops looking like they’d prefer to have been at Valley Forge. The president, sitting on the reviewing stand in that weird, forward-leaning attitude that he has, rarely smiling, a skunk at his own garden party.

“I think there probably was more good feeling and genuine emotion when they took Jack Kennedy out to Arlington for the last time.” — Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce, 6.15.25.

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Five days hence (6.20.25) marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws.

Given its reputation as the film that pioneered the ubiquitous wide-release saturation strategy, HE is again reminding that the real saturation trailblazer was Chartoff-Winkler’s Breakout, a quasi-exploitation prison-break flick costarring Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland and Robert Duvall.

HE update: Commenter Sonny Hooper argues that 1974’s The Trial of Billy Jack (11.13.74) began with a thousand-theatre break on a four-wall basis, and therefore launched the practice of saturation bookings six months before Breakout and Jaws. I’ve always thought that the indie nature of that film plus the four-walling thing…I’ve always thought these factors constituted an asterisk.

Put it this way: Breakout and Jaws were the first studio-distributed films (Columbia and Universal being the studios) to launch with saturation bookings.

Posted on 4.17.16: A veteran filmmaker reminded me yesterday that Breakout, a 1975 B-grade action flick that’s basically about a helicopter pilot (Charles Bronson) air-lifting a framed American prisoner (Robert Duvall) out of a Mexican jail, was the first film to open via wide saturation booking, and not Jaws, which usually gets the credit.

After Breakout opened internationally on 3.6.75, Columbia opted for a radical, roll-the-dice decision to open this mezzo-mezzo actioner in 1350 situations on 5.21.75. After two weeks it had grossed a then-head-turning $12.7 million.

Impressed, Universal chairman Lew Wasserman and studio president Sid Sheinberg decided to ape this strategy by opening Jaws, which they knew would be a big hit, on 6.20.75 in a similar fashion.

The initial Jaws plan was to open it in 900 theatres, but Wasserman cut that figure down to 464. Wikipedia claims that Breakout opened on 1300 screens, or nearly three times the opening-day screen count of Jaws.  The veteran who reminded me about Breakout recalled a screen tally more in the 600 range.

I just think it should be recognized or remembered that the Breakout guys were the saturation pioneers and not the Jaws copycats.

Full disclosure: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Breakout. (Or have I?) It was regarded as a harmless, enjoyable diversion at the time, although no one thought it was anything more than a throwaway for drive-ins and sub-runs. Now that it’s been re-activated in my mind I intend to stream it soon.

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.

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.”