Jeff Wells

After freaking out most of Hollywood last night with a pledge to impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, Orange Plague has been softening his stance or, if you will, turning tail. Which is good!

Earlier today Variety‘s Pat Saperstein reported that President Trump told White House journos that he would meet with Hollywood film honchos to discuss his tariff plan, but that he’s “not looking to hurt the industry…I want to help the industry…I want to make sure they’re happy with it, because we’re all about jobs.” In other words, he was preparing to cave.

And now Variety‘s Gene Maddaus has just reported that Jon Voight, whose Sunday (5.4) visit with Trump at Mar a Lago riled things up as well as incited the tariff pledge…Voight, says Maddaus, is doing what he can to turn down the heat on this story while trying to to sound like a measured, sensible MAGA guy with a plan.

Voight and producing partner Steven Paul told Maddaus that they have submitted to President Trump “a comprehensive” plan to rescue the entertainment industry.”

Maddaus: “The plan includes federal incentives for production and post-production, as well as infrastructure subsidies for theater owners, job training, and other changes to the tax code. The plan also calls for tariffs in ‘certain limited circumstances.’”

“The President loves the entertainment business and this country, and he will help us make Hollywood great again,” Voight said in a statement.

In short, Trump has apparently decided to back away from the hardcore tariff thing, and Voight is setting the stage for that extremely welcome capitulation.

Jon Voight discusses his meeting with Donald Trump:

"Many Americans have lost jobs to productions that have gone overseas… I have brought forward recommendations to the President for certain tax provisions that can help [Hollywood]."https://t.co/jWUtcwJsUW pic.twitter.com/V5iy1n3LmE

— Variety (@Variety) May 6, 2025

Because teasers rarely convey depth or complexity, I’m seriously impressed with this fresh-out-of-the-box for Spike Lee‘s Highest 2 Lowest, a kidnapping drama. Sharp, taut, thoughtful. Immediately engaging. My blood is up for the Cannes screening, which isn’t far off.

Directed by Spike and written by William Alan Fox…a reinterpretation of Akira Kurosawa‘s High and Low, which I’ve never liked that much. Denzel Washington, Ilfenesh Hadera, Jeffrey Wright, Ice Spice, ASAP Rocky.

Until last Friday night I’d somehow missed the fact that Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie had opened on 4.25, or a week and a half ago. It’s playing right now at the AMC Empire 25, but only in the early afternoon.

I’d seen Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong on Real Time with Bill Maher, y’see, and the first question that came to mind was why does the 86-year-old Chong seem less diminished and crumpled by age than the 78-year-old Cheech?

I interviewed Cheech in the early ’90s; the line that sticks in my memory is that “the name of our city is Los ANGELES and not LOS ANGLOS.”

Their apparently scripted documentary-road movie will presumably be streaming before long.

Yes, Cheech and Chong created stoner humor back in the ’70s, but the best film with a discernible current of stoner humor is still Curtis Hanson‘s Wonder Boys. And the absolute best Cheech Marin film, of course, is Born in East L.A..

How many times will the HE congregation declare en masse that eccentric Millennial and Zoomer women who have totally bought into the Sinners theology (literally tomented by their whiteness, convinced they’re literally cultural vampires)…how many times will the HE chorus bury their heads in the sand by dismissing these women as unworthy nutters and outliers? They’re not.

A few months ago I was condemned for insisting that back in the ’70s “spade cat” was a term of respect on the street, but I would never use an “s” term that this woman uses…i won’t repeat it but she says it.

@junkmotherjess Replying to @oliver tosen hot take? #whitewomen #sinners #vampires #hermeshaul ♬ original sound – The Health Decoder

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Jump into a time-machine tunnel back to 1968 or ’69. You and a friend are counter-culture buckaroos and fairly flush, having just moved a lot of cocaine, and so you hop on your hogs and leave Los Angeles for a long, un-hurried trip to New Orleans. You’re not middle-class vacationers but cool-cat road warriors, so you’ve both packed a sleeping bag. But what else?

If I was Peter Fonda‘s Wyatt I would bring (a) a two-man pup tent for when it rains, (b) an olive drab Army-Navy rain poncho, (c) the usual toiletries, (d) extra clean socks, underwear and T-shirts, (e) an extra pair of leather pants and a couple of clean shirts, (f) a nice little pillow, and (g) maybe a book or two (Herman Hesse‘s “Siddhartha”, Jack Kerouac‘s “Dharma Bums”, John Lennon‘s “In His Own Write”). Not a ton of gear but enough to fill a couple of pillow cases.

The rolled-up sleeping bag, tent and poncho could theoretically be tied to that vertical backrest on Wyatt’s American flag Harley. But where to stash the other stuff? Obviously you’d need a pair of fringe leather saddlebags, hanging off either side of the rear section. But of course, Wyatt has none. Look at the footage — sleeping bags aside, neither Wyatt nor Dennis Hopper‘s Billy (a scruffy, submental, cowboy-hat-wearing oaf) are packing a damn thing. Just the clothes they’re wearing.

And what kind of odorous bullshit is that? Unless they find a motel room that rents to hippies, within two or three days they’re going to stink to high heaven. Which wouldn’t go down too well with the New Mexico hippie chicks (Luana Anders, Sabrina Scharf) they pair up with. Not to mention the prosties (Karen Black, Toni Basil) they meet in that New Orleans cat house.

So why no saddlebags? Not realistic. Not even counter-culture bravehearts like to wear stinky, skidmark underwear or socks crawling with bacteria.

Half the appeal of Easy Rider is the title, which Terry Southern came up with. If Fonda and Hopper had stuck with The Loners, it wouldn’t have had that schwing.

Easy Rider still works pretty well, but without the great music tracks (“The Weight,” “If Six Was Nine”, “The Pusher”, “Born to be Wild”) it would have felt like a lot less. And Hopper’s performance, while certainly colorful, is hugely annoying. Billy is such a primitive, under-educated low-life.

The film was shot between early to mid ’68. Four-year-old Bridget Fonda (born on 1.27.64) can be glimpsed during the New Mexico commune segment.

I’ll admit that I’ve occasionally visited wikifeet.com because — yes, okay — I’m something of a foot guy, but I’m not fanatical about it.

It’s also a fact that if you’re searching around for casual portrait snaps of any actress or name-brand celebrity (anything informal or off-screen or between takes, and I mean as far back as the 1930s) there’s no website that has a bigger collection of candids than wikifeet.com.

Every famous glammy female over the last 90 years, it seems, has a library of at least 20 or 30 snap on this site, or more. It’s really quite the resource. Forget the foot aspect — it contains a gargantuan amount of photos, period.

Wiki excerpt: Wikifeet was founded in 2008 by Eli Ozer, an Israeli former computer programmer and animator who now runs the site full-time. According to an eight-year-old claim by Ozer, the site gets about 3 million views a month.

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…why would you get engaged to a guy whose last name is Mezzenga?

In a recent episode of Love Is Blind Sara Carton left Ben Mezzenga at the altar because his political values weren’t progressive enough, particularly regarding Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights and transies in particular.

Well, what did Sara expect from a guy whose last name ends with a vowel? I don’t mean to sound like a judgmental WASP asshole but isn’t that name at least a little bit of a red flag? Mezzenga sounds like the name of a mafia family out of Sicily. It almost rhymes with Johnny Carson‘s “Ungawa”, and absolutely rhymes with the last name of that older Cuban guy whom Al Pacino knifed to death in Scarface.

Carton is a blue-blood name (it’s almost Carlton!) and Mezzenga is an immigrant name…the last name of a bricklayer or a New Jersey sanitation guy or a goon who works for Lee J. Cobb‘s Johnny Friendly. Why didn’t she get engaged to a guy whose last name is Wilson or Hopkins or Grant or Weisleder or Weston?

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I’ve just learned that the HE/World of Reel Cannes pad isn’t a one-bedroom deal (I was okay with sleeping on the couch) but a studio apartment…one room plus a bathroom!

Last year Jordan Ruimy and I stayed in my cherished rental in Old Town — 7 rue Jean Joseph Mero — where I’d bunked during the teens. Less than 5 minutes from the Palais. A Napoleonic era duplex with an upstairs bedroom, nice bathroom with a tub, downstairs living room with a bed, a nice little kitchen and an outdoor patio with a clothesline. We paid around 2000 euros for 10 or 11 days.

Two years ago we were in a sizable one-bedroom apartment that was way down at the tip of Palm Beach, or roughly a 25-minute hike from the Palais. But the rent was tolerable. The problem was that a sublet guy on the couch snored like a grizzly bear. (Hr was also the size of a grizzly.)

Now we’re paying 2500 euros for a one-room studio that looks like Robert Duvall‘s apartment in THX-1138. It’s located due north of the J.W. Marriott and two blocks north of the Voie Rapide — a 20-minute walk to the Palais. Magnifique, no?

HE to landlord: “Are you sure you’re charging enough? An 11-day stay in a one-room, one-bed studio located north of the Voie Rapide and straight out of THX-1138 should rent for $3K euros, no?”

My follow-up remarks: (a) “You’ll forgive my sarcasm.” (b) “I’m just surprised.” (c) “I guess I should be thankful that it has a bathroom.”

The Cannes greed factor has become more appalling than ever. I feel disgusted and humiliated. Places to stay during the Cannes Film Festival have never been a bargain. For two years I stayed in a little rat trap in Cannes la Bocca. I had to take buses and cabs every day. But the rental fees were always commensurate with the appeal of the place. Bottom line: The newbie is WAY too costly for what it is.

Okay, it’s a tolerable space situation — not much different than the alternate rue Jean Mero space (a studio) that we rented in ‘22. But that place, at least, was close to the Palais. The newbie is a hike — 20-plus minutes to the Palais.

Ruimy: “It’s not a ‘hike.’ Google Maps says it’s a 15-minute walk to the Palais.” HE: “15 minutes is okay. I just don’t think it is 15. Google Maps is very accurate on driving times, but I don’t trust their walk-time estimates.”

Landlord: “From the Cannes gare to the flat the walk is 20 to 25 minutes, but it takes only 13 if you know the shortcuts. Maybe less.”

HE’s luxurious sleeping couch:

…are so thick and identity-driven and so easily distracted by cheap bullshit that they wouldn’t even get the joke in this scene from Network. They wouldn’t even get it.

Plus they would attack this scene as racist because of their idea that Marlene Warfield and Arthur Burghardt‘s portrayals of Laureen Hobbs and The Great Ahmed Kahn as patronizing or buffoonish or otherwise unattractive.

This is my kind of humor.

“Greatest Rainstorms of My Life,” posted on 1.15.21: “Great gushing cloudbursts are few and far between in my neck of the woods. I’m not talking about simple drenchings, which happen every so often — I’m talking cats and dogs, the wild Parasite rainstorm, monsoon-level, The Rains of Ranchipur and how this never happens in WeHo.

“When you get right down to it I’ve experienced only five or six gully washers over the last 20 or 30 years, and almost all of them overseas. There was one serious soaking in Manhattan in the spring of ’81, when I was living on Bank Street. And a major cloudburst in Las Vegas back in the ’90s. But I wouldn’t describe either as super-exceptional.

“The greatest urban rainstorm happened in Paris in the summer of ’03. Dylan I were living on a hilly street in southwest Montmartre — 23 rue Tourlaque. It was coming down so hard that the gutters were swamped with charging rapids. And the cacophony (trillions of water bullets clattering on hundreds of clay-tile rooftops) was magnificent. And the crackling thunder before it started. The wrath of an angry Old Testament God from a Cecil B. DeMille film.

“The most exciting deluge in a forest primeval setting happened about 10 years later, in Vietnam. In a jungle-like area not far from the Mausoleum of Emperor Minh Mang, just south of Hue. We took shelter inside a kind of makeshift cafe — open air, plastic tables and chairs, a slanted wood-frame roof covered with palm fronds and banana leaves. The sheer energy of the downpour plus the overwhelming symphony of sound (half raging waterfall, half Noah’s Ark flood waters)…must have lasted a good 15 or 20 minutes.

23 rue Tourlaque, Paris.

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If Oliver Hermanus and Ben Shattuck‘s The History of Sound, a period queer romance bound for Cannes, turns out to be as good as Luca Guadagnino‘s Queer, I’ll be a satisfied viewer. But the Queer bar is a high one.

Paul Mescal‘s Lionel is the lead character (his POV dominates the narrative) with Josh O’Connor‘s David being secondary. 73 year-old Chris Cooper, of all people, plays an older version of Lionel. An odd call. The last time I checked Cooper didn’t have a hawk nose or a pointy chin.

I wasn’t thrown by the Queer sex scenes (even the chowing-down ones) because I really loved the performances by Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, and because their intimate scenes were about delicacy, ambiguity and, now and then, open-hearted longing that I couldn’t help but believe and even relate to.

Vanity Fair‘s David Canfield: “[Mescal and O’Connor] sell a romantic connection that extends well beyond the bedroom. ‘There is a kind of real sense of companionship, and the joy and loss that comes with the presence and absence of that,’ Mescal says. ‘It’s not just about sex and the intensity of falling in love. It’s deeper than that.’

“In fact,” writes Canfield, “there isn’t much sex at all in The History of Sound” — honest sigh of relief! — “although the film carries a romantic sweep beginning to end.

Hermanus: “I didn’t want the sex of it to be the transgression, or the big idea, like, ‘Oh, it’s 1917, and these two men are taking the risk of being sexual’. Ben wrote it in a way where there was no hesitation, no moment of fear.

“For me, the sex scene” — just one? — “is when Lionel is walking around David’s apartment the morning after [their first encounter], and he’s smelling everything and sitting everywhere. He’s absorbing the energy of this person.”

The broadly mocked all-female Blue Origin flight (Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Kerianne Flynn and Lauren Sánchez) happened on 4.14.25, a.k.a. “the Empty Coke Bottle flight”. It reached a height between 62 and 65 kilometers, or just above the Kármán line.

The satirical Blonde Origin flight (three right-leaning women — Megyn Kelly, Megan Callahan, Sara Clemente) wasn’t a zero-gravity thing but a reduced gravity parabolic flight. Not on a rocket but aboard a Zero G jet flight, which took off on this particular day from LaGuardia airport.

The flight lasted 90 to 100 minutes and consisted of 15 parabolas, each of which simulates about 30 seconds of reduced gravity: one that simulates Martian gravity (one-third of Earth’s), two that simulate Lunar gravity (one-sixth of Earth’s), and 12 that simulate weightlessness. Each parabola begins with the aircraft climbing at a 45-degree angle at approximately 23,000 feet (7,000 m), peaks at 32,000 ft (9,800 m), and ends with the aircraft pointed down at a 30-degree angle.

As of three years ago, the price of a ZeroG flight for a single passenger began at $8,200.

Extended, real-deal zero gravity conditions begin at 160 kilometers above the earth’s surface.