Jeff Wells

Matt Friend is only 26. He’s never done a devastating Chris Walken (or at least not to my knowledge), but nobody does a better Barack Obama.

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Late yesterday afternoon I tapped out a few Mickey 17 reactions from my Norwalk AMC theatre seat. I was the only one there so no concerns about iPhone glare.

(a) I’m 40 minutes into Bong Joon-ho’s long-delayed, politically fraught follow-up to the over-rated Parasite, and it’s obviously ass…dystopian primitivism, visually dreary, crudely plotted, sadistic characters, physically gross and slimy. Vomiting, brutality, chaos, writhing agony, bodies dropped into molten lava…and it’s a stab at black comedy, of course. The broad, emphatic and profoundly unfunny kind.

(b) I’m the only humanoid in the theatre so I can write all I want. This poor little futuristic allegory, shot entirely on sound stages, is an instant commercial tank. Zero want-to-see. I am the late Earl Holliman back in ‘59…”where is everybody?”

(c) “No multiples! No more re-prints!”

(d) Mickey 17’s lighting is grayish, murky, shadowy, draining. You can make out various visual details but the film is so dark you’re left wondering “why am I even watching this?”

(e) AMC concessions should offer packets of heroin as special coping additives. Sold only to customers with ID verifying that they’re over 45 years of age.

(f) Bong sure loves his creepers! Creepers are fat, insect-like life forms, cousins of Dune sand worms (thousands!), mixed in with a few large, woolly mammoth creepers, but mostly the size of bloated armadillos…despised by Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-like, dental-veneer-wearing leader but in fact benign and Ewok-like in a certain sense, and representing harm to no one.

(g) Creepers, of course, symbolize immigrants or social lessers. This is a movie offering explicit social instruction. Trumpian evil must be eradicated! Wokeys leading a revolution on a Hoth-like snow planet!

(h) RPatz is no longer the young, slender, dishy guy…he’s still thin but now on the brink of middle-age…time cuts no one a break.

(i) The menage a trois scene between Naomi Ackie and the two Pattinsons (the amiable, kind-hearted Mickey 17 and the hostile-aggressive Mickey 18) is the most interesting interlude so far. Superfluous but interesting.

(j) I’m almost at the one-hour mark. Actually the 75-minute mark. A full hour to go. I really do need to snort a little smack. Oh, you have some? Thank you…thanks so much.

(k) Poor Toni Collette….over-acting as Ruffalo’s icy-phony wife…pocketing a paycheck but doing her career no favors.

(l) Ruffalo: “You’d better be on your toes. One false move and you’re man-burger.”

(m) At least Mickey 17 ends happily. The diverse, under-40, white coat or military fatigue-wearing Bong wokeys make things right.

The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield is forecasting a nightmare scenario (NS) for the Los Angeles-based entertainment industry, not 15 or 20 years down the road but closer to 5 to 7 years…

Come clean about the false Demi Moore narrative that she “sold” at the Golden Globe awards. Be honest, cut the shit.

I’ve been dying to hate Mickey 17…champing at the very bit…if only I didn’t have to sit through it.

“The brilliance of Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite lay in how it took apart the superficial ‘niceness’ of its privileged characters. But in Mickey 17, they are so obviously and uninterestingly awful — characterizations worthy of a bad Saturday Night Live skit — that the effect is to defang the story of any genuine bite. That might be forgivable if the film was at least funny — but again and again lines and scenes strain for comic effect, but fail to deliver the goods.” –from Hugh Montgomery‘s BBC.com review.

Last night I finally paid attention to this trailer for Seven Veils, a psychological Atom Egoyan thriller starring Amanda Seyfried. It opens two days hence, but why so long after its intial premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival? A decent Rotten Tomatoes score (81%) but a shitty rating (62%) from Metacritic.

The presumption is that Meryl Streep will play an older version of Joni Mitchell in Cameron Crowe‘s forthcoming biopic, but how could ManCalledC not be thinking of Amanda Seyfried as a younger version? The uncanny resemblance between Seyfried’s singing voice and that of early ’70s, Court & Spark Mitchell….c’mon.

I like this scene. Pure exposition, explanation, recapping for the slowboats. It helps. Alas, it was cut out of the 1946 theatrical release. Confusion ensued.

“The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.

“What with two interlocking mysteries and a great many characters involved, the complex of blackmail and murder soon becomes a web of utter bafflement. Unfortunately, the cunning scriptwriters have done little to clear it at the end” — from Bosley Crowther‘s 8.24.46 N.Y. Times review

A few hours ago Sasha Stone and I chewed it all over (i.e., last night’s Oscar telecast). We didn’t miss a trick.

If you’re married to or living with a good-looking woman of a certain age, every so often you need to mention the fact that she looks really great. If you want to stay out of trouble, that’s the only way to play it.

Even if she could use a little spritzing or smoothing out, never say that she might want to think about doing this.

Paulina Porizkova was a super-hot model in her youth and middle age, but now that she’s about to turn 60…well, what can a gentleman say except “you look exquisite”?

You can never be honest with a woman about the realities of aging.

Only an idiot would say to her “you look ravishing but…well, to be perfectly honest, you’d look even better if you touched up your eyelids and eye bags and eliminate that little hint of a neck wattle…you could lose 10 or 15 years in one fell swoop…hell, you’d be a total knockout”.

A woman can say this to another woman, but if a guy says it, forget it…he’s a dead man.

If a woman said to me “you had some work done back in 2012 or 13 years ago, right?…you might want to think about getting a little re-touch down the road,” I’d probably say “yeah, you’re probably right…facial work only lasts about 15 years or so, 20 at the outside.”

Friendo confidential: “A female friend knows the chief medical examiner in New Mexico. She said that Gene Hackman’s wife, 63-year-old Betsy Arakawa, died from an ailment that had nothing to do wth Hackman’s heart condition. Once she had passed the exceedingly frail Hackman was left helpless, and without his wife to assist him he wound up collapsing in the ‘mud room.’ One of the dogs that was in the kennel died because of no food or water. The other two dogs who weren’t in the kennel survived.”

HE response: Who lies down on a bathroom floor when they’re weakened by the flu or whatever? 63 year-old women don’t just keel over and die on the bathroom floor. If you’re feeing badly you call a nurse or an ambulance service. Arakawa was a responsible person. Why would she allow herself to drift off without calling someone to assist her husband?

Alain Delon, who passed last August, was a huge French megastar in the ‘60s and ’70s. In Europe he was on the level of Robert Redford, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, etc. But he was left out of last night’s Death Reel because he became an immigrant-loathing right-winger in his declining years. I didn’t agree with his political views either, but for God’s sake, you don’t ignore the passing of Alain Delon….c’mon! If he hadn’t become a rightie they would have honored the poor guy.