Jeff Wells

Matthew Miele‘s Paddy Chayefsky: Collector of Words, a highly absorbing 95-minute doc, first surfaced on 7.27.25. I finally sat down and watched it this evening on HBO Max.

Mr. Chayefsky is the only writer to win three Oscars for solo, non-collaborative screenwriting: the adapted Marty (’55), and the written-for-the-screen The Hospital (’71) and Network (’76).

I fell in love with the man when I first saw The Americanization of Emily (’64). Despite Marty‘s vaulted reputation I didn’t actually sit down and watch it until sometime in the ’90s.

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What magnificently concise writing…straight to the point, not a single superfluous word or syllable. And yet they’re read by a kind of magical sorcerer…a wonderfully soothing, calming voice from the great Alec Guinness…sublime.

“The young woman known as Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova is your daughter. You arranged for her illegal departure from Russia by pretending she was a secret agent of the Thirteenth Directorate. You stole public money and misused the resources of your service. And you caused the murders of two men, the first in England and the second in West Germany. I do not ask what you did to the wretched Oleg Kirov.

“Any one of these offenses would be enough to ensure your death at the hands of your rivals in the Collegium.

“There is also the open question of what may be done with your daughter, here, now that her true identity is known. It is possible that she is curable, I am told, with the right treatment here in the West. In the East it is different, as you know. But what will happen once she is deprived of money and proper papers? She will become a perpetual and ailing exile, ferried from one public hospital to another. I do not need to imagine her solitude, or yours. I have seen her.

“When we met in Delhi, I urged you to come to the West. I promised you, within reason, a decent life. If you do that now, if you cooperate in your interrogation, you will be resettled in the usual way, and your daughter’s future in the West will be secure.

“By your actions, you have disowned the system that made you. You have placed love above duty. The ground on which you once stood is cut away. You have become a citizen of no man’s land. I send you my greetings.”

I loved the tension of the last two or three innings, but I was generally focusing upon player appearances. I decided that Bo Bichette is the most Hollywood of them all, certainly hair-wise.

It’s over. Zohran Mamdani in a walk. Curtis Sliwa is too much of a narcissist to drop out.

A discussion recently raged about which films have the best shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.15.26.

“In a perfect world, Weapons,” I said, “but I don’t want to even hear about Sinners. I don’t wanna hear that word! Nominations but no big wins. Right now it’s One Battle After Another vs. Hamnet, except smart Academy members know they can’t hand the gold crown to Paul Thomas Anderson‘s film as doing so would brand the filmmaking community as unregenerate, hyperventilating lefty wombats who live on their own full-tilt island. So the problematic Hamnet will proably prevail at the end of the day. Despite the indisputable fact that…”

Friendo: “Yes?”

HE: “Despite the indisputable fact that Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value is far and away the best of them all…an honest, drillbitty, perfectly written and performed, Ingmar Bergman-esque family drama that deals straight cards, top to bottom.”

Friendo: “There’s no way a European-made, foreign-language film will win the Best Picture Oscar this year.”

HE: “It’s actually bi-lingual — an English-language title, of course, and performed in a mix of English, Norwegian and apparently a little Swedish. The English-speaking Elle Fanning plays a crucial supporting role (a major American actress) in her native tongue. It’s mostly in Norweigan, but there’s certainly enough English to qualify the film as bilingual and then some.

“In any event what about a little Korean-language film called Parasite? Took the Best Picture Oscar in 2020.”

Friendo: “That was a woke one-off. The younger Academy members refused to embrace Scorsese’s The Irishman, and fell for the then-fashionable notion of awarding a stringent social satire about poor people of color hustling rich people of color. Plus Bong Joon-ho relentlessly worked the town like a pro. Plus the Academy refused to deal with the hustlers letting the fired maid into the house during that rainstorm.””

HE: “So it’s not the foreign-language factor. Not really. You’re saying Sentimental Value can’t win because it’s mostly about a white Norweigan family. Not diverse enough.”

Friendo: “Parasite made $53 million at the U.S. box office, and over $253 million worldwide. I love Sentimental Value as much as you, but it’ll be lucky to make $5 million domestic. Americans are too thick to really get behind it.”

While driving home last night around 1 am, I had NBC’s coverage of the RFK assassination (6.5.68) on the headphones. Excerpts, I mean. It lasts 102 minutes.

At exactly the 45-minute mark, RFK’s crowded-together supporters, having just celebrated the New York Senator decisively winning the California Democratic primary inside L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel, start to realize that something terrible has apparently happened in an area behind the ballroom stage.

Shock, alarm and panic begins to ripple through the crowd…an eerie cacophonus shrieking starts to fill the room, getting louder and louder.

This ghastly symphony reminded me of an observation shared 25 years ago by former NBC correspondent Robert MacNeil during a Television Academy Foundation interview. The 18-minute segment is all about how MacNeil reported the tragic events of 11.22.63 in Dallas.

Seconds after the Dealey Plaza shooting, MacNeil jumped off the press bus, he says. At the 8:55 mark he recalls the following: “The air was filled with the most incredible screams I’ve ever heard…it was as though there were a bunch of choirs, all deliberately shrieking out of tune, cacophonously…an hysterical, unbelievable sound echoing off all these [Dealey Plaza] buildings.”

HE to knowledagble friendo who’s seen Hamnet: At the end of Maggie O’Farrell‘s book of Hamnet (published in 2020), the Stratford-dwelling Agnes Shakespeare journeys to London and attends a performance of Hamlet, written by her absentee husband William, and is very moved.

We all understand that Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal play Agnes and William Shakespeare in Chloe Zhao’s filmed adaptation, which pops on 11.27.

But is it stated or implied by Zhao that catching Hamnet at the Globe theatre is Agnes’s very first viewing of one of her husband’s plays?

Because it was first performed in 1600, by which time Shakespeare had been banging out plays for rough eight or nine years. Hamlet was in fact his 22nd play. Agnes didn’t catch any of his plays before this?

Friendo: “That’s right. He goes to London, where he establishes himself (and spends increasing amounts of time), and his family is still living out in the country. It’s like they’re many miles away in the burbs, except there’s no commuter train.”

HE to friendo: “Check — no commuter train. But still…he’s written many, MANY big-time plays during the 1590s, including Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and Julius Caesar, and she hasn’t attended ONE of his plays before Hamlet? She’s the playwright’s wife and she couldn’t manage to attend ANY of his big-time plays for a period of eight or nine years (1592 to 1600)? Judi Dench‘s Queen Elizabeth admired Shakespeare (in Shakespeare in Love she attends the debut performance of Romeo and Juliet) and the country-dwelling Agnes was like “look, that’s all very nice with the Queen and all, but I’ve got so much laundry and house cleaning and cow-milking to attend to”?

Friendo: “Hey, I didn’t write the script!”

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Last March World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy spoke to a couple of Hamnet viewers, and resultantly posted the term “misery porn.” So Ruimy was first out of the gate with the association of Hamnet and emotional “porn”…six months ago!

On September 2nd, having seen Chloe Zhao‘s historical drama and then spoken to a few fence-sitting Academy members, THR‘s Scott Feinberg mentioned that some Telluriders were calling Hamnet “trauma porn.”

On September 7th, or roughly seven weeks ago, Film Freak Central‘s Walter Chaw reviewed Hamnet, having seen it in Telluride, and given it “ZERO” stars. In the seventh paragraph of his hilarious pan, he echoed Ruimy by calling it “misery porn.”

The very next day, or on September 8th, Daily Beast critic Nick Schager called Hamnet “grief porn.”

And then yesterday (10.30) Jeff Sneider called it “nearly unwatchable…boring, tedious, insufferable.”

So the sequence is Ruimy, Feinberg, Chaw, Schager and then Sneider.

Again, I’m not launching any kind of takedown campaign here. I have no dog in this. I haven’t even seen Hamnet…come on.

A 10.31 story by Variety‘s Adam B. Vary has announced that Saoirse Ronan, Anna Sawai, Aimee Lou Wood and Mia McKenna-Bruce (who?) will play the spouses of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in Sam Mendes‘ Beatle flick quartet, which is due in ’27.

Ronan as Linda Eastman McCartney (spot-on casting), Sawai as Yoko Ono (fine), Wood as Patti Boyd Harrison (tolerable facial resemblance) and McKenna-Bruce as Maureen Starkey (flatline).

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But wait a minute….whoa, whoa, whoa. Mendes’ decision to cast the hawk-nosed, pointy-chin-chinned Paul Mescal as McCartney and double especially Joseph Quinn as Harrison despite the absolute absence of even a slight physical resemblance between them…I thought this meant that Mendes was bravely and boldly going for something else besides a mere similarity-of-appearance factor…right? Obviously zero interest in any kind of look-alike aesthetic.

But Wood’s signature buck teeth, which stirred some talk during the initial streaming of season #3 of The White Lotus earlier this year….Wood’s scary chompers** align precisely with Patti Boyd‘s rabbit teeth (or ‘rather prominent front teeth,” which is how a guy in the mid ’60s described them)…this is dead-to-rights proof of an inconsistent casting aesthetic.

Wood’s teeth had to be a factor in Mendes casting her as Boyd, but Mescal’s hawk-nose and pointy-chin-chin, which argue strenuously with McCartney’s facial features, wasn’t an issue at all. Hawknose schmawknose…close enough!

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Due respect offered to Eliot Sumner‘s performance as Freddie Miles in Steven Zallian‘s two-year-old Ripley, but Phillip Seymour Hoffman really sunk his teeth into the wiley Miles in Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (’99). Sorry, but no contest.

I for one love vitriolic shouting matches on political talk shows. Can’t get enough of them. Mother’s milk.

Yesterday’s piss-balloon battle between conservative Katie Miller (wife of the demonic Stephen Miller) and Cenk Uygur on Piers Morgan Uncensored was as good as it got.

Not for Miller, as she seemed untethered to any sense of candor or humility as she used her Jewish identity like a battering ram, but for viewers everywhere.

It starts at 38:55. Piers’ panelists also included conservative fitness advocate Jillian Michaels and Palestinian American analyst Omar Baddar.

Miller: “Why is it that every time someone wants to criticize Zohran Mamdani, it immediately comes back to the Jews and the anti-Israel movement instead of actually talking about his viewpoints?”

Uygur: “Nobody said Jews. You just said it. You always do that. We say Israel, you say Jews. We say Israel as a government. Please don’t make it about Jewish Americans. You’re totally lying…it’s very normal for a Miller to be completely and utterly lying. You and your husband are supposed to be working for America. Not for Israel. I think you’re betraying this country.”