The casting of 20somethings as college students or even teenagers is common Hollywood practice, but 40ish guys playing characters who look, think and behave like younger, less thoughtful fellows and are therefore less believable — this is less common.

I’m thinking, of course, of the Tom Ripley situation — 47-year-old Andrew Scott playing the titular sociopath in Ripley. The eight-episode series was shot in ‘21 when Scott was 45 or thereabouts. Matt Damon was 28 when he played the same fellow in The Talented Mr. Ripley (‘99). Alain Delon was 24 when he played Ripley in Plein Sud (‘60).

I think Scott’s performance is masterful, but there’s still no hiding the fact that he seems too old to be playing a young opportunistic sociopath who’s more or less floating through life and improvising each new hustle on the fly. We tend to think of 40something guys as being past all that.

Which other older actors else have prominently portrayed characters who should have been played by 20somethings or at least 30somethings?

Robert Redford was 47 when he played the 36-year-old Roy Hobbs in The Natural…he seemed a little too old but Redford’s handsome features and athletic frame made up for that. Redford’s Hobbs is actually less of a stretch than Scott’s Ripley.

Who else?

Posted on 6.15.18: I was crashing with a married couple, Frank and Karen, in a smallish Boston apartment in the general vicinity of Symphony Hall and Hemenway Street. They had a linebacker-sized friend named Eddie who lived nearby and was also hanging out a lot. Mainly the four of us sat around in the evenings and got high. I distinctly remember not rolling joints as much as tapping the tobacco out of filtered cigarettes and then-filling the cigarette with what I recall was low-grade pot. Moderately potent, lots of stems and seeds.

One night around 10 pm or so we decided we needed a straw for sucking in hash smoke. A tiny chunk of hash placed on the burning embers of a cigarette, etc. No, I don’t remember why we didn’t just use rolled-up dollar bills. Probably because it would’ve been unsanitary.

I recall that it was fairly cold out and that we were probably broke or close to it, and so going to a market and buying a pack of straws was out. So I decided to start knocking on doors and asking Frank and Karen’s neighbors if they had a straw to spare. It wasn’t just the vaguely strange notion of a long-haired guy in jeans and boots with bloodshot eyes looking to bum a straw from strangers, but that it was too late to knock on doors and bum anything from anyone.

Her name is Ada (@ada_akpala)…

I can’t explain why I feel more jolted and jazzed by The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars now than I did 52 years ago. I liked David Bowie’s 1972 landmark album but didn’t adore it — now I’m head over heels, can’t stop listening to it. I was actually more into Lou Reed‘s Transformer back then, although they weren’t exactly concurrent. Ziggy popped in June ’72 — Transformer arrived five months later.

I always thought glam rock and glitter rock were one and the same. They’re certainly synonymous today.

“Yes, there’s still a long way to go, and [there’ll be almost certainly] more horrendous shit to endure over the coming few years. But I genuinely believe we’ve seen the worst of it. In fact, I would say the scale of change has been quite abrupt.

“Something like Disney’s Strange World, released just over a year ago, would probably not be greenlit, produced or released today….”

…when I brought it over two weeks ago.

Posted on 8.26.14: Last night I tried to explain my sense of frustration about The Leftovers to a guy pretending to be Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of the HBO series. I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been because I posted my thoughts on Twitter rather than in an e-mail. But I made a few points that added up to something, I think.

And then the fake Lindelof tried to blow me off or at least denigrate what I was trying to say by addressing me as “Ma’am.” He did so, he later said, because I reminded him of his aunt. But the conversation had merit nonetheless because I meant what I said.

I tried to say that it’s always seemed to me that there’s a huge empty hole in the middle of The Leftovers, and this is due to an absence of awe and wonder on the part of just about everyone in the series, both in front of and behind the camera.

A cosmic event of extraordinary significance has occured three years before the series begins, and in the wake of the disappearance of 2% of the world’s population, it seem as if everyone in The Leftovers is saying “Wow, we didn’t get chosen…that’s fucked up…this feels bad…I guess we’re all spirituallly deficient on some level…shit.” And yet no one is saying “Wow, the religious wackos were right all along! There is a God and a heaven and a scheme of some kind…what a mindblower! Bill Maher and Woody Allen and all the great existential philosophers were wrong all along, and…well, even if some of us don’t wind up in paradise, at least we know for the first time in the history of humanity that there really is a plan and a scheme and some kind of order to things. The term intelligent design is no longer a right-wing slogan. It’s obviously real and serious as a heart attack.”

And yet the scheme is not particularly intelligent. It’s arbitrary and random as fuck. There’s no special moral glow or distinction shared by the departed. They’re just gone. A woman of Indian descent who smokes cigarettes and is having a fast fuck in a motel room with Justin Theroux‘s Kevin Garvey…she gets taken along with Vladimir Putin, Gary Busey, Jennifer Lopez and the Pope? Along with Carrie Coon‘s husband and two kids? And an unborn fetus in the womb of Amy Brennaman? What the hell for? If anything the design is malevolent and perverse. Nothing calculates or balances out. It’s all a big sick joke, and it’s all from the head of evil Lindelof.

Here’s how I put it to fake Lindehof on Twitter and how he replied. Note: I’ve clarified and expanded upon a couple of thoughts here — in actuality they were a bit shorter and blunter. Senior Variety editor Marc Graser was kissing Lindehof’s ass about something and I jumped in with…

Wellshwood: “Does it bother anyone that there’s never been even a mention of wicked design in this series?”

Wellshwood: “What kind of idiotic God removes an unborn fetus from a mother’s womb? To what possible fucking end?”

Wellshwood: “In short, [the series] has a big fat empty hole in the middle of it — a hole it doesn’t know what to do with, much less fill.”

Wellshwood: “The show says over and over that God is one ruthless fucker, a master of infuriating fate.”

Lindelof (later on): “Ma’am, I would make fun of you, but I honestly can’t even tell what you’re trying to say.”

Wellshwood: “Go ahead and make fun. Your series is about cosmic malevolence and the utter absence of wonder.”

Wellshwood: “And where’d you get the idea I’m a ‘Ma’am’?”

Lindelof (this morning): “Honest mistake. Sorry about that. Your haircut and ramblings about religion reminded me of my aunt.”

Wellshwood: “Funny.”

..we all know what this is going to be. A feminist Bride of Frankenstein empowerment saga by way of Poor Things….same deal, back from the dead, recreates herself spiritually, sets the world on fire.

All my life I’ve wanted to experience a total eclipse black-out…a serious Bing Crosby in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court moment..,and if I want it badly enough I can have this tomorrow afternoon.

But I’ll have to drive hundreds of miles for hours and hours plus pay for several tanks of gas and at least one motel sleep-over to get to the sweet spot.

Why couldn’t the eclipse show a little more taste in deciding which areas of the country to temporarily darken? Austin and maybe one or two other towns aside, the eclipse will mostly affect nothing towns and bucolic, bumblefuck backwaters, regions that nobody ever seems to visit or even think about, and that’s really a shame. I’m serious.

Imagine if it hit Boston or the Berkshires or NYC…magnificent.

Last night I watched episodes #6 and #7 of Steven Zallian’s Ripley, and what a soothing, transporting dream trip this series is…a silky and serene monochrome soul bath…a reminder of how much better life was and still is over there in certain pockets, and (this is me talking and comparing, having visited Italy six or seven times) what an ugly and soul-less corporate shopping-mall so much of the U.S. has become this century…the contrasts are devastating.

Ripley is an eight-episode reminder that there really is (or was during the mid-20th Century) a satori kind of life to be found in parts of Italy and Sicily, better by way of simplicity and contemplation and quiet street cafes, better via centuries of tradition, pastoral beauty and sublime Italian architecture…grand romantic capturings of Napoli, Atrani (the same historic Amalfi Coast city where significant portions of Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer 3 were shot), Palermo, Venezia and Roma.

Life doesn’t have to be dreary and banal and soul-stifling, Zallian is telling us in part…you can find happiness standing downstream, as the great Jimi Hendrix once wrote, especially if you’re an elusive sociopath living on a dead guy’s trust-fund income and therefore not obliged to toil away at some sweaty, shitty-ass job to survive.