If you calculate that the glory days of the ‘70s actually began with Bonnie and Clyde (fall of ‘67) and ended with Star Wars (May ‘77), it followed that the fallow, high-concept period of the early to mid ‘80s which included the tits & zits films (and which produced one unchallengeable classic — Risky Business) and the Simpson-Bruckheimer formula films (Flashdance, Top Gun), you can understand and sympathize with the July ‘86 cover-story freak-out by New York critic David Denby.

The indie-driven ‘90s provided what felt like an exciting reprieve, and there were certainly many distinguished films that came out in the early aughts before the superhero death virus that began to permeate in the early 2010s. This led to Denby’s “Do Movies Have A Future?”, which was published in 2012. But it wasn’t quite as bad as all that…okay, maybe it was.

The later Obama years nonetheless allowed for cinematic highlights (The Wolf of Wall Street, A Separation, 12 Years A Slave, Zero Dark Thirty, The Social Network, Call Me By Your Name, Moneyball, Son of Saul), but then the scolding, pearl-clutching wokesters muscled their way into the remaining nooks and crannies of Hollywood consciousness in 2017-18, and a huge wave of fear, intimidation and conservatism flooded in, and right now many of us are still gasping for breath.

Hollywood Elsewhere hasn’t seen Celine Song’s Past Lives, but many who caught it at Sundance ‘23 are claiming it will be a formidable contender in the forthcoming 2023 Best Picture slug-out. That may be the case (I might love it!) but they’re forgetting one tiny thing. They’re forgetting that A24 has to pay the price for EEAAO — it has to pay for sweeping the table and permanently lowering Oscar property values. It may not be fair or compassionate, but given what’s happened there’s no way Past Lives will take the cake. The name of the game is revenge.

There’s a major disconnect in the trailer for Love and Death (HBO Max, 4.27), a true-crime drama written by David E. Kelley and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. Boiled down, the disconnect is Elizabeth Olsen saying to Jesse Plemons, “Are you interested in having an affair?”

I’m not having trouble digesting the facts of the case, which happened in 1980 in the small town of Wylie, Texas. Candy Montgomery (Olsen) was a terminally bored mother and housewife whose husband, Pat Montgomery (Patrick Fugit), was an electrical engineer. Montgomery’s close friend Betty Gore (Lily Rabe) was married to Allan Gore (Plemons). Candy and Allan wound up having an affair, and Betty freaked when she found out, which led to Candy doing some freaking of her own — she savagely murdered Betty with an axe, striking her dozens of times.

The Texas Monthly story about the tragedy was titled “Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part I: Candy Montgomery’s Affair,” and the subtitle read as follows: “She was a normal suburban housewife. All she wanted was a little fun with another man. She never really expected to kill her lover’s wife.”

All of this is fine, but biological reality is strongly arguing.

It would be one thing if the actress playing Candy was shlumpy or overweight or less than dynamically attractive. But Olsen, 34, is a double-A hottie and has been so for many years, so why in the real world would she want to have sex with a C-minus guy (at best) who looks like Jesse Plemons? Fleshy and ginger-haired, pale and puffy-faced, tiny pig eyes.

This isn’t how life works. Birds of a general feather tend to flock together, and saucy hotties don’t sleep with plump ginger dudes as a rule. I don’t care how bored they are.

Obsessive fans of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining have been carrying the torch for decades, and apparently will never quit. I wouldn’t necessarily include myself, although I’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film at least 11 or 12 times.

My first reaction was subdued bordering on disappointed, but the film has gradually expanded or deepened in my head over the years, which is significant considering that it’s not especially scary and is more noteworthy for its perverse sense of humor than anything else. Which makes it, of course, rewatchable as fuck. For people like me, that is.

Every time I watch the Jack-and-Wendy baseball bat scene, I chuckle or even laugh out loud at Jack Nicholson‘s twitchy unhinged wackazoid, which is total Kabuki theatre. And I adore Nicholson’s Delbert Grady interrogation in the bright red bathroom. Not to mention the chat with Lloyd the bartender, although I would have preferred it if Lloyd had said the Richard Price line from Mad Dog and Glory — “women…can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ’em.”

All to say that if money was no object I would be tempted to buy Lee Unkrich’s new Shining book, an ultra-meticulous cataloguing of the entire effort, start to finish. Call it the ultimate obsessive Shining fan publication, made by and for wealthy people.

The Taschen publication is priced at $1500. It took Unkrich a dozen years to put it all together. He apparently talked to damn near everyone who had ever worked on it or who knew or had heard anything.

Two days ago IndieWire‘s Bill Desowitz posted an interview with Unkrich. I spoke to Desowitz yesterday. Our conversation focused on two areas of interest — (a) the fact that Unkrich has never seen the missing second-to-last scene in which Barry Nelson‘s Overlook Hotel manager, “Mr. Ullman”, visits Shelley Duvall‘s “Wendy Torrance” in a Denver hospital following the death of Jack Nicholson‘s “Jack Torrance”, and (b) the number of takes used to shoot the hotel staircase baseball bat scene.

I, Jeffrey Wells, am one of the few living souls on this planet to have seen the hospital visit scene. I saw it a few weeks before The Shining opened on 10.2.80. The print I saw was 146 minutes long, and the venue was the old Warner Bros. screening room at 75 Rockefeller Plaza.

Desowitz told me yesterday that he too saw this scene, albeit shortly after the movie opened. The 146-minute cut was shown commercially in Westwood for a week or less. Kubrick hired an editor to remove the scene from prints playing in Los Angeles and New York.

The scene is nothing special, I can tell you. Not a “bad” scene, but definitely a ho-hummer. The narrative energy drops significantly, and it basically adds very little to the whole. Roughly ten years ago Unkrich posted the dialogue. I’ve posted it after the jump.

Unkrich’s Shining book includes a couple of frame captures from the hospital scene.

How many times was the baseball bat scene shot? No more than 15, Desowitz says. The scene with the most takes is the one in which Jack, Wendy and Danny are being shown the golden ballroom by Ullman — 66 takes in all.

…like the plague.

For me Paris is about strolling around the cool neighborhoods (like the rue Bretagne nabe in the video) with occasional, hour-long pit stops in cafes, and about revisiting old haunts from years and decades past. I’ve visited at least 11 or 12 times. If there’s one place that’s good for recharging your spiritual batteries, this is it. And I always slip into a Paris mood a few weeks before Cannes.

Ben Affleck’s Air is a solid 8.5 or even a 9 —- just don’t go expecting the world. It’s a modest, well-crafted film about vision and risk and soul and salesmanship, and the best aspect, I feel, is that it doesn’t swing for the fences.

It’s an unpretentious, steady-as-she-goes sports saga that frets about stress and failure and at the same time insists over and over that “if you don’t take a risk you can’t make a gain,” which is precisely what Walter Huston’s chuckling, goat-like prospector said in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

In a way Air is just as much of a pikers-strike-it-rich story as John Huston’s 1948 classic was and is, and the stakes are just as life-and-death when you consider what might’ve happened if Nike hadn’t signed Michael Jordan and if Matt Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro and Affleck’s Phil Knight had taken a gut punch instead.

Their down-to-business story is about marketing and branding that wound up on a super-scale, but told with a modest brush. Nothing goofy or slick or wild-ass. It starts out ordinarily or even ho-hummishly, but then it picks up a little steam and then a little more, and then little dabs of feeling are sprinkled into the second act and then spoonfuls of the stuff into the third as it gets better and better and better.

And then the big payoff moment comes, which isn’t as emotional as Jerry Maguire but then how could it be? Air isn’t about wives or girlfriends or kids or dogs…it’s strictly about business and that’s a good enough thing, trust me.

Here’s the thing: Damon’s Vaccaro is a beefalo bordering on a lardbucket, and I was bothered by this at first. But guess what? I stopped thinking about the paunch around the 30-minute mark. By the one-hour mark I’d forgotten about it entirely. This in itself says a lot.

7:55 am update: It’s being said that Viola Davis’s grounded performance as Michael Jordan’s tough negotiating mom, Deloris, is the keeper. She’ll probably be Oscar-nominated, but Damon’s Vaccaro shoulders the weight. He’s playing the poet and the singer and the believer of the piece, and it’s his best performance since…what, the second Bourne film? Or The Informant? And I love how he’s never cowed by Affleck’s Knight, calmly standing his ground, and in fact plays him at the very end. It’s brilliant. And I love Chris Messina’s tough-shithead agent who reps the Jordans and is content to eat alone.