As I understand it, working-class Mexicans and residents of Spain speak the same language in the same way that natives of rural Arkansas and Cambridge-educated Brits both speak English. I wouldn’t know, but street-level Mexicans allegedly speak Spanish with mumbled, guttural inflections. Long ago I read that the word huevos (eggs), which Spaniards pronounce as “WAYvos”, is pronounced as “werewolves” in non-tourist regions. So the next time you’re ordering breakfast in Monterrey or Vera Cruz you need to say “werewolves rancheros.”

I mentioned this a couple of years ago in a piece about the Riviera Maya Film Festival. I first learned about real-deal Mexican pronunciations in Robert Sabbag‘s “Snowblind: A Brief Career in the Cocaine Trade,” which I read…oh, probably around ’77 or thereabouts. (The hardbound edition popped in ’76.) Sabbag’s dealer character, Zachary Swan, mentions that a Mexican waiter didn’t understand him when he ordered “dos huevos,” and a friend explains he would’ve been perfectly understood if he’d said “dos werewolves.”

I’m finding it vaguely alarming that Eyes Wide Shut opened 18 years ago. I clearly remember seeing the unrated, uncensored-orgy version out at the Warner Bros. lot, and then being shown the censored version and producer Jan Harlan taking questions about this. I swear that didn’t happen more than 13 or 14 years ago, despite what the calendar says. Time seems to be rushing along at greater and greater speeds.

Diana, the former Princess of Wales, died on 8.31.97. I was attending the Montreal Film Festival when the news broke. I remember talking it through with colleagues and then retreating to my hotel room and tapping out a reaction piece for my L.A. Times Syndicate column. The next day Rod Steiger, a guest of the festival, delivered a rant about how the papparazzi had killed her. Which they did in a way. But the primary villain was Dodi Fayed, the millionaire asshat whom Diana had been fucking for a few weeks.

I was working at People when Diana began seeing Fayed in July 1997. Two or three of us were asked to make some calls and prepare a file on the guy. Within three or four hours I’d learned that Fayed was an irresponsible playboy, didn’t pay his bills on occasion, lacked vision and maturity and basically wasn’t a man. And yet Diana overlooked this or didn’t want to know. And that’s why she died. She orchestrated her demise by choosing a profligate immature asshole for a boyfriend.

Fayed was just foolish and insecure enough, jet-setting around with his father’s millions and looking to play the protective stud by saving Diana from the paparazzi, to put her in harm’s way. It all came to a head on that fateful night in Paris. Fayed told his drunken chauffeur to try and outrun a bunch of easily finessable scumbag photographers on motorcycles, and we all know the rest.

Last night Paul Schrader posted a Facebook lament about Detroit (i.e., the Algiers Motel brutality goes on forever). It drew the following reply from Tony Joe Stemme: “It’s an oddly structured movie. The first 20 minutes or so lead the viewer to believe they are going to see an overview of the Detroit riots. Then we are plunged into the horrid events at the Algiers for at least an hour (might even be longer if you add the intros leading up to it). And then we get another half-hour of the aftermath including trials. Sadly, I don’t think it works, but it’s a daring strategy.”

The best reply came from Savas Alatis: “The Passion of the Detroit.”

I saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky (Bleecker Street 8.18) this morning, and I came out fairly happy or soothed or whatever. I wasn’t exactly dazzled or blown away but I don’t think was the intention. It’s a mild, easygoing entertainment. Yes, it’s Ocean’s Eleven in a rural, lower-middle-class realm, except the principal thieves (Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig) are unassumingly brilliant in both the planning and execution of a big heist, or the removing of millions from Charlotte Motor Speedway.

So far most critics are delighted with Logan Lucky. It has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak, and an 81% rating from Metacritic. But what about Joe and Jane Popcorn, not to mention rural shitkicker types?

Soderbergh is such a master, such an exacting orchestrator. This has been said repeatedly about many films, but Logan Lucky has really and truly been assembled like a fine Swiss watch. I really love hanging in Soderberghland. I relish his dry sense of humor, his laid-back naturalism and low-key way of shooting stuff, plus his cool framings and cutting style, etc. A total pro.

I’m too stupid to understand all the logistical and strategic maneuvers, double-backs and fake-outs. To this day I don’t entirely understand every last thing about how the heist was pulled off in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, and I don’t care enough to see it again anyway. I’m just not very smart when it comes to this stuff.

Part of the problem today was that I was unable to hear about 35% or 40% of the dialogue because of the horrible sound system in the Wilshire Screening Room.

But I loved so much about Logan Lucky. I really did. It’s such a nicely assembled alternate-reality caper piece. It’s a light cultural fantasy thing, and is quite funny here and there. Very droll and low-key and plain spoken. But I mainly love it because it’s so well made. All hail cinematographer Peter Andrews!

And yeah, I loved the surprise appearance of Hillary Swank, but I’m too dumb to…forget it.

Of course, Logan Lucky is set in a version of Bumblefuckland that’s not quite real. Because the characters aren’t real Bumblefucks but Hollywood hybrids pretending to be the Real McCoy. Skilled, clever, laid-back smoothies performing with yokel accents and wearing the clothing and all the rest of it in a casual, pocket-drop way, and at the same time handling their complex robbery scheme in a much smarter way than you might expect garden-variety Bumblefucks to do, or anyone for that matter who isn’t an Einstein-level genius at pulling off robberies.

George Clooney‘s Danny Ocean would be seriously impressed by these guys.

My mood always sinks when a film I want to catch is showing at the dreaded Wilshire Screening Room (8670 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA). The sound isn’t awful there, but it’s bad enough that I’m often unable to decipher some of the dialogue. Sometimes half of it and sometimes less than half, but there’s always a little bit of a problem when I see a movie there. Because the sound just isn’t sharp or trebly enough, and so I can’t hear some of the consonants all that clearly. You can respond with the usual bullshit about how I need to get my ears checked, but I’ve heard dialogue just fine in dozens of other venues. Okay, maybe I’m slightly at fault and maybe I need to clean the wax out, etc. But why do I always have problems with the Wilshire and almost never anywhere else? I’ve seen two films at the Wilshire within the last couple of days (Only Living Boy in New York, Logan Lucky), and both times I was muttering to myself, “Why can’t I hear what they’re saying half the time?”

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson on Twitter (posted early this morning): “Fair or not, I can’t think of a more tone-deaf and thematically pointless idea in this political/social environment than white male filmmakers remaking Death Wish.”

Jeffrey Wells reply: What you’re saying is that a movie about a middle-aged vigilante shooting ethnic gang members in 1974 was a crude Nixon-era exploitation piece about lawlessness and racial tensions in a city that was succumbing to urban rot and going downhill fast. But a movie telling more or less the same tale in 2017 or ’18 will be a flat-out racist screed trying to appeal to angry Trump voters and other thoughtful types who believe that black lives might matter in a certain sense (i.e., not too specifically or militantly) but that blue lives matter also, and that young men of color had better not cause any trouble or pull out guns or argue or run away when a cop pulls them over.

This evening Tatyana and I attended a Hollywood hills party for Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival. It was held at a beautiful, ultra-modern mini-manse on Oriole Way**. The owner-hostess was longtime festival supporter and former Lynda.com owner Lynda Weinman. We chatted with Florida Project and Tangerine director Sean Baker. I told him I’d missed TFP in Cannes but wanted to catch it sometime in August, if at all possible. Baker was with Florida Project associate producer and actress Samantha Quan. Many of the usual journo suspects were there — Anne Thompson, Scott Feinberg, Peter Rainer, John Horn, etc. An elegant event, startling Belvedere vodka cocktails, an exquisite infinity pool and a knock-your-socks-off view.

Producer-actress Samantha Quan, Florida Project director Sean Baker at Tuesday evening’s Santa Barbara Film Festival party, hosted by Roger Durling and Linda Weinman. (I’m just as bothered by the fuzzy, non-focused appearance of Baker and Quan as you are.)

(Photo courtesy of Scott Feinberg.)

The Call Me By Your Name trailer, I mean. The poster popped three or four days ago.

I was just noticing Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury‘s Leatherface (LionsGate, 9.21), a prequel to ’74’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the eighth film in the TCM franchise. And I was saying to myself, “You know something? I don’t a flying fuck about Leatherface’s backstory…does anyone?”

I actually don’t give a flying fuck about any character’s backstory…ever. I never cared about little Bruce Wayne seeing his parents murdered or how that trauma affected him as an adult. Tough shit, sonny! I had a pretty tough childhood also — get over it. Seriously — fuck you and your aloof, melancholy Wayne Manor attitude about everything. I’m sitting here in my cushy megaplex seat with a small popcorn and a Diet Coke. Entertain me, ya fuck.

If I never see another origin story, it’ll be too soon. Fuck all origin stories from here to kingdom come. I don’t want to know anything about what any character went through before the movie started. All I want to know about any character in any film is how they’ll respond to the particular thing that’s happening right now. Nothing else matters.

You could make an origin-story movie out of any major character in cinema, and you’d be some kind of destroyer of worlds if you did.

Did we need to know what North by Northwest‘s Roger Thornhill was like as a nine-year-old kid, playing marbles or stickball or falling in love with the girl next door? In Zero Dark Thirty Kathryn Bigelow told us nothing about the early formative years of Jessica Chastain‘s Maya, and that was totally fine with me. I didn’t give a damn about the evil father of Heath Ledger‘s Joker taunting him as a kid. I’ll never want to know about how Alan Ladd‘s Shane came to be an ace-level gunfighter, or how Clark Gable‘s Rhett Butler became a charming rogue. I’ve always hated, hated, hated depictions of young heroes in any context or franchise. Those movies are always awful. The only young anything I’ve ever liked was Young Frankenstein.

The only realm in which backstories are regarded as a big deal is that of (a) superheroes and (b) hit-movie sequels. You really do need to be a bit of a simpleton to be genuinely interested in backstories in the first place. There are NO backstories or character fill-ins of any kind of in Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, and it’s utterly wonderful for that.

Christopher Reeve did well by critics when Richard Donner‘s Superman popped in December of ’78. This was partly due to the fact that by late ’70s standards Reeve was quite the hunk. “Reeve’s entire performance is a delight,” wrote Newsweek‘s Joe Morgenstern. “Ridiculously good-looking, with a face as sharp and strong as an ax blade, his bumbling, fumbling Clark Kent and omnipotent Superman are simply two styles of gallantry and innocence.”

What upper-echelon actors in today’s realm are ax-blade handsome in that tall, broad-shouldered, WASP-ian way? Two guys I can think of — Armie Hammer and (when he’s not summoning memories of Ernest Borgnine) Henry Cavill. But that’s about it.

Because ax-blade handsomeness isn’t trusted, much less admired. It’s even despised in certain quarters. Because it’s now synonymous with callow opportunism or to-the-manor-born arrogance. Men regarded as “too” good-looking are presumed to be tainted on some level — perhaps even in league with the one-percenters and up to no good. It’s been this way since Wall Street types and bankers began to go wild in the mid ’80s.

I was thinking this morning about how Reeve and Robin Williams were the best of friends for 30-plus years (they bonded at Juilliard in the early ’70s), and now they’re both dead. And they didn’t go peacefully into that good night either.

After his 1995 horse-riding accident, which turned him into a quadraplegic, Reeve became a kind of never-say-die spiritual hero. There’s no question that his becoming an impassioned stem-cell-research advocate left a more profound impression on the world than his performances ever did. But he was a fine, appealing actor.

Reeve had a ten-year run (’78 to ’88) as a marquee name. Superman launched him; Switching Channels finished him off. His best film performances were in Jeannot Szwarc’s Somewhere in Time (’80), Sidney Lumet’s Deathtrap (’82) and James Ivory’s The Bostonians.

His best performance ever was in the Broadway stage production of Lanford Wilson’s The Fifth of July, in which he played a gay paraplegic Vietnam veteran. It ran in the late summer or fall of 1980. Jeff Daniels and Swoozie Kurtz co-starred.

Here’s an oldie-but-goodie about the worst on-the-job mistake of my life. Nothing to do with politics, but I posted it four days after Barack Obama’s election (11.8.08). The incident happened when I was working for a chain-link fence company in Fairfield, Connecticut, when I was in my early 20s. It’s a good story because I wasn’t just “fired” but kicked to the curb for an error of classic proportions. A lulu.

I worked with two other guys for the company. Every day we loaded big coiled-up bundles of chain-link fence and schlepped them around to this and that job site. We would dig several holes, pour cement into each one and then insert metal poles. We would then return to the job a couple of days later to put up the fence, unspooling it yard by yard and fastening each length to the poles with hard metal coils or “ties.”

It was agony moving the chain-link rolls off the flatbed truck and then lifting them up with sheer brawn every time a section had to be unspooled. Especially in the horrid winter with the cold metal freezing your fingers and the tips of the fences making scratches and cuts on your hands every time you manhandled them. My job attitude was half-hearted at best. It was awful, awful work.

I was the guy who would back the truck up and get it into position before the fence rolls were unloaded in front of the poles.

One time we were putting up a fence near a large dirt lot. The road was a couple of hundred feet away from the location of the poles, and for whatever reason it was decided not to park the company’s flatbed truck right next to the poles but up near the road.

In any event it got to be 4:30 pm one day — time to get the truck and bring it back to where the un-mounted fence sections were lying on the ground. The rear of the truck was facing the far side of the road. The obvious plan was to back it into the road and then whip it leftward and drive across the lot.

I started the truck and checked the two rearview mirrors. The coast seemed clear although there was a bit of a blind spot. My coworkers were collecting tools and whatnot, so it was just me and my wits.

The truck was parked on an incline, however, and there was a lot of mud under the tires and I couldn’t get any traction when I hit the gas. So I tried rocking it back and forth — no luck. I then decided to put a couple of pieces of scrap lumber under the rear tires for traction. I again put it in reverse, hit the gas and finally the truck lurched backwards.