At one point Seth Meyers‘ jailbird character says to Kenan Thompson‘s “Bill Cosby”, “This is gonna sound mean but have you ever considered just dying?” Cosby is an animal, I know, but that’s not funny.

An earlier incarnation of this post appeared on 9.15.14: My childhood was a gulag experience. So were my teens. Things started to get a little better when I began as a film journalist but my life didn’t really pick up until ’80 or thereabouts. And even then it was constant struggle, struggle, toil and trouble. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may have lived a tough life but so did I.

I started to feel really badly about life’s possibilities when I seven or eight. The misery seemed to intensify when I turned 11 and 12, but the onset of puberty seemed to make things worse in so many ways. I used to argue with myself about which parent I despised more, as they were awful in their own specific ways. My only encounters with happiness, however brief, came from hanging with certain friends and catching new films at my local theatre (the Westfield Rialto) and on WOR’s Million Dollar Movie or the CBS Late Show when I visited my grandmother, who would always let me stay up as late as I wanted.

My home town of Westfield, New Jersey, was a pleasant enough place, but the social aggression and general bullshit in junior high school meant there was always a taunt and a challenge and some kind of shit going on behind your back. A fairly rancid atmosphere. Everything was awkward or tortured or tedious.

My basic response was to say “fuck this concentration camp and the fucking rules you have to live by or live up to,” and to start living in my own realm, which for me meant the universe of cinema. At age 13 or 14 I got into the habit of taking the bus into Manhattan (a secret mission as my parents wouldn’t let me go alone) and just roaming around Times Square and looking at the various marquees and just soaking it all up. I’d take the bus in the late morning, visit Mecca for three or four hours and get back for dinner by 5 or 6 pm. I paid for these trips with my modest weekly allowance plus a little extra lawn-mowing money.

I used to love the smell of bus exhaust inside those Port Authority parking areas. To me those fumes were the city itself — they smelled like oxygen.

James T. Wells, Jr., my witty, well-educated, occasionally surly dad, died a little more than a decade ago. He wasn’t always surly — he could also be snappy and sullen. He also did grumpy. I posted the following on 6.21.08:

My father had 86 years of good living, mostly. He was miserable at the end, lying in a bed and watching TV, reading and sleeping and not much else. I think he wanted to go because his life had been reduced to this. He was a good and decent man with solid values, and he certainly did right by me and my brother and sister as far as providing and protecting us and doing what he could to help us build our own lives.

But he was also, to me, a crab and a gruff, hidden-away soul (his Guam and Iwo Jima traumas as a Marine during World War II mashed him up him pretty badly) and even, it seemed at times, something of a bitter curmudgeon. But not altogether.

I feel very badly for his suffering the indignities of old age and the mostly horrible life he lived over his final year or two. I know that whatever issues I have with my manner, attitude or personality, it is my charge alone to deal with, modify and correct them. But I also know deep down that Jim Wells was the father of it. He lived in a pit so deep and dark you needed a kleig light to see around.

He was a lifelong Democrat who hated John Wayne for his pro-war posturings. He liked Simon and Garfunkle but never got the Beatles, which always flabbergasted me. He actually thought that Michael Herr‘s Dispatches was a waste of time. My brother tried to get him to watch The Limey and he wouldn’t do it. He lived in his own world and could be a real pain to hang with at times. He was foul and nasty and a snappy contrarian about everything during a trip we took to Lake George about 12 years ago. My son Dylan (who was with us) and I did everything we could to escape his company.

I distinctly remember feeling tear-struck in 1986 when I learned of the death of Cary Grant, whom I’d always regarded as a beloved debonair uncle of sorts. I didn’t feel anything close to that when I heard the news about my dad the night before last. The truth is the truth.

When that “where’s the flag-planting sequence?” complaint about First Man broke at the time of the Telluride Film Festival, my response was that the flag actually appears in the film three or four times, including a shot of the moon flag as well as a brief but unmissable flag-unfurling scene featuring one of Neil Armstrong‘s sons.

Except I was apparently wrong about the count.

According to a 10.12 Huffpost piece by Bill Bradley, the U.S. flag appears no fewer than 18 times in Damian Chazelle‘s film. Presuming this is true, the issue could have been shut down so easily if Universal marketing had simply hired an ad agency to assemble all 18 flag shots and make a patriotic YouTube video out of said footage. Maybe some talking-head quotes about the duty-and-patriotism aspects from Chazelle, Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, a NASA rep, Buzz Aldrin…would’ve been a snap.

Now that Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 is playing on both coasts and some have presumably seen it, what are the reactions? There’s no way I’ve oversold or overpraised it but does anyone think I might have? Is it mostly an older person’s nostalgia trip or is there some interest among 20- and 30somethings? It made around $28K at Manhattan’s IFC Center after a week; the Los Angeles Nuart booking began last night.

Here’s a chat I did with Tyrnauer 10 or 11 days ago.

In the wake of Richard Brody‘s “why is First Man so white?” critique (“Brody Fulfills Prophecy,” posted on 10.11), RealClear’s Thelma Adams is the latest to carry the identity politics torch:

“Fifty years [after NASA’s first manned flight to the moon] America doesn’t do such an out-of-this-world job when it comes to racial inclusivity,” Adams has written. “First Man is a reminder of such inequality.

“The early reception for Damien Chazelle’s space epic since its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival last month has been superlative. Under the National Review headline “First Man is the movie of the Year,” my friend and former New York Post colleague Kyle Smith joined with the majority who found the biopic 82 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. He crowed “First Man is why we go to the movies.”

“To that I ask, ‘What do you mean we, white man?’

“Nothing like the last month in America shows the cracks in the American melting pot, and the impossibility of a cultural ‘we.’ Most semi-woke individuals sometime during the 141-minute movie will notice the absence of people of color in speaking roles. Not there on the mammoth screen. Not there historically. Not in space. And possibly absent from the audience.”

In other words, Adams seems to be saying, First Man would have been more in synch with woke America and might have generated a more bountiful box-office if Chazelle had ignored history and cast an African=American actor in one of the principal roles.

She seems to be suggesting that First Man would have been in better cultural shape if Chazelle had cast, say, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Ed White, one of the Appollo astronauts who tragically died on the Cape Kennedy launch pad in 1967. Or as Roger Chaffee or Virgil “Gus” Grissom.

Why not, right? The only thing that matters these days is inclusion and representation. Hollywood has a duty to push back against racial discrimination in all its forms, and that includes accurate but harmful depictions of U.S. history.

While watching Paramount’s 4K-restored, wire-free War of the Worlds, I was again perplexed by that vaguely obnoxious Colonel character (played by the late Vernon Rich) pronouncing “hill three” as “hill thuh-ree“. This always struck me as an excessive application of military-speak. Obviously “thuh-ree” is about verbal clarification over a possibly squawky military radio, but what other other number sounds even a little bit similar? Saying “thuh-ree” for emphasis is like saying “fi-yi five” or “ay-yay-eight” or “ni-yi-nine.” Again, the mp3.

Chelsea Handler obviously wasn’t implying there was anything wrong or unfortunate about Sen. Lindsey Graham possibly being closeted, which I know nothing about one way or the other and am not interested in discussing. Handler was alluding to a possible vein of hypocrisy on his part, given HRC’s 2016 statement that Graham “has been a consistent opponent of everything from marriage equality to protecting LGBT workers from employment discrimination.” If, that is, there’s some factual basis to the loose talk.

I’m not saying all high-school girls are fickle and flighty, but a lot of them are. Or were, at least, when I was an awkward, insecure schlemiel.

In my senior year I had it bad for a great Irish blonde named Sally Jo Quinn. Or so she seemed at the time. Short, slender, magnificent blue eyes, straight blonde hair, smallish feet, slender hands with chewed nails. No dad at home; just her single mom who worked as an administrative something-or-other at the high school. I can’t recall if the parents had divorced or if the father had died or what.

All I could do was dream about putting the moves on Sally. She wasn’t entirely averse to my attentions as a couple of hot and heavy episodes did happen. Once in my car (i.e., my father’s train-station car) and once while lying on a bed of brown pine needles in a woodsy area near the town reservoir.

[Click through to full story on HE-plus]

Will you look at the on-the-nose emotional triggers in this trailer? Right away you can smell the calculation, the family-friendly pablum, etc.

I haven’t time to write even a half-assed review of Julian Schnabel‘s Vincent Van Gogh film, At Eternity’s Gate, but it does deliver an intimate channelling of the visions and torment that surged within this angst-ridden impressionist, and the effect is fairly on-target. The film is more into communion than visions — intuitions, intimacy, revelations.

As Schnabel said during the post-screening press conference, “Rather than a movie about Van Gogh, I wanted to make a film in which you are Van Gogh.” He’s more or less done that, I feel. Which pretty much says it all.

Is Willem Dafoe‘s performance as Van Gogh the best thing he’s done since The Last Temptation of Christ, which was 30 friggin’ years ago? I’d say so, yeah. Dafoe seems to be so open to the ache of this poor man, and immersing himself so completely in his emotional, artistic and spiritual struggles, that (I realize I’ve said this a few times over the years) he really doesn’t seem to be performing or pretending. I wish I could think of some other way to say this, but whatever.

The interesting part is that Dafoe, now in his early 60s, is 25 years older than Van Gogh was when he died at 37, and yet this isn’t a problem. You don’t even think of it. Poor Vincent was so bothered and self-flagellating that Dafoe looking somewhat older than a guy in his mid 30s…well, of course.

The other thing is a scene in which Van Gogh, temporarily incarcerated in a mental asylum, has a somewhat testy conversation with a doubting priest (Mads Mikkelsen). The priest is softly contemptuous, saying in so many words that he thinks Van Gogh’s paintings simply aren’t very good, and that he’s almost certainly deluding himself by thinking that God meant him to pick up a brush.

Van Gogh responds just as softly that he might be painting for people who haven’t been born yet (or words to that effect). The instant Dafoe said this some guy sitting behind me went “uhm-huh” and I muttered the same thing to myself — “That’s right…that’s exactly what he’s doing.”

Schnabel: “This is a film about painting and a painter and their relationship to infinity. It is told by a painter. It contains what I felt were essential moments in his life. This is not the official history — it’s my version. One that I hope could make you closer to him.”

George Clooney remarks at Variety’s Power of Women event in Los Angeles: “When you call an entire religion your enemy, you might very well make an enemy out of an entire religion. When you tell a whole race of people that you value them less, you can’t be surprised when they question your values. When you tell women that coming forward to testify about their abuse is a joke, don’t be shocked when they’re standing on your lawn, laughing on November 7.

“After all the jokes and insults and reality show frenzy, what will be remembered, what will stand the test of time, is holding responsible these wolves in wolves’ clothing.”

HE to Clooney: I hope you know something I don’t. I hope that the blue wave turns out to be as real and formidable as many of us hope. Thing is, an awful lot of women voted for Donald Trump two years ago, and there were even a fair number of Trump Hispanics that turned out. People think and behave in amazingly stupid and lazy ways. Just when you think they can’t get any dumber, they defy your expectations. Here’s hoping things work out for the better.