Every HE regular who has instinctually, blithely and thoughtlessly dismissed Gavin Newsom as a credible presidential contender. Tomorrow night’s debate between Newsom and Gov. Ron DeSantis (who is wasting his time running for the Republican presidential nomination) will almost certainly be an eye-opener. We all understand that President Joe Biden hasn’t the stamina or quickness of mind to match Newsom’s debating skills. It’s a fact.

Tens of millions of serious movie fans swear by No Country For Old Men (’07), and I’ll bet there are less than 25 humans in the entire cinematic universe who approve of Joel and Ethan Coen’s non-depiction of the death of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin).

Yes, this is how Moss’s shooting death was handled in Cormac McCarthy’s novel– the Coen’s were simply being loyal to McCarthy’s dramatic choice. The difference, of course, was that McCarthy could easily convey what happened to the reader but in the film it isn’t clear that it’s Brolin lying on that motel-carpet rug. No matter how you slice it, it’s a huge cheat….a WTF! for the ages.

This aside, here’s a repost of “Dying With Style,” which appeared on 9.30.20 — smack dab in the soul-suffocating depths of the pandemic:

Yesterday (9.29) Widescreen‘s Anthony Francis posted on Facebook about some of his favorite death scenes.

1. Marlon Brando‘s hacking cough death in Act Three of The Godfather (’72). Francis comment: “The man dies a monster — a mirror image of his true self.” HE comment: Vito Corleone does not “die as a monster” but as a kindly, animated old guy playing with his grandson. The scene in which Vito scares young Anthony by putting a piece of orange skin in his mouth is one of the most heartwarming moments in American cinema.

2. Christopher Walken shoots himself in the head in The Deer Hunter (’78). Francis comment: “One shot and with a smile, [Walken] becomes another casualty of war.” HE comment: I hated Cimino’s idiotic Russian roulette gimmick from the get-go, and have always refused to read anything into it. No lead character in a serious film has ever died for a dumber reason than Walken did in The Deer Hunter. Which I haven’t seen, by the way, since ’78 or thereabouts.”

3. John Hurt chest-burst death in Alien (’79). Francis comment: “The death that shocked audiences all over the world.” HE comment: Well, okay but people weren’t reacting to Hurt’s death as much as the realistic physical effects that made the chest-fever scene seem so vivid and traumatic. It wasn’t a death thing but a ‘holy shit, how did they do that?'”

4. Rutger Hauer‘s wings-of-a-dove death scene in Blade Runner (’82). Francis comment: “All those moments will be lost in time like tears…in the rain. Time…to die.” HE comment: “One of the saddest, gentlest and most beautiful death scenes in movie history.”

5. Josh Brolin‘s off-screen death in No Country For Old Men (’07). HE comment: “One of the strangest directorial cheats of all time…almost on a fuck-you level…you spend a whole film with a guy and then he gets blown away by some crazy Mexicans and we don’t get to witness it in real time?”

6. James Cagney‘s blown-to-kingdom-come death in Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat (’49). HE comment: “Better to go out with a big glorious bang than whimpering and anesthetized inside some padded cell.”

7. A lovesick, house-sized ape plummets 86 stories to his death in King Kong (’33). HE comment: “20 or 30 seconds before he lets go and falls there’s an expression on Kong’s face as he looks up at the planes. The look says “you fucking assholes…I’m in love and all you want to do is kill me…you’re such pricks, all of you…why didn’t you just leave me alone with Faye Wray back on the island? I would’ve taken care of her.”

8. Each and every electric-chair death in The Green Mile elicits HE contempt. As God is my witness I’ll never see that godawful film again.

9. William Holden‘s pointless and easily avoidable death in Sunset Boulevard. HE comment: Joe Gillis knows that Norma Desmond tends to react over-dramatically about everything, and he knows that she’s obsessively in love with him, and that the odds of her doing something rash if he announces he’s leaving her are high. If Gillis was smart he’d play it cool, leave her a sensible note, take the nice wardrobe and escape while she’s sleeping. And then go to the cops and say, “There’s an eccentric wealthy woman who may do something violent.”

…and which will never manifest again. CD and cassette players are gone forever…obviously. No more ashtrays…no problem. No more triangular vents at the front of the driver’s side and front passsenger windows, which were great for flicking ashes out of. Large backseat areas that offered ample leg room…gone and too bad.

But the yesteryear perk that I’m truly sorry has disappeared are those old, padded, well-upholstered, couch-like seats with the mohair velvet seat coverings. And the soothing old car aroma that resulted. (Which was occasionally mixed with the after-aroma of pipe or cigar smoke.) I’m talking about a grandfather-car aroma that I vaguely recall from way back. I visited a classic car show in Long Beach in the late ’80s or early ’90s — I might remember it from that.

Classic car buffs know what I’m talking about. It’s an entire culture unto itself.

I’ve never once sat in, much less driven, a 1920s-era Stutz Bearcat or anything resembling that swanky Norman Desmond car from Sunset Boulevard (a 1929 Isotta Fraschini — ee-ZOH-tah frah-SKEE-nee for morons), and I probably never will be. The luxury levels back then (i.e., Mollie Burkhart‘s era) were off the charts.

Car interiors have been almost all plastic and cheap metal for the last…what, 50 or 60 years? The padding in dashboards and trim is most commonly polyurethane foam, while the surface can be a mix of polyvinyl chloride and thermoplastic olefin. The most common plastic in cars is polypropylene, “a highly durable polymer produced from propylene.”

I’ve been complaining all along that Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t deliver a satisfying catharsis in the matter of Lily Gladstone‘s Mollie Burkhart character. She never slaps or even scolds her slow-on-the-pickup husband Ernest, (Leonardo DiCaprio) after learning he’d injected her with poison. And she never says boo to arch-villain William Hale (Robert DeNiro) for his complicity in murdering various Osage brethren.

This photo suggests that if push ever came to shove, the stout Mollie could have easily beaten Hale up (she’s almost twice his size) and could even give Ernest a bruise or a black eye or at least give as good as she gets in a wrestling match. The skillfully manipulative Scorsese never allowed viewers to contemplate Mollie’s size advantage, of course.

But if I’d been in Marty’s shoes, I would have insisted on a Mississippi Burning-style payoff in which Mollie gets Hale in a headlock and forces a confession. Or maybe just slaps him around for pleasure. You can call this a crude Charles Bronson scenario, but the heart wants what it wants. The heart of Joe Popcorn. I mean.

Remember Little Big Horn!

Or at least, you know, treated more fairly and respectfully?

Unless you subscribe to the extreme view that Robert DeNiro is an unreliable or unhinged narrator (which I doubt), there seemed to be an element of doubt or suspicion in that month-old financial grievance lawsuit with former employee Graham Chase Robinson. On the plaintiff’s part, I mean.

I’m presuming that DeNiro treated Robinson with insufficient respect or a lack of sensitivity from time to time, but many bosses are guilty of this. Not all but many. But you take your lumps and move on.

The term “abuse” or “abusive behavior” is thrown about fairly liberally these days. By today’s Millennial or Zoomer snowflake standards, it’s a very rare exception to the rule when a wealthy boss (celebrated or otherwise) doesn’t treat his or her veteran assistant with a certain degree of disregard or callousness. It’s not a desirable state of affairs, but it does seem to go with the rough and tumble.

By typical wokester sensitivity standards I, Jeffrey Wells, have been abused my whole life in one way or another, starting with my ostensibly brutal parents (when I was young I used to carry on internal debates about which one, mom or dad, was worse) and brusque grade school teachers and moving on from there. I’m not being facetious. I have been. I have the emotional scars and bruises to prove it.

On the other hand once you adopt the Everly Bros. or Linda Ronstadt attitude of “I’ve been cheated, been mistreated…I’ve been put down, I’ve been turned ‘round,” there’s no end to it.

Life is often abusive or hurtful in one way or another, at least to some degree. Do I wish that “abuse” was never visited upon poor poor pitiful me? Yes, I do wish that, but what else is new?

Another Nosferatu/Orlok/Dracula yarn? Again? How many have there been?

The original 1922 F.W. Murnau film with Max Schreck as Count Orlok. Tod Browning‘s Dracula (’31). Those Hammer Dracula films of the ’50s and ’60s with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Followed by Werner Herzog‘s Nosferatu the Vampyre (’79), Francis Coppola‘s Dracula (’92) and E. Elias Merhige‘s Shadow of the Vampire (’00) with Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck himself. What am I forgetting?

Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu will open theatrically on 12.25.24.

But technique aside, what could Eggers be expected to add to the lore? The saga has been beaten to death, and Eggers, it’s fair to say, suffered his first semi-failure when he released The Northman in April ’22. If Nosferatu works, it’ll almost be considered a comeback.

Eggers’ film costars Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe and Simon McBurney.

I re-watched Poor Things a couple of nights ago (my second viewing), and reacted in a way I hadn’t expected. I felt a bit more dazzled or certainly more appreciative of the multitudinous elements that go into each shot. I was knocked out when I saw it in Telluride in early September, but I expected to have more or less the same reaction. Maybe a slight enthusiasm drop but that’s par for the course and nothing to sweat.

But to my surprise it gained. I was saying “wow” over and over, as much as I did three months ago. Over and over I was shaking my head in admiration for the visual energy…the exacting care and immaculate invention that went into every aspect — the exciting abnormality of it all, the skewed Victorian-era dialogue, Emma Stone‘s robotically out-there manner and behavior, the imaginative artificiality and bizarre production design, the weird performances from pretty much everyone, the perverse humor…all of it. It looks and feels like a weird dream, but one you can easily settle into.

I gradually realized that Poor Things is one of those films that you need to see twice because there’s so much going on that a single viewing won’t suffice.

I was wondering for a while what Poor Things would be like if I saw it on peyote or mescaline. I would never consider such a thing (in my youth I tripped my way through at least three or four films) but it’s a film that would really be enhanced by the right kind of hallucinogen. A gentle one, I mean.

Make no mistake — Poor Things delivers a woke narrative. An attractive and spirited artificial young woman in her 20s encounters the big, bad, male-corrupted world for the very first time with naive, childlike eyes and somehow finds her way through the thicket, and emerges at the end of the tale with an emboldened, seen-it-all feminist attitude. But Bella Baxter’s tale is so inventively told I not only didn’t mind the preach but was taken by it. I didn’t feel the least bit dismayed or disengaged.

I noticed something else that I probably shouldn’t mention but will anyway. I’m talking about the simple biological fact that Emma Stone has large, slender, shovel-like feet. I’m sorry but she’s barefoot in at least half of her scenes, and I was saying “well, there it is…her feet don’t have that petite Japanese geisha thing going on.” No problems or judgments; her anatomy is her anatomy. But I did notice this.

But I was also thinking, “God, what a brave and striking performance…Bella is so eccentric, so stiff-necked (a little like Elsa Lanchester‘s Bride of Frankenstein) and yet so carefully and correctly phrased,m and so willful…such an original concept.

And before Poor Things I was never a huge Yorgos Lanthimos fan, mind. I respected and appreciated his brand and sensibility, but this was the first time I felt really enthused about what he was showing me.

HE: “When I think of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things (Searchlight, 12.8), I think of a one-two effect. First I think of Frankenstein’s sexually vigorous daughter, and then a back-from-the-grave woman whose worldview evolves from wide-eyed wonderment into critical male-shirking wokeness. I also believe that Emma Stone has the Best Actress Oscar in the bag.”

Friendo: “When I think of Poor Things, I first think of a lurching, amusing and sometimes audacious [effort] that feels second-rate-ish at the end of the day. Then I think of the in-your-face woke design (Ms. Barbie Frankenstein in a world of angry, damaged, predatory men!), then I think of all that sex and how it’s really kind of gratuitous (unless this were 1972) but wow, it sure is going to help sell the movie!”

From Brent Lang and Matt Donnelly’s Variety story (filed on 11.28 at 10:18 am) about the attempted censoring of Robert DeNiro‘s speech at last night’s Gotham Awards:

“A source close to the film denied that there was any censorship involved and said that the incident was a miscommunication. There had been multiple versions of De Niro’s speech and there was a desire to focus solely on the moviemakers and their artistry, according to the source. Apple and the filmmakers were unaware that De Niro hadn’t signed off on the final draft, the insider added.”

Translation: “We [Apple] tried to politically sanitize DeNiro’s speech. In hindsight we realize we shouldn’t have done this, But to protect ourselves now, we’re going to deny everything and call it a miscommunication.”

May December‘s Charles Melton has won the Gotham Award for Best Supporting Performance. Good, fine and congrats, but may I ask where this Melton energy came from? Why did this happen? What voting bloc rammed this through? What is this?

It is Hollywood Elsewhere’s opinion, due respect, that no less than eight Gotham nominees in this category delivered far more arresting performances than Melton.

HE’s best-of-the-best is The Holdovers‘ Da’Vine Joy Randolph, closely followed by BlackBerry‘s Glenn Howerton. HE’s #3, #4 and #5 picks are Ferrari‘s Penélope Cruz, The Taste of Things‘ Juliette Binoche and All Of Us Strangers‘ Claire Foy.

Then comes Jamie Foxx in The Burial (#6), Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (#7) and Ryan Gosling in Barbie (#8).

Then and only then comes the ninth–place Melton.

This is so sweet… charles melton you are so loved pic.twitter.com/SJCJfyPWaf

— e (@mellarkanti) November 28, 2023

The Outstanding Lead Performance award went to Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country, a film that no one relatively few have seen or reviewed, to go by general impressions. The urge to socially and culturally celebrate Gladstone’s Killers of the Flower Moon Oscar campaign was the motivating factor here. Congrats to her handlers.

The Best Feature award went to Past Lives…yeesh. The Gotham voters really and truly live on their own tight little island.

Posted on 10.24.23: