11 years ago I attended the funeral of the great James Gandolfini. My report about this sad but moving event triggered one of the ugliest comment-thread pile-ons in the history of this column. It followed a plainly-written “this is how it happened” piece about my having “crashed” (in a vague manner of speaking) Gandolfini’s funeral service at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine on 6.27.13.

For two days I was seething with rage while coping with a broken heart. The ugliness amazed me although a few commenters, at least, understood and respected the fact that I attended out of love and respect. Variety‘s Stephen Gaydos said it best in 6.28.13 post: “Wells is a huge [Gandolfini] fan and so he paid his respects to a guy who was talented and died too young. Those are the facts. The rest is cockatoo chatter.”

At the end of a local ABC News report about the funeral, an anchor guy stated that “the funeral was closed to the press.” The beat-down I received that day was partly about my having claimed that press wasn’t invited (or at least that I wasn’t) and that I had to circumvent stern-looking women with clipboards who were checking names, etc.

Here it is again: “I got hated on big-time for tweeting about having crashed James Gandolfini‘s funeral this morning at Manhattan’s St. John The Divine. Yes, I flippantly used the term “funeral crasher!” because that’s what I was. But it’s the singer, not the song. The haters ignored the fact that I (a) asked for God’s forgiveness in having crashed, (b) ascribed my crashing success to the intervention of angels, and (c) said that I crashed with reverence and respect for James, David Chase and all the “made” Sopranos guys. The rush-to-judgment pissheads simply weren’t listening. They never do. They’re scolds…shrill finger-wagging scolds going “tut-tut!” and “no, no, no!”

“I didn’t crash Gandolfini’s funeral like some giggling monkey, and I didn’t take the subway up there this morning with the intention of crashing. I crashed it solemnly like some devoted choirboy or Sopranos family soldier. I just grimmed up and shuffled up the cathedral steps and…well, go ahead and laugh but I honestly believe that I got past security because some angel from heaven who lived in my area of New Jersey when he or she was mortal happened to look down from heaven at that moment and said ‘whoa, wait up…he’s okay…fuck it, let him through.’

Read more

The great James Earl Jones — Lt. Lothar Zogg in Dr. Strangelove, Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope, the voice and soul of Darth Vader in the first three Star Wars films, Tony Award winner for his portrayal of Troy Maxson in August Wilson‘s Fences, Vice Admiral James Greer in Clear and Present Danger (“Watch your back, Jack”), Terence Mann in Field of Dreams — has left the earth at age 93.

I’ve never heard the original, un-synthesized tapes of Jones speaking Darth Vader’s dialogue, but “no, I am your father” is not only the most famous single line he ever performed, but one of the famous lines in movie history.

Jones’ deep baritone voice was a thing of absolute beauty. I never knew he was plagued by stuttering, at least as a young man.

I have this half-century-old memory of Jones explaining to Dick Cavett that the then-current colloquial term for a dude of color was “spade cat.” That was once a term of respect and awe…really. When’s the last time anyone said “spade cat” in mixed company? Has Robin D’Angelo ever used it?

HE can’t wait to see Ron Howard’s Eden. Seriously.

Don’t kid yourself: The Galapagos island of Floreana, where the turbulent real-life story unfolded 95 years ago, is no tropical paradise. And it’s widely presumed that Dr. Friedrich Ritter, the brusque German misanthrope (Jude Law), was so incensed by the flamboyant vulgarity of Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas) that somehow expelling or otherwise getting rid of her became an obsession.

From Owen Gleiberman ‘s 9.8.24 review:

“This Is Bad“, posted on 9.28.05:

I can’t overstate what a besotted, drugged-out feeling it is to be back in Los Angeles…to once again stand on the roof of a certain West Hollywood high-rise and smell the faintly noxious air and gaze out at the milky haze and tell myself, “It’s okay…despair not.”

There is only one way to live in this town and that’s to crawl into the cave of your own head and your work, and to feed off screenings and DVDs and the haunting emotions of pretty women, and to savor those special times in which you happen to be in the company of similarly diseased and/or disgruntled persons like myself.

Like, for instance, the amazing Joss Whedon.

I would find it astonishing to find myself in the pasta-and-sauces department of Pavilions and all of a sudden…Whedon! Just standing there in boring clothes like a regular mortal and telling himself, “I can’t eat pasta any more, certainly not in the evening. Face it — those days are over.”

A portion of my L.A. lethargy is indicated by the fact that I’m back to reading Defamer and going “hyeh-hyeh” like Beevis and Butthead. I didn’t go to Defamer once during the Toronto Film Festival, and not all that much when I was living in Brooklyn. I like Defamer — it’s a very well-written thing and a necessary component — but you have to be a little sick in your soul to be into it in the first place.

I could feel the old vibe swirling around me like that banshee from Darby O’Gill and the Little People, so I did the sensible thing and evacuated myself off the roof of the high-rise and made my way over to Tower Records and bought the DVD of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.

I tried to wangle a freebie from the Paramount Home Video publicist who took Martin Blythe‘s place, but she didn’t call back until today. I tried to buy it yesterday at Laser Blazer in the early afternoon, only to be told it had sold out. The Tower Video guys, who had plenty of copies, said it was moving moderately well but nothing to write home about.

I nodded off for about 20 minutes when I saw David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in Cannes and I didn’t get around to it in Toronto, so tonight I get to absorb the whole thing at the American Cinematheque, more or less alert…down for it.

I’m a little surprised to be riffing rather indulgently about the stink of Los Angeles seeping back into my bones (that’s a Charles Bukowksi line), and I promise to get back into matters of substance fairly soon.

Except melancholia is a matter of substance if you live here.

I’ve got a screening conflict next Tuesday evening — Tony Scott’s Domino vs. Joss Whedon’s Serenity. Well, not really. I would be squirming a bit if Whedon and I were talking in the pasta-and-sauces aisle right now and he was asking me, “So, are you going?”…but we’re not so I’m cool.

The only thing that gives me concern about Domino is an observation in David Katz‘s profile of Keira Knightley in the current issue of Esquire. He says that Domino is “a messy movie, often intentionally, often not.”

Roughly a year ago…

Anora’s Mikey Madison is a slam-dunk to win the Best Actress Oscar on Sunday, 3.2.25 (six months hence!) because of a few combining factors but mainly two.

One, her performance is one of those guns-blazing, force-of-nature, hurricane-strength grand slams that can’t be brushed aside…a bloom-of-youth, prime-of-life fastball that streaks across the plate at 105 mph.

Not so much during the first third of the film, mind, but starting a bit shy of the one-hour mark after her sex-worker character’s fairytale fantasy (immense wealth through marriage! endless partying! security for life!) comes to an abrupt, screeching halt.

And two, despite the rage and chaos that pours into her life like a flash flood after the parents of her immature, waste-of-skin Russian husband get involved, Anora (she prefers to be called “Anni”) is essentially a Cinderella figure —- a young, struggling, hard-knocks scrapper who is scooped up and saved and then knocked down and brutally pushed around only to be re-saved (or at least blessed by a life-changing emotional breakthrough) at the very end.

Everyone loves a Cinderella story, especially if, as in Anora’s case, it avoids the sentimental, sappy stuff and goes for broke with relentless hellzapoppin’ and a “don’t fuck with me” spitfire attitude.

There are no other 2024 Best Actress contenders or performances (young, older, anyone) who come close to delivering this kind of current.

Madison will win for the same reason Jennifer Lawrence won for her eccentric, emotionally unbalanced but open-hearted protagonist in Silver Linings Playbook. You just knew Lawrence had it in the bag.

What other Cinderella-type roles have resulted in Oscar jackpots, or at least heavily favored Best Actress nominations?

Audrey Hepburn won for playing a spiritually confined princess who is released after falling in love with Gregory Peck in in Roman Holiday (‘53). She was Best Actress nominated the following year for playing another Cinderella character —- a chauffeur’s daughter —- in Sabrina (‘54).

Julia Roberts’ performance as Vivian in Pretty Woman (‘90) was also nominated for Best Actress, although she lost to Misery’s Kathy Bates. Roberts did, however, win the Golden Globe trophy for Best Actress a few weeks prior.

Who else?

Is this one of those optical illusion snaps? Vanessa Kirby is 5’7” but despite wearing modified heels appears taller, Ana de Armas is 5’6” but looks at least 5’8”, and Sydney Sweeney is 5’3” but seems more like 4’ 11”.

A harmless, feature-length in-and-outer would be acceptable or at least tolerable, but six hours of this? C’mon…

I’ve been to Martha’s Vineyard twice but never to Nantucket. I’ve just decided to go there within the next few weeks, or at least before November.

And you know who sounds like a perceptive, well-educated fellow and then some? Lieutenant General and all-around human being H.R. McMasters, who briefly served ae Donald Trump‘s chief of staff (13 months, February 2017 to March 2018). For the first time since I first heard of the guy seven years ago, I was thinking “this dude’s okay, has a sharp mind.”

There’s an unverified story that in 1953, tough-guy actor James Cagney agreed to submit to an in-depth, carefully supervised interview after allowing himself to be injected with a 21st Century woke-candyass serum.

Once under the influence of this experimental drug, Cagney stated that filming “problematic” scenes of murder and misogyny in films like The Public Enemy (’31) and White Heat (’49) were among “the darkest days of my life.”

The Cagney experiment was discussed on a recent episode of the Inside of You podcast, which had previously posted an interview with Buffy the Vampire Slayer costar James Marsters, who said more or less the same thing about filming a traumatic sexual assault scene with Buffy costar Sarah Michelle Gellar. So Matsters was hardly the first to feel this way.

Cagney quote: “Pushing that halved grapefruit into Mae Clarke‘s face while shooting Public Enemy made me feel awful. After the first take I ran off the set, sweating and sick to my stomach. All I could think of was how poor Mae must have felt with that grapefruit juice stinging her face. It was all I could do to keep from weeping out loud. I felt like I needed a priest.”

A biography of Public Enemy director William Wellman allegedly reports that Wellman was alarmed by Cagney’s on-set behavior. He got up from his director’s chair, pulled Cagney aside, slapped him hard across the chops and said “pull yourself together, you little fucking pussy….it’s acting, for Chrissake!…you’re pretending to be a a bad-ass Chicago gangster…get it?”

Cagney obeyed, and yet 18 years later he felt a similar sense of shame and remorse when slapping Virginia Mayo around during the filming of Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat. He also felt convulsed with guilt and moral revulsion after shooting a railroad engineer point-blank in the gut. Walsh had heard stories about how Wellman handled Cagney, so he too went up to the Oscar-winning actor, slapped him hard and said “you pathetic little whiner!… I don’t want to hear another word about your sensitive-ass feelings about pretending to be a psycho killer….man up and do the job!”