Late last September Variety‘s Scott Foundas wrote an appreciation of Thom Andersen‘s re-edited, digitally upgraded version of Los Angeles Plays Itself, which had shown a day or two earlier at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian theatre. (It premiered at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival, which is where I first saw it.) Before the L.A. screening, Foundas writes, Andersen told the audience that the 2013 version “is not an update…I didn’t see the need.”

“The way movies foreclose the possibility of emancipatory politics has not changed,” he explained to the crowd. Foundas reports that Andersen also said “the gulf between an impoverished working class and a wealthy one percent even more of a truism now” than it was in 2003.

Maybe so but for God’s sake, man…you think people are into your film so they can contemplate the socio-political stuff? Los Angeles Plays Itself is almost certainly the best film ever made about how Los Angeles has portrayed itself (or allowed itself to be captured) in movies, hands down. Watching it feels so stimulating on so many levels, like a combination bath and visual massage, and all of it delivered with a smart, socially astute hand. It gives you a nice, comforting academic contact high. It’s a kind of thinking cinefile’s amusement park. It “plays” in any corner of the globe, I’m sure, but, as critic David Fear once suggested, it also stokes the narcissism of Los Angelenos in a way that’s pretty much impossible to resist…the movie is about “our” realm, “our” history, “our” lives and back pages.

While watching the remastered, slightly-reedited version of Thom Andersen‘s Los Angeles Plays Itself last night at Cinefamily, I suddenly decided I wanted to see Jacques Deray‘s The Outside Man, a 1972 hardboiled noir that Andersen uses a couple of clips from. (It costars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Ann-Margret and Roy Scheider.) I just wanted to download and watch it without any bullshit. But of course, Netflix offered just that. I can order the disc, they said, but no streaming. (Every damn time I want to stream something on Netflix it always says “sorry but no can do.” Every damn time.) The film isn’t on Vudu or Hulu either. I can rent it on Amazon (I’m an Amazon Plus guy) and watch it on one of my Mac laptops but the only way to watch Amazon rentals on the 60″ Samsung, apparently, is to buy an effing Roku player, which has the app. (Amazon apps are not on my Oppo Bluray or my Apple TV, and are not installable on same.) If I had money to burn I’d suck it in and buy the damn Roku (what is it, $80 or $90 bills?), but I hate being prodded to spend money for video players that I resent and never liked the sound of in the first place. I hate the word “Roku”…hate it!

I scanned and posted a few stills from the ’70s and ’80s yesterday, and not only did the usual snark not manifest but the photos seemed to go down fairly well — only one cheap-ass comment. I scanned a few more this morning.

Sometime around ’88 or ’89.

I played the boorish hillbilly rapist Marvin Hudgens in a Westport Country Playhouse production of Dark of the Moon in the summer of ’77. Tedious play. I wasn’t too bad.

My dad Jim Wells (a ’60s Mad Men guy who worked at J. Walter Thompson, Needham Harper Steers, et., al.) sometimes around ’92 or ’93.

(l. to r.) Ex-g.f. Sophie Black, my dad & myself in Paris — July 1976.

The best films are always feeding off cultural currents like water drawn from a well, and it’s common knowledge that real-life events sometimes trigger interest in a film that’s lucky enough to open at just the right time. Sometimes it’s hard to say whether events influence films or vice versa, or if “fears, ideas of joy and what’s happening on the horizon” (in the words of Film Society of Lincoln center honcho Kent Jones) are just swirling every which way and sticking to this and that surface. Everyone remembers how The China Syndrome, a 1979 film about meltdown threats in nuclear power plants, got a significant boost when the Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened less than two weeks after it opened. And if you ask me some of the potency of Tony Scott‘s Man on Fire (’04), an immaculate whoop-ass revenge film, came from a general feeling that deep down it was a response to 9/11 (i.e., Denzel Washington bringing great pain to a gang of fiends).

Likewise I have a slight seat-of-the-pants feeling that Mike Binder‘s Black and White, a racially-tinged child custody drama pitting a lushy, well-off L.A. attorney and grandfather, played by Kevin Costner, against his African-American in-laws, is going to somehow siphon the Ferguson after-current on some level. The film doesn’t dramatize police brutality or shootings or any of that, but it takes a hard look at responsibility and parenting and racial identity and who’s really feeling what, and if you ask me it offers one of the frankest discussions about the black-white racial divide since Barack Obama ‘s Philadelphia speech about Reverend Wright, and before that Spike Lee‘s Do The Right Thing (’89).

Chris “right on the edge of thin although I’m sure he’s planning to get fat again” Pratt is on the cover of the new Esquire, which I bought last night. I didn’t start flipping through it until 10:45 or 11 pm, at which point I was starting to fade. At the same time I was talking to a lady on the phone and playing with the kitten. All to explain that I had to read this pull quote three times before I got it. At first I thought Pratt had bought a gun for his wife, Anna Faris, with instructions for her to blow their brains out — his and her own — in case an intruder breaks into their home. (“Crazy person” is singular, “their” is obviously plural.) I read it again — Chris Pratt wants Anna Faris to shoot him in the head and then kill herself if an intruder breaks in? If he’s referring to “their” brains being blown out he can’t be referring to a single “crazy person”, right? So he must be talking about leaving the world together as man and wife. Then I realized, “Of course! The under-educated Pratt got his articles wrong and Esquire didn’t want to fix the quote (i.e., change it to ‘his’ brains) for fear of being labelled sexist. After all the intruder could be a woman.” This is the world in which we live.

This Central Park shot (snapped by ex-g.f. Sophie Black) was taken in the winter of ’76, or about a year before I moved into my first Manhattan apartment at 143 Sullivan Street, or just south of Houston. This and dozens of other pics arrived today inside a big box full of my mother’s photo collections, letters and keepsakes. Of no particular interest to anyone except myself, of course, but what about that second shot…me, the dog and the 1988 computer? Does anyone remember Wordstar? It was Andy Klein who told me to buy it and even helped me with the basics. I found it horrifying at first. If I were to try it again today I’d probably still find it horrifying.

January or February of ’76…sometime around there.

Mom, dad, myself at kitchen table in their Wilton, Connecticut home, sometime in the mid ’80s.

Last night I went to see Carol Reed and Graham Greene‘s Our Man in Havana (’59) at the Aero. A dryly amusing, mild-mannered timepiece. Intelligently written by Greene, pleasantly assembled. Handsomely shot in widescreen black-and-white (those old cobblestoned streets of Havana look wonderful under streetlights), although everyone is unfortunately affected with the CinemaScope mumps. It was filmed in Havana two months after Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. (Warning: Trailers From Hell tour guide John Landis says it was shot during Batista’s regime and that Batista visited the shoot — in fact Castro and Che Guevara visited.) Alec Guinness in his prime, Ernie Kovacs, Noel Coward, Maureen O’Hara, Ralph Richardson, Burl Ives, etc. The sort of light-hearted, old-school, mid 20th Century film that was all but eradicated by the cultural upheavals and radical passions of the ’60s and all that followed.

A fair-sized percentage of the New Yorkers and Los Angelenos who will pay to see Ira Sachs‘ Love Is Strange (Sony Pictures Classics) this weekend will be doing so, I’m guessing, because it’s racked up a 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating and a Metacritic rating of 85%. That averages out to 90.5, which pretty much means “whoa…let’s definitely see this before Sunday night!” And then they’ll see it and most, I’m presuming, will emerge moderately pleased, although others, I’m fairly certain, will be feeling a bit confused and perhaps even frowning. I can imagine some guy saying to a friend, “It was nice but a little…what’s the word? Enervating? It doesn’t have much of a pulse. Why did the critics get so excited? Is it me? Do I lack sensitivity or something? Because from my perspective it was almost a meh. A nice sensitive meh.”

The reason Love Is Strange has done so well among N.Y. and L.A. critics is because a private memo was sent around two or three weeks ago. I won’t say who wrote it and I can’t even quote directly, but it more or less said the following: “This is a nice, low-key, sensitive little Sundance movie, possibly autobiographical to some extent, from an admired, openly gay New York filmmaker, and we don’t want to be anything but gentle and admiring in our responses. No snark, no snippy-ass remarks, no put-downs…Love Is Strange is an opportunity for all of us to to open our pores and show the world how enormously sensitive we are when given half a chance and to show our respect and affection for gay people who marry and also to show how humanistic and 21st Century our attitudes are. Plus it pushes back, deftly but forcefully, against anti-gay discrimination by Catholics and other religious organizations. So be nice, and if you want to play it extra-safe, be really nice.”

Yesterday Little White Lies, a British film magazine, published a q & a between correspondent David Jenkins and directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose Two Days, One Night will play the Toronto and New York film festivals before opening stateside via Sundance Selects. I respect the film but I’m calling it a “ploddingly earnest line-drive single.” I’m mentioning the Jenkins piece because of (a) a forehead-slapper of a question (i.e, “Why did you decide to make a movie which is essentially the same scene played over and over?”) and (b) an even bigger forehead-slapper of a response from Luc Dardenne (i.e., “Why not?”). Even if I was hostile to the film (which I’m not) and wanted to give the Dardennes a hard time, I wouldn’t have the balls to ask this question. Jenkins is an admirer, just to be clear.

A hunch just slipped into my bloodstream that Jean-Marc Vallee, Reese Witherspoon and Nick Hornby‘s Wild (Fox Searchlight, 12.5) will be the first film to be shown at the Telluride Film Festival, or around 2 or 3 pm at the Chuck Jones Cinema (i.e., right after the picnic). No one’s told me anything — I’m just hearing a little voice, or more precisely a ping. All prophetic, telepathic and/or inspirational messages are always received as little taps on your shoulder or ping tones in the back of your head.

Telluride is technically a four-day festival (Friday, 8.29 through Monday, September 1st) but it doesn’t really start until Friday afternoon, and for industry visitors is all but over by early Monday afternoon so call it three days.

Incidentally: Everyone travels to Telluride on Thursday, of course. My Burbank-to-Durango flight arrives around 2:30 pm. I’ll pick up the rental car right away and drive to Telluride, which takes a little over two hours. If anyone wants a lift in exchange for gas money, get in touch. I’m heading back to Durango around 1 pm on Monday.

I really hate spitballing this early on potential Oscar nominees but Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil insisted. Wait until after Telluride or better yet after Toronto. I have to say again that I feel a teeny bit irked by the default favoritism being shown to Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken. A movie about a guy who had run-ins with the law, competed in the 1936 Olympics and then survived two horrible ordeals (one at sea, the other in a Japanese P.O.W. camp) and then went on to live a full life is not enough. “He survived!” ain’t my idea of profound. Everybody goes through hard times, some harder than others. Some make it through, some don’t…big deal. It may be there’s a lot more to Unbroken than just that, but I’m telling you right now I don’t like the way all the lemmings are going over the cliff for it already. Boyhood, fine, but not Unbroken. Or at least, not yet.