Everyone has a look of excitement and anticipation in their eye after they’ve graduated high school and are about to start college. The great adventure! When I attended my 25th celebration most of my ex-classmates had either surrendered that gleam or put it into a bureau drawer somewhere. To me they looked sedate, staid, settled. All except for a small fraternity, which I estimated to be maybe 5% of the crowd. X-factor types with a semblance of life in their veins. Looking for action, adventure, the next discovery.

Posted on 6.29.15: The other day a friend mentioned a pending high-school reunion. Okay, fine, I wanted to say, but if you were fundamentally unhappy and occasionally miserable in high school (as many of us were, and as I definitely was), you’ll need to stash that history in your locker and keep it there until the reunion is over.

Reunions tend to remind a lot of us what a regimented environment and cultural concentration camp high school was. Most of us only realize this after we’ve found our footing as adults. I was lost but now I’m free, or certainly a lot freer.

My high-school years didn’t feel “miserable” in an unmistakable, lemme-outta-here sense; the unhappiness I lived with seeped into my system in a hundred subtle ways. I was so down it looked like up to me. All of it. I didn’t expect any semblance of “happiness,” but I was hoping all the time that life might eventually become less grueling.

I wasn’t anti-social but I didn’t party and run around all that much until my senior year, and once that phase kicked in I became a madman. The truth is that on a certain level I was a kind of functioning alcoholic (no serious behavioral problems but a few serpents under the surface) from my late teens until I quit the hard stuff in the mid ’90s. The real healing didn’t begin until I went sober in March 2012, or so I tell myself.

Before I socially flowered I watched a shitload of TV and listened to a lot of music and basically lived in my head. I was a secret genius who could potentially be persuaded to join the crowd, but no one ever asked. I know that my father’s alcoholism felt and smelled like mustard gas in our home, especially during dinner hour, and that my self-esteem was in the basement. I mostly felt apart, diminished and unworthy when it came to women. In school I didn’t do sports or join clubs or do anything extra-curricular except for detention.

My life didn’t really kick into gear until my mid 20s when the journalism thing started, and even that was agony until I became a half-decent writer and had learned the ropes and had gotten to know people, etc. Things didn’t actually kick into a good place (confidence, comfort, fair reward) until the online column era started, in late ’98 — a quarter-century ago.

…was a Wilton high school science (or was it biology?) teacher named Dan Cappel. It wasn’t his teaching methods which threw me off — he was actually a very bright fellow who knew his stuff cold, and was likably mild-mannered to boot — but his voice sounded so depleted of raw energy, and he had this seemingly exhausted, baggy-eyed, beaten-down appearance.

I once spotted Dan driving his three or four kids around in a VW van, and he looked so weary and bedraggled and sleep-deprived and generally sagging at the seams. Something inside me recoiled in horror at this sight, and from that moment on I couldn’t listen to Dan. I couldn’t unsee that exhausted guy. I had decided “whatever kind of biology this guy’s selling, I can’t buy it. Because I really don’t want to be him when I get older.”

Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham: “I can tell by your faces that many of you are shocked at the outcome. I, on the other hand, am not because I have had the misfortune of teaching you this semester, and even with my ocular limitation I’ve witnessed first-hand your glazed, uncomprehending expressions.”

Brady Hepner’s Teddy Kountze: “Sir, I don’t understand.”

Hunham: “That‘s glaringly apparent.”

Kountze: “No, it’s…I can’t fail this class.”

Hunham: “Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze. I truly believe that you can.”

Kountze: “I’m supposed to go to Cornell.”

Hunham: “Unlikely.”

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“Head-Scratchy “Occupied City” Includes Heavenly Entr’acte Musical Passage,” posted from Cannes on 5.18.23:

I reluctantly sat down this morning with Steve McQueen‘s Occupied City, a doc about the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II and the various oppressions, suppressions and terrors that arose from this. “Reluctantly” because I’d read that McQueen’s film is a bit of a tough one or, in the words of Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, “a trial to sit through.” It seemed at the very least unworthy of a four-hour-plus investment. Maybe.

I was nonetheless ready to engage, and I can at least report that I didn’t hate it. Given the historical aspect you might presume that McQueen would be using troves of digitally enhanced archival footage from the war years, but it was all shot during the pandemic of ’20 and ’21, and in vivid color inside a boxy (1.37:1) aspect ratio, and overflowing with Amsterdam capturings.

It’s based upon “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a purportedly exacting coffee-table book by McQueen’s wife Bianca Stigter, and it’s basically one fixed-tripod tableau after another of Amsterdam, augmented or expanded upon by narration (read by Melanie Hyams) about this or that dark anecdote or tale about Jewish residents of that Dutch city who were persecuted or hid in attics or were eventually murdered in concentration camps. But it feels awfully dry and rote and static, I can tell you. It’s not boring or uninvolving but a bit flat, but within 12 or 15 minutes I was muttering to myself “this is it?”

McQueen’s basic idea (hold on, it’s a lulu) is that the bureaucratic repression of the Covid years, which we all felt pained and smothered by in more ways than one, and the deeply injurious Amsterdam restrictions, suffocations and violations of the early to mid 1940s are somehow related. Or, you know, not dissimilar.

This is what the film keeps saying over and over, that we’re all living in the now but that the past is still with us (and isn’t even “the past”, heh-heh) and lingering in our hearts and souls and all that. It’s a strange concept but I went with it, and I certainly came to know the various neighborhoods and bridges and weathered buildings and town squares of Amsterdam look like these days, much more than ever before, I mean, and I’ve been to Amsterdam, mind. Too many British pubs, too many party boys.

But I have to be honest and admit that my eyelids didn’t make it all the way through. I’m blaming this not on myself but on a certain fellow I’m sharing the apartment with, and more particularly his grizzly bear-snoring…make that his Steven Spielberg T-Rex snoring. (More on this in subsequent story.)

McQueen’s film includes an intermission, and it’s finally time to fulfill the promise of the above headline and state that the musical entr’acte interlude between parts one or two is truly, oddly moving. In a liturgical sense. I loved just sitting there and letting it sink in. It made me feel oddly happy, and also persuaded me that there might be something deeper to Occupied City…something that i wasn’t paying sufficient attention to. But I let that notion go.

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The Gotham Award nominations were announced at noon today, and hoo boy…talk about an organization and a community that lives in a deep mine shaft within its own secular planet…nominations that represent an elitist bubble of urban progressive sensitivity that could choke a plowhorse…a mindset that frequently spits upon Joe Popcorn cinema and enforces a social prejudice agenda…diverse, convulsive, queer-friendly, gender-neutral, indie-favoring, right index finger inserted in rectum, down with older white guys, “we know what we know and if you don’t like where we’re coming from that’s on you because we represent the better angels of the human condition, in large part because we’re more highly evolved”…

Okay, I’m half on-board with a few of the acting nominations…some of them are fairly spot-on so the people who selected them aren’t knaves but perceptive, sensible types for the most part. But the Best Feature and Best International feature nominees…yeesh.

The five Best Feature nominees are Ira Sachs‘ Passages (forget it), Celine Song‘s Past Lives (the fix is in on this one, trust me), Tina Satter‘s not-half-bad Reality, Kelly Reichardt‘s Showing Up (a reasonably decent woke-lifestyles-in-Portland film) and A.V. Rockwell‘s A Thousand and One (not a chance).

The Best International Feature noms are All of Us Strangers, Anatomy of a Fall, Poor Things, Tótem and The Zone of Interest. Yup, that’s right — they’ve blown off the audience-friendly The Taste of Things (i.e., The Pot-au-Feu). I didn’t realize that Poor Things was a truly international production….whatever.

Outstanding Gender-Free Lead Performance noms: Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in Origin, Lily Gladstone in The Unknown Country (peresumably a KOTFM stalking horse), Greta Lee in Past Lives, Franz Rogowski in Passages, Andrew “beard stubble” Scott in All of Us Strangers, Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla, Teyana Taylor in A Thousand and One, Michelle Williams in Showing Up and Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction.

Outstanding Supporting Performance noms: Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things (obviously NOT a supporting performance), Penélope Cruz in Ferrari (yes!!), Jamie Foxx in They Cloned Tyrone (what about his knockout performance in The Burial?), Claire Foy in All of Us Strangers (very good performance), Ryan Gosling in Barbie, Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry (first-rate!), Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest, Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (good performance), Charles Melton in May December (forget it), Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers (best of the bunch or at least tied with Penelope Cruz!).

Back to the root elements: Remember Ray Walston in My Favorite Martian with the insect antennae popping out of his head? Many of the Gotham nominators are 2023 Walston variations…alien humanoids with a knowledgable, sophisticated, well-educated dweebo sensibility…Snidely Whiplash foo-foos who all drink from the same well or the same teapot…Justin Chang, K. Austin Collins, Jessica Kiang, Claudia Puig, Alison Willmore, Thelma Adams, David Fear, Jon Frosch, Wendy Ide, HE’s own Guy Lodge, plus Carlos Aguilar, Lindsey Bahr, Lovia Gyarkye, David Sims, Monica Castillo, Robert Daniels, Tim Grierson, Tomris Laffly…okay, I’m not 100% certain that each and every Gotham Awards nominating committee member is a “bad” person but many of them are, in my humble opinion.

These folks are mostly ideological sycophants, political cowards, go-alongers…people who have sworn loyalty to the politically purifying, disruptive, anti-populist social serum that’s been flowing through the veins of Stalinist theological authoritarians and generally plaguing cinema since ’17 or thereabouts by attempting to transform the art of motion pictures into an instrument of progressive social change…these are basically your Strelnikovs, your enlightened cool kidz…advocates of sweeping social change first and movie fanatics second.

If, for the sake of self-protection and your own professsional survival, you’ve decided to flip against a certain mouth-breathing sociopathic bully boy, fine. It simply means that your interests are now being harmed by your previously obedient association with Donald Trump, and that you’ve trying to wash yourself clean of this ignominous chapter in your life and move on. But the weeping in court is pathetic. Suck it up, comport yourself like a responsible adult and read the statement, but theatrical displays of remorse are basically cheap theatre.

This is some kind of optical photographic distortion. Richard Burton (5’10”) seems too large compared to Clint Eastwood (6’4″). Elizabeth Taylor was only 5’2″ — a stature sister of Kamala Harris.

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I’m not going to say who, but during last night’s Montclair Film Festival screening of The Holdovers I was sitting next to a youngish guy (early 30s), and I could sense his vibe all through it and that he wasn’t exactly grooving with pleasure.

I could tell that he was okay with it in a subdued way, but the crowd (mostly GenX and boomers) was chuckling and guffawing left and right. The Holdovers is nothing if not full of sly, cutting humor and lacerating putdown lines that are cavalier and half-mean and yet sometimes heartfelt. And so this guy’s silence felt a tiny bit ominous.

And then around the two-thirds or three-quarters mark, he looked at his watch. That told me everything. The under-40s are going going to respond to this film with a little resistance.

Given that The Holdovers is set during the ’70 to ’71 Christmas and New Year’s holiday, obviously people who were around back then are going to relate more than Millennials or Zoomers. Nobody’s disputing this — seemed obvious from the get-go.

But Payne’s film is about much, much more than just savoring the nostalgia vapors and the exactly-right period aura and all the atmospheric trimmings. It pays off in dozens of deep-down ways, and I thought the fact that it’s obviously an excellent film, and one that exudes complete confidence in iself…I thought this obvious fact might start to win this guy over. But it didn’t.

Not to mention that slender, physically glowing quality. And yet I was fairly full of despair at 17 and 18. I felt no real hope and excitement about anything until I hit 25 or 26. And then slowly and very gradually, the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.

It has long been my opinion that any Oscar-season pundit who professes to truly love and recommend too many films for Oscar glory…anyone who pours out award-season love too generously is, in my humble opinion, a kind of slut.

Say what you will about Hollywood Elsewhere but I don’t sell praise and affection as a rule. When I express love for a film or a performance or some other significant cinematic achievement in whatever category, it means something. Okay, now and then I’ve moderated or tempered my opinions in exchange for ads, but spottily.

What 2023 award-season contenders has Hollywood Elsewhere passionately gone to bat for so far? Which films do I, Jeffrey Wells, seriously love and admire as we speak? I’m just stating this plain and straight because all my life I’ve been in this racket for those rare poutpourings of love, awe and excitement.

Unlike the gladhanders, I have strict standards. I don’t think it means anything if your standards are overly elastic. Then again I’m not a hate factory. The wokester killers and suppressionists have tried to characterize me as such, but love means nothing if you’re not picky.

HE LOVE: Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers. Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Poor Things. David Fincher‘s The Killer. Michael Mann‘s Ferrari. Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things. Almost certainly American Fiction and Napoleon, although I haven’t yet seen them. Plus I earnestly respect and admire the impact that Barbie and Oppenheimer had las summer. That’s nine at the top of the list….nine!

Not to mention Errol Morris‘s The Pigeon Tunnel, Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge (official German submission for Best Int’l feature), Aki Kaurismäki‘s Fallen Leaves. Call it twelve.

And let’s not forget Jean-Stephen Sauvaire’s Black Flies, which I tumbled for in Cannes last May. (And I don’t care what Manohla Dargis thinks of it.)

Plus Guy Ritchie‘s excellent The Covenant, Christian Mungiu‘s RMN, Cruise & McQuarrie‘s Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One, Ari Aster‘s Beau Is Afraid, Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest. Ben Affleck‘s Air. And…uhm, okay, Celine Song‘s Past Lives to a modest extent.

Mainly because he was taking shots at my hero, President Barack Obama, during the 2012 election. Now I’m telling myself realizing that Romney wasn’t actually so bad, and that this country is much worse off because there are no more classic, candidly-spoken “classic” Republicans. Center-stage-wise, all we have in this regard is Nikki Haley and Chris Christie.

Alexander Payne at Middleburg Film Festival on 10.21: “You want your movie to be as short as possible. There are too many damn long movies these days…if your movie’s three and a half hours at least let it be the shortest possible version of a three half hour movie…like The Godfather Part II [and] The Seven Samurai are super tight three and a half hour movies and they go by like that. So there’s no ipso facto judgment about length.”

I’m not saying the director of The Holdovers was specifically refererring to Killers of the Flower Moon when he said the above, but is there anyone on the planet earth who didn’t immediately presume that he was referring to Martin Scorsese‘s elephantine murder saga?

The truth is that relatively few three-hour-plus movies are regarded as painfully slow. Most of them work on their own sprawling terms.

I wouldn’t have said a word if Michael Mann‘s 170-minute Heat had been 10 minutes longer…hell, a half-hour longer! There’s a certain endless splendor to Sidney Lumet‘s Prince Of The City, which runs 167 minutes….it could have easily run 15 or 20 minutes more withut diminishment. The 227-minute Lawrence of Arabia is pure butter, pure icing, pure symphony…it never lags or drags, Ditto the 197-minute Spartacus.

Some three-hour-plus films, however, contain drop-out moments — plot triggers that encourage a sudden lack of interest or prompt viewers to space out or otherwise disengage.

For me, the drop-out moment in Killers of the Flower Moon begins at roughly the half-hour mark…I’m sorry but when I realized I was more or less stuck with Leonardo DiCaprio‘s dumb-as-a-fencepost Ernest Burkhart and Robert DeNiro‘s drawling, tedious and endlessly repetitive King Hale…when I realized I would be hanging with these fucking dolts for the next three hours I fell into an increasingly deep depression. Not during the first viewing, mind (I was moderately engaged or at least respectful of the film when I saw it in Cannes) but when I saw it for a second time last Thursday night.

Part One of Gone With The Wind is fairly riveting — the drop-out moment comes when Scarlett O’Hara marries Frank Kennedy, or roughly 35 minutes into Part Two. It’s all downhill from then on.

The Barry Lyndon drop-out moment comes when Ryan O’Neal blows pipe smoke into the face of Marisa Berenson. It marks the beginning of Lyndon‘s “dead zone,” which I explained in detail nearly seven years ago.

The drop-out moment in the 212-minute Ben-Hur comes after Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) vanquishes the evil Messala (Stephen Boyd) in the climactic chariot race. Ben-Hur is basically a betrayal-and-revenge movie, and once Judah’s revenge has been achieved there is no more movie. Nobody cares about Judah’s sisters being cleansed of leprosy or Judah being purged of his anger and bitterness by the blood of the crucified Jesus Christ. It doesn’t fucking matter!…nobody cares!…the post-chariot-race stuff is pure denouement.

Put another way, life is hard no matter how you slice it, and, to quote John Lennon, “there aren’t no Jesus gonna come down from the sky.”

Posted today (10.23) at 7:02 am: