Jeffrey Wells

Persistence of Idiots

by

There’s no reaching the God-knows-how-many-millions-of-woke-kneejerk-simpletons out there who agree with @alibrooke4ever.

Woody Allen haters are beyond the realm of reason and rationality. They are cultists living in a cave.

There’s a Grand Canyon’s worth of difference, for example, between Soon–Yi Previn having been his “stepdaughter” (imagined) and “adopted daughter of girlfriend.” Not to mention the 28 years of marriage that have transpired since Woody and Soon–Yi tied the knot in ‘97.

Ali Brooke could be ordered to read and re-read Woody Allen‘s 2.7.14 op–ed response in the N.Y. Times ten or twenty or a hundred times, and she would still say “no!”

The haters could be forced to read and re-read Moses Farrow’s “A Son Speaks Out” (5.23.18) and they would say “okay, Moses was right there in the house and all, but we’re not buying it!”

All hail persons of moral integrity and backbone like Scarlett Johansson.

Incidentally: Not that it matters all that much, but Woody’s Isaac character in Manhattan is 42, not 40.

Read more

Was William Shakespeare a London Tomcat? Was He a Kirk Douglas Kinda Guy?

by

As a successful playwright, producer and director of many respected plays, Mr. S was surely regarded by young women as an opportunity waiting to happen. In this respect he surely had the pick of the litter. “Will” was married with kids, of course, but those obligations were 100 miles away in Stratford-upon-Avon. Out of sight, out of mind. How could he have abstained, given his relative youth and all? How could he not have been Joseph Fiennes?

Does Anyone Even Remember “42”?

by

“Critics have a duty to be clear with readers,” Marshall Fine has written in a 4.12 essay. “Not to warn them, per se, because that implies something about relative merit. But to be clear or honest [when the case applies]: This is a movie in which nothing much happens. Or this is a movie in which what does happen doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or is deliberately off-putting or upsetting.”

I am one of the few critic-columnists who actually says stuff like this from time to time. But I disagree with Fine siding with the virtues of audience-friendly films, particularly when he uses Brian Helgeland‘s 42 as a sterling example.

“You know what an audience-friendly film is,” Fine writes. “It tells a story that engages you about characters you can like and root for. {And] yet movies that seek to tell a story that uplifts or inspires often get short shrift from critics. 42 is being slagged by some critics for being manipulative, [but it] happens to be a well-made and extremely involving story about an important moment in history.”

Wells response: 42 is okay if you like your movies to be tidy and primary-colored and unfettered to a fault, but it’s a very simplistic film in which every narrative or emotional point is served with the chops and stylings that I associate with 1950s Disney films. The actors conspicuously “act” every line, every emotional moment. It’s one slice of cake after another. Sugar, icing, familiar, sanctified.

One exception: that scene in which Jackie Robinson is taunted by a Philadelphia Phillies manager with racial epithets. I’m not likely to forget this scene ever. It’s extremely ugly.

Back to Fine: “The fact that 42 works on the viewer emotionally, however, is often seen as a negative by critics who aren’t comfortable with movies that deal with feelings, rather than ideas or theories.” There’s an audience, Fine allows, for nervy, brainy and complex films like To the Wonder, Upstream Color, Room 237, Holy Motors and The Master. But “all of those are not audience-friendly,” he states. “Most of them were barely watchable.

But if you read the reviews, you would find little that’s descriptive of what the movie actually looks or feels like while you’re watching it. Which, for a lot of people, was a negative experience in the case of those particular titles. “How many people saw them because of positive reviews that were misleading? How many might have thought twice if the review mentioned that, oh, well, this film is all but incomprehensible, even if you’ve read a director’s statement on what it means? Or, well, this movie has very little dialogue and takes a 20-minute break for a flashback to the beginning of time? Or this movie is about an inarticulate movie star caught in moments by himself during a movie junket?”

Wells response: I also think that critics should just say what it’s like to watch certain films. If a film is great or legendary or well worth seeing they need to say that, of course, but they also have to admit how it plays in Average-Joe terms and how it feels to actually sit through it. I’m not saying “nobody does this except me,” but who does do this? New Yorker critic David Denby strives to convey this, I think. Andy Klein does this. I’m sure there are others. But I know that it’s a clear violation of the monk-dweeb code to speak candidly about how this or that monk-worshipped, Film Society of Lincoln Center-approved film actually plays for non-dweebs or your no-account brother-in-law or the guy who works at the neighborhood pizza parlor.

Guys like Dennis Lim will never cop to this. It also needs to be said that “audience-friendly” is a somewhat flattering term. The more accurate term is audience-pandering. Pandering to the banal default emotions that the less hip, more simple-minded and certainly less adventurous portions of the paying public like to take a bath in. Because these emotions are comforting, reassuring, and above all familiar. That is what 42 does, in spades.

A Guy Who Knew From Cricket Bats

by

The sublimely gifted Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born, British-seasoned author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (’66), Jumpers (’72), Travesties (’74), Night and Day (’78), The Real Thing (’82), Hapgood (’88), Arcadia (’93), The Invention of Love (’97), The Coast of Utopia (saw it at the Vivian Beaumont in ’07), Rock ‘n’ Roll (’06) and Leopoldstadt (’20)….one of the greatest fellows I’ve ever “known”, so to speak, has passed at age 88.

Posted on 10.16.22: The Reagan-era play that lifted me up and melted me down like none before or since was Tom Stoppard‘s The Real Thing (’84).

“Sappy as this sounds, it made me swoon. Okay, not ‘swoon’ but it struck some kind of deep, profound chord. Partly because I saw it at a time when I believed that the right relationship with the right woman could really make a difference. That was then and this is now, but I was in the tank for this stuff in ’84. The play used the Monkees’ “I’m A Believer” as mood music, and I pretty much was one at the time.

“I’m speaking of the original B’way production, of course, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. My admiration for Irons’ performance as Henry, a witty London playwright who resembled Stoppard in various ways, was boundless. Close, whom I was just getting to know back then, was truly magnificent as Annie.”

N.Y. Times critic Frank Rich called it “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.”

“Love has to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.

“Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy…we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a pack of cards?

“[The answer is] carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, [so] you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake.

“Knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone EVERYTHING IS PAIN. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.”

— from Tom Stoppard‘s The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. It opened at the former Plymouth Theatre (now the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre) on 1.5.84.

Frank Rich’s N.Y. Times review, 1.6.84.

For The 79th Time This Year…

by

Scott Feinberg’s Oscar handicap lists are self-perpetuating, especially during November and December. There is no “I have no dog in this as I’m just forecasting what I think will happen without judgment or prejudice aforethought ”…bullshit!

And Scott’s persistent favoritism toward Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a skillfully directed leftist propaganda film that is basically a racially–flipped remake of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, has become a cultural albatross and is therefore untenable in terms of the film industry’s attempt to win back (if this is even possible) Joe and Jane Popcorn, who have long despised wokeism and are sick to death of being politically goaded or gamed or instructed by nutbag lefty fantasies.

And please, please…enough with the “because Ryan Coogler has blended the musical tradition of Robert ‘Crossroads’ Johnson with the coarse tropes of a schlocky AIP vampire film…and because he finished Sinners off by not only melting the wicked vampires but also by machine-gunning some overweight KKK crackers, and because Sinners made money…because of all this Coogler has to be Oscar-toasted for identity reasons alone”…please stop this self-ridiculing, identity-campaign bullshit. Stop it! The second half of this movie is low–rent junk. It’s a Wendy’s burger with arterial blood sauce.

The Best Picture competish is Hamnet vs. Marty Supreme vs. Sentimental Value…period.

Average schmoes will hate Hollywood all the more if One Battle After Another wins the Best Picture Oscar. Save yourselves, industry voters! Celebrate heart and verve and leave the progressive lefty shit behind. Plus OBAA lost $100 million!

Return of Wife and Sister

by

It’s been 12 years since I last saw Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here. It’s technically not half bad…decently composed, well-edited, real-ish, moderately affecting, believably acted. Alas, I didn’t much like it because of a single maddening performance by Felicity Price, the director’s wife who has the lead female role

It’s odd how a film with a hugely irritating performance managed to stay in my mind, but it has. And now I’m watching it again on Amazon. Yes, that’s right — I’m giving it another chance.

I took my original 2013 review down during the height of the #MeToo movement (late 2017 through late ’23) for fear of someone slitting my throat.

Wish You Were Here is about the fallout from a tragic Cambodian vacation — a getaway that married, expecting parents Dave and Alice (Joel Edgerton, Price) have recently shared with Alice’s younger sister (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Star).

Jeremy vanished at the end of the getaway and nobody seems to know (or be able to admit) what happened, although it’s obvious that Dave knows and will eventually spill the beans by Act Three.

I’m sorry if this sounds like a primitive reaction, but Wish You Were Here is no one’s idea of a film noir.

Because the film, primarily set in Australia, is mainly about the reaction of Price’s Alice to a brief instance of infidelity that happened in Cambodia. A drunken and woozy Edgerton and Palmer got together on the beach, y’see. The kind of infidelity that happened so quickly with both parties so drunk or stoned that neither party remembers much. And the minute Alice learns of this you’re muttering “oh, Christ, here we go.”

Not that it’s wrong or unnatural for Alice to be outraged, but it becomes sooo tedious — the same piano chord played over and over. The four characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal were much, much better at dealing with infidelity and whatnot.

After a while I started muttering to Price, “Jesus, get over it, for God’s sake…it wasn’t planned, it was just beach sex, they were drunk and they’re both really sorry…Jesus.”

So basically we’re stuck with a horse-faced pregnant wife who can’t let this one bad thing go, and a seriously fetching and tormented sister named Steph you’d like to hang with more and a good-looking missing guy whom you’d also like hang with a bit more.

But Steph has been relegated to the sidelines and Jeremy is missing. So we’re stuck with angry Alice and conflicted, shaggy-faced Dave going through the pains of hell because he hasn’t told the truth to anyone about what really happened.

Wish You Were Here is basically a “get away from me, you fucked my sister!” movie with a side-plot about what happened in Cambodia. It’s about the cost of suppressing the truth and not coming clean, and the cost of coming clean about meaningless infidelity.

Price to Edgerton: “You effed my much more attractive sister? You loathsome animal. You contemptible hound. You think you know what marital misery is? Well, you’re going to suffer like never before. In fact, I’m so enraged that I’m going to put the audience through as much agony as you, my dear husband. We’ll all sink into the quicksand together — you, me, Jeffrey Wells, all the other people in the audience.”

I’m sorry but my Amazon viewing (it ended an hour ago) left me feeling no better than I did 12 years ago when I first saw the film at Sundance.

Reminder to all infidels: Never admit to catting around, deny it until death. Nothing good can ever come out of admitting to infidelity. This goes for Olivia Nuzzi as well.