Movie City News - Entertainment Roundtable

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DAVID POLAND: Hey Jeff... crappy weekend at the box office, huh?

JEFFREY WELLS: Well, low volume, yes. But that Vin Diesel, man....what a locomotive! XXX! Rob Cohen.... and that thing that went zooming along the Vltava toward Prague!

DP: Right into the Volga!

JW: These guys are Gods, myths, titans!

DP: Bald monkeys! All they need is a house to fall on the Lovely Ms. Argento

JW:All right....yes, a slow weekend. That's what the month of August is sometimes all about. No biggie.

DP: So sweet... has Simone taken over your screen name?

JW: I'm falling asleep here, I have to admit. Numbers do that to me. Movies are not about numbers, but emotion and sex and looking for God in all the wrong places.

DP: Is there a bad place to look for God?

JW: Well, yes. If, say, you're looking for him any where in the vicinity of Lorenzo di Bonaventura's office, I'd say you're likely to be disappointed.

DP:: I think Lorenzo must be praying to some God. By the way, I hear that Variety is confirming McG's exit from Superman, so there is a God.

JW: That's a shame. I was quite looking forward to McG's Superman, right after his remake of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and, of course, his Vietnam movie, which I was really looking forward to.

DP: Vietnam by McG... funny. Rob Cohen's Last Tango In Paris! Asia Argento telling Vin to pass the butter.

JW: She told Rolling Stone she isn't Vin's type, whatever that may be. And don't get me started on God, because that will lead to discussions of Satan's influence in the film industry, and that will lead us straight to Adam Sandler.

DP: Adam Sandler is such a sweet young man. Why do you hate him so?

JW:: I don't "hate" Adam Sandler. I am just neutrally recognizing, in a dispassionate professorial way, that the wretched emptiness of his output, starting with The Waterboy and up to Mr. Deeds, probably has something to do with Satanic influence, if the Devil can be supposed to have an interest in killing off interest in movies and making comedies unfunny. When movies are really funny and inspired, I believe God has had something to do with this.

DP:There are so few that are funny and inspired, and the studios never can figure out how to sell those. But The Waterboy is genius level.

JW: The Waterboy was a very popular film. I don't think that makes it a work of genius. Like all Adam Sandler films, it is about repressed anger and vengeance against a world that has failed ot recognize Adam Sandler's uniqueness and specialness. Sandler's movies are about the punishment that small-minded people deserve to have visited upon them. They're basically Death Wish movies. You don't get me? You're treating me like dirt, or putting me down? Undervaluing me? You die.

DP: That sounds like a Jeff Wells column

JW:: A Jeff Wells column is essentially about the same thing over and over. And that is, "I get it. Most people out there get it. Why don't they (the studios, filmmakers, the marketing people.) get it?" All good opinion columns are about this, no?

DP: The studios get it. Most people are fucking sheep. Literally sometimes. And they love the stuff you hate! There are people who love Scooby Doo. Even you have to appreciate that particular psychosis

JW: It's fine to love Scooby Doo, I suppose. I mean, you can always make up for that in your next life, digging ditches or being a beggar in Calcutta.

DP: Cruel, cruel, cruel

DP: Just wait until we find a human being who loves Freddy Got Fingered.

JW: I could tell when I was watching Blood Work in a theatre last night with "real" people that it was going over pretty well. People weren't hating it....I could feel waves of moderate satisfaction in the room. But critics killed it, for the most part. And while it wasn't all that good, it wasn't that bad either. Best thing about it was the way it avoided being bad or irritating in all the usual ways most actioners and policers today are bad and/or irritating.

DP: It was old... I appreciate that as a value... but only if it's also good. Just because it isn't bam-bam, bang-bang kid's stuff, doesn't mean it is good. The Bourne Identity was old fashioned and good. Unforgiven was old fashioned and good

JW: Unforgiven also had a pared-down, believably arty posturing that worked. Yes....The Bourne Identity was old fashioned and good. I'm just saying Blood Work wasn't that bad, and was more than tolerable because of all the bad movies and whambam techniques it didn't step into.

DP: It was intolerable because Eastwood doesn't cast as well as he used to. There wasn't a single stand-out performance in that movie

JW: Yes, there was. Eastwood's, for one. And the breasts of the woman he has a relationship with in the film. I forget her name, but her breasts were most impressive. Make that very impressive.

DP: They were fake! You must have sucked on the wrong end of the bottle as a baby.

JW: Regular guys like me appreciate this stuff in movies like this. Regular, hot-dog eating, snow-cone slurping regular guys like large breasts in action cop films.

DP: Regular guys like who? You're about as regular as a man without an anus.

JW: I was born in New Jersey, played stickball with my friends when I was 12, used to chew bubble gum...I did all the regular things that suburban kids do when they grow up. The regular guy DNA is deep within.

DP: And I loved seeing Eastwood's inverted nipple... hot!

JW: Curiously, strangely, I admired the honesty of his going shirtless at age 72. Not very Playgirl-ish, but it was real.

DP: I was okay with him going shirtless once, maybe twice. I've seen old men with real heart surgery scars. Not pretty.

JW: It isn't pretty, and it wasn't pretty in the film. But it was honest of Eastwood to take his shirt off and let us look and think about his age and heart surgery scars and whatnot. And it was very nice and kind of him to cast a woman with large breasts as his costar.

DP: How did you manage to put up with Blue Crush? Small breasts all around.

JW: And I thought Freddy Got Fingered deserved respect, not for being funny, particularly, but because it was a work of real auteurism and self examination -- Tom Green looking at his real life and making a crude, whorey comedy out of the raw material he actually lived through.

DP: OHMYGOD!! Jeff Wells gives it two proctoscopes up! A 2 year old examines his own feces. It's not brave!

JW: It was about his lying around his home as a youth and dealing with his disapproving, mean-spirited father. It came straight from the heart, from the truth of his life. You have to respect that on a fundamental level.

DP: How do you know that? Do you know Tom Green's family? They seem awfully nice to me. They seem to support him quite a bit.

JW: "Seems" is the operative term. My understanding is that the film is fundamentally based on his own life, when he was doing nothing and living with his parents.. But when I say "regular guy," I mean I haven't forgotten about or lost touch with my roots as a wide eyed kid going to see movies when I was 10 or 12. Too many critics climb into the ivory tower and leave that emotional base behind, and overly intellectualize things to the point that their reactions are almost alien like, at times.

DP: Fair enough, but you have your own tower. It may be made of dung, but it's still a tower

JW: Any reasonable-minded movie lover who's gone through what I've gone through, and seen as many movies, and learned what I have about the industry, would find him or herself in a similar "tower" of their own making. It's inevitable. You are what you eat & what you've seen.

DP:: Fucking A

DP: Is there a film in box office Top Ten in the last decade that you really, really liked?

JW: Did I really, really like any of the 100 films that qualified over the last 10 years? There are always two or three or four out of ten that are likable, and one or two that are really likable that are in the year's top ten.

DP: Which two this year?

JW: Which top boxoffice films this year so far have I really, really liked? I really liked Signs and....uhm....

DP:: Spider-Man, Clones, MiBII, Goldmember, Ice Age, Signs, Scooby Doo, Lilo & Stitch, Minority Report, Mr. Deeds. Okay, Signs... you liked Signs... Why? Because you avoided the religious issues. That's like avoiding the dog in Scooby Doo.

JW: I liked Signs, was mezzo mezzo on Spider-Man, loathed MIBII, didn't much care from Clones, respected and liked to a considerable extent Minority Report, despised Deeds and Scooby Doo.

DP: So, Signs and Minority Report for Mr. Normal.

JW: People get through life by compartmentalizing what they want to deal with, and not deal with. I immediately decided early on in Signs that I didn't care about whether Mel Gibson is wearing the cloth or not, or feeling cynical about life. I cared about the creepies I was getting from thinking about those aliens in the cornfield. Period. I cared about how well Shyamalan was pulling the strings and showing us very little and making us feel so much. God, I sound like Roeper!

DP: I hate chat abbreviations, but LOL. And the alien sucked! It was a bad suit and it dies too easily. I'm sure you would have liked the movie better had you seen the wife's entrails come out when they backed the car away

JW: I didn't want to see the wife's entrails. With Shyamalan, you know you probably won't see stuff like that. That's one of the things I like about his filmmaking style. Less is more, and sometimes showing nothing is more powerful than showing something.

DP: Except for Eastwood's girlfriend's breasts... got it. And on that note, I guess we should chat more tomorrow and see if we can find a guest or two
Any last words for me to chew on?

JW: This was not like Pauline Kael debating Otis Ferguson. It was Beavis and Butthead.

DP: If the icons fit.