Jeffrey Wells

I’ve been assuming all along that Olivia Wilde‘s The Invite (A24, 6.26), which exploded last month during Park City’s final Sundance Film Festival, would play during Cannes ’26. All those European critics champing at the bit…they’d have to show it, right? But Jordan Ruimy informs that A24 is saying “no more festivals.” But there will certainly be Cannes market screenings, I’m figuring. I’ll find my way into one of them.

Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz (’79) is a dazzler in several respects, but it keeps pushing the coy cynicism button…over and over and over. It walks and talks big-city sophistication within a very narrow lane, but it’s essentially aimed at the rubes.

Roy Scheider gave a career-peak performance as Broadway musical director Joe Gideon, whose story was modelled on Fosse’s own in the early ’70s. And yes, Jazz impressed me the first time (the Manhattan press screening was at Cinema 1). But it irked me the second time. When I caught it a third time on DVD (I love the early dance-audition sequence) I quit before the halfway mark. It over-emphasizes to a fault. Parts are ham-fisted and painfully un-hip, but it was quite the film of its day.

“Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease,” wrote critic Dave Kehr. “This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.”

Time‘s then-critic Frank Rich wrote that “as a showman, [Fosse] has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone.”

I interviewed Scheider in late ’81 or ’82 for Us magazine. We met at a coffee shop on Lexington, somewhere in the mid ’70s. He used to go there after his morning run. He was a good egg, an honest cat and a hard worker. Most actors don’t get to flourish with the kind or roles that Scheider was able to land from the early ’70s to the early ’80s.

If a dead celebrity is used for one of those nostalgic AI slop featurettes, he/she enters the frame with a pair of white feathered angel wings attached to his/her back. This one uses amber halos instead. There’s something vaguely creepy or even demonic about those feathers. They’re meant to convey a loving respectful attitude about the deceased, but to me they’re like a glimpse of the reaper. “They’re coming for you, Barbara…”

Even I, a non-sports fan from my mid-teen years onward, know who the great Bill Mazeroski was. The What’s My Line? clip (after the jump) reveals that Bill spoke with a West Virginia barnyard accent. Mazeroski passed yesterday at age 89.

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Sen. Jon Ossoff can’t compete with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s rhetorical ease, balls and all-around charisma, but he has a solid honest center. He strikes me as well-grounded.

HE is a sensible centrist, but in the above context my closest allegiance is with the “abundance libs.”

The odious implications of modern advertising were explored in Adam Curtis’s The Century of the Self (‘02), a landmark doc with laser-like insights into a few bizarre corners of the human psyche.

This reminds me of a certain legendary ad copy line for Clairol hair coloring…a line that came from the contours and tendencies of the culture of the mid to late ‘50s but finally broke through in the first year of the Kennedy administration.

Tom Wolfe nailed it in his legendary 1976 essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

In 1961 a copywriter in the employ of Foote, Cone & Belding named Shirley Polykoff came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!”

The basic attitude of having “only one life,” said Wolfe, contradicted a general belief among families and nations that had existed for centuries, which you could sum up as a belief in “serial immortality.”

Boiled down, serial immortality means that we’re all part of a familial stream — our lives being a completion or fulfillment of our parents’ lives and our children’s lives completing and fulflling our own, and everyone understanding that we’re part of the same genetic river of existence and spirit.

Polykoff’s copy line basically said “the hell with that — it’s just me, it’s just my life and my goals, and I’m going to satisfy myself!”

By the time the early ’70s rolled around the culture had begun to believe in the “me first” philosophy en masse.

And then, exactly ten years after Polykoff’s brainwave, came Erhard Seminars Training (EST).

And then, in ‘77, along came Michael Ritchie‘s Semi Tough, a satire of the human potential movement and, really, the whole damn ‘70s decade.

That completely aside, the 1970s were arguably the greatest nookie decade in the history of Western civilization, and they’ll never, ever return. That was then, this is now.

HE-posted on 1.25.09: When the Changeling Bluray pops on 2.17.09, drinking games will commence nationwide. One swig all around whenever Angelina Jolie says “I want my son back!” Double swigs all around when she says “that’s not my son!”

Clint Eastwood‘s drama opened theatrically on 5.20.08.

This hilarious John Carpenter interview happened during the filming of Halloween in May 1978. “Hilarious” because of Carpenter’s reaction to the interviewer mentioning the avant- garde, envelope-pushing nature of Robert Altman‘s Nashville (’75).

Go to the :39 mark — Carpenter’s eyebrows arch dramatically as his eyelids briefly close. In his eyes and eyebrows, Altman is a dead man.

Differing HE opinion: I agree with Carpenter about Nashville, but there’s just no slagging Altman’s M.A.S.H., McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, The Long Goodbye and The Player. You can’t dismiss these five…verboten.

The most recent HE Nashville put-down piece was posted on 7.8.25.

N.Y. Times, 2.19.26, reported by Ashey Ahn: “The banners follow a string of efforts by the administration to emblazon the president’s name and face on everything from coins to national park passes.

“Such displays are more often a feature of countries run by dictators, not democratically elected leaders.

“‘This is not just egotistical self-satisfaction…it’s a way of expanding presidential power,” Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, told The Times recently. “A president is more powerful, I assume he believes, if he is ever-present than if he keeps his head down.”

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I was an ardent lefty for so much of my life and such a good malcontent in so many ways (anti-authoritarian, irreverent, iconoclastic), and when I first saw Hal Ashby‘s Coming Home at Manhatttan’s Magno Screening Room in January ’78…well, that movie just poured right into me, and I sank into it right back.

I felt moved and melted down, and was nodding in recognition at so much of what it was saying…I felt so emotionally caught up during Jon Voight‘s big speech to those high-school kids at the end. And the late ‘60s soundtrack.

I wound up seeing Coming Home three or four times after it opened on 2.15.78, and felt so enthused when Voight and Jane Fonda won Best Actor and Best Actress Oscars, and Waldo Salt and Robert C. Jones won for Best Original Screenplay.

My Bluray version of Hal Ashby’s best film is sitting on the bookshelf in the living room, but I haven’t popped it in for a few years. Being a lefty was such a different thing back then. I was such a whole-hearted believer. It’s hard to accept that early ’78 was nearly a half-century ago.