Hollywood Elsewhere

  • Presumably Freaked About Facing The Cameras, Nick Reiner Ducks Arraignment

    The self-loathing, emotionally destroyed, psychologically torn-and-frayed Reiner will face arraignment on 1.7.26.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Giorgio Baldi Haunting

    When Rob Reiner, Conan O’Brien and Martin Short were schmoozing, eating and drinking at Giorgio Baldi back in ’22, they hadn’t a glimmer of what the future might bring. They suspected this or that but knew nothing. No idea that Trump would be re-elected in ’24, much less that tragedy would befall Reiner in early December of ’25.

    Life is so much better and more soothing when you’re Giorgio Baldi-ing rather than grappling with the hard, thorny, oh-my-God stuff.

    Posted yesterday by X17onlineVideo:

    I’ve eaten at Giorgio Baldi twice…no, three times. The first time was 15 years ago with Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal (Zero Dark Thirty was years off at the time). Clint Eastwood and Sean Penn were sharing an indoor table. Three or four years later I ate there on my own dime, and then returned again in ’16 or thereabouts. It’s pricey but excellent. The Dover Sole is heavenly — moist and light, bursting with flavor, sprinkled with lime.

    But I’ll tell you one thing. If I was rich or famous enough to have a security guy with me, and if he were to gently place his hand on my back as I stepped into the waiting SUV, I would probably stop and turn around and ask, “Why are you putting your hand on my back?”

    Security: Sir?
    HE: Why did you place your hand on my back as I was stepping into the car?
    Security: We’re just here for you, sir. No issues.
    HE: What are you trying to do, guide me into the car?
    Security: Just an instinct, sir. We’re right behind you.
    HE: I know you’re right behind me, but don’t touch me.
    Security: Sorry.
    HE: It’s okay. Just don’t do it.
    Security: Okay. Understood.
    HE: I’ve been stepping into SUVs all my life.
    Security: Of course.
    HE: I’m sure you’re a good man.
    Security: I try to be.
    HE: And you are.
    Security: Yes sir.
    HE: Okay, good.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Effing Spielberg Face

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Anxiety For The Effing Holidays

    HE has yet to endure Michael Showalter‘a Oh. What. Fun. (Amazon/MGM, 12.3). Dynamic casting (Michelle Pfeiffer, Felicity Jones, Chloë Grace Moretz, Denis Leary, Dominic Sessa, Jason Schwartzman, Eva Longoria, Joan Chen) but saddled with 30something ratings on RT, Metacritic. Set in Texas but shot in Atlanta, the Wiki synopsis suggests a mulchy, boilerplate, home-for-the-holidays, quirky-family-conflict thang.

    We all understand that ensemble family dramedies are politically obliged to include at least one gay couple and at least one ethnic character (and preferably two or three), and so the producers have naturally gone there. Moretz, Pfeiffer’s middle daughter, plays the principal gay standard-bearer, but her latest girlfriend (Devery Jacobs) dumps her halfway through. Chen is apparently the senior designated Asian — her family mermbers include two sons (Michael Lee Kimel, Zac Oyama) and a daughter (Elizabeth Lilyan Wood).

    For what it’s worth Pfeiffer, born during the second term of Dwight D. Eisenhower, looks pretty good for her age.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • I Don’t Even Want To See “Avatar: Fire and Ash”

    I know it’ll “satisfy” by the usual knockout Cameron standards, but I really, really don’t want the effing Navi re-invading my head just now. Thanks all the same but no thanks. I’m sick of it all.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Did The Infamous Larry Smith Re-Colorize Thhis?

    What’s wrong with this nearly 60-years-old, behind-the-scenes photo of the Elstree Studios filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey?

    I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. The padded slipcover of the king-sized bed as well as the fabric upholstery on the 18th Century chair are the wrong color — muddy canppuccino brown. They should be soft green.

    One immediately wonders if the Criterion vandal-beast Larry Smith had something to do with this. If it wasn’t Smith himself who injected the brown, it was certainly the fault of what we can now call a Larry Smith virus.

    Smith’s legacy is irrevocably that of a visual liar, a flim-flammer — a guy who injected teal poisoning into the general color scheme of Criterion’s 4K Nluray of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Mr. Freeze Outside My Door

    I can handle cold temps in the low 40s and 30s, but forget the 20s and don’t even mention the teens. And no wind, for God’s sake! Half the time I dream about living in Key West or, better yet, Cuba or Belize or Turks and Caicos. I hate windy cold. Stuff of nightmares.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Gaudy, Intravenous Feminist Trash

    From Owen Gleiberman‘s obliging, carefully phrased review of Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid (Lionsgate, 12.19):

    “The Housemaid [is] a movie of diabolical developments, and that’s what’s captivating about it. That, and Elizabeth Perkins’ droll performance as a mother-in-law from WASP hell, and the fact that in following the ins and outs that made the novel such a hit, the film creates an ideology of male-female relationships that’s at once timely, glibly mythological, and born to be milked by a Hollywood thriller.

    “There’s a note of pop sadism at work in the material; The Housemaid features scenes of people terrorizing each other in violently gaudy ways. Yet the scenes don’t feel exploitative, because they express the characters’ drives, and the audience is hanging on the outcome. In the thick of awards season, when those of us in the media are busy nattering on about prestige films, this is the kind of stylishly tricky high-trash movie that can steal some of the limelight.

    “Wealthy White Husband Is A Shithead….Shocker!“, posted on 3.22.25:

    Indications are that Paul Feig‘s The Housemaid (Lionsgate, 12.19), based on Freida McFadden‘s three-year-old novel, a feminist potboiler that has since grown into a multi-book franchise, is going to be a bit of a groaner…perhaps even a forehead-slapper.

    All feminist airport fiction is based upon a single premise, which is that the principal male character is a toxic piece of shit who has made his own bed and deserves all the bad karma that’s sure to come his way.

    It certainly seems unlikely that Feig’s film will deliver the intrigue and complexity of Im Sang-soo‘s The Housemaid (’10), which I recall as being half-decent.

    Both versions have vaguely similar plots with the husband banging (or at least looking to bang) the housemaid, and the wife freaking out and the usual blowback kicking in.

    The Housemaid costars Sydney Sweeney as the titular character; Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar (the bearded, nice-guy suitor in It Ends With Us) are her wealthy employers.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • Reiner’s Decade-Long Hot Streak

    In the wake of Rob and Michele Reiner‘s horrifying murder last Saturday night, the emotional climate is such that I can’t post an honest career assessment piece about Rob without getting kicked, beaten and spat upon.

    But from HE’s personal perspective Reiner certainly delivered four unqualified, adult-level, middle-class humdingers over a period of six years — When Harry Met Sally… (’89), Misery (’90), A Few Good Men (’92) and The American President (’95).

    His peak period basically ran from the mid ’80s to the mid ’90s, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Reiner leapt upon a fast thoroughbred, and he just rode the whirlwind and grabbed a few brass rings and good on him for managing this hall-of-fame achievement.

    This Is Spinal Tap (’84) was funny-nervy and a good break-out film. I found The Sure Thing (’85) shallow, formulaic, sophmoric. I hated Stand By Me (’86), and I never felt all that charmed by The Princess Bride (’87). The unbeatable trio (Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men) was glorious, and then along came the rank embarassment that was North (’94). Reiner rebounded with The American President, and then he lost the magic mojo and hung on with this and that middling feature over the next 30 years. Okay, The Bucket List (’07) wasn’t too bad.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • More Shyamalan Than Spielberg

    No TV weather woman would freeze up like this, and the news show floor techs wouldn’t just stand there like frozen zombies. Seized by some kind of invisible force and not knowing why or how or anything, Emily Blunt would do her best to pretend that everything’s okay. She would improvise a little blah-blah, air some bullshit, etc.

    Where are the UFOs, and where’s Carlo Rimbaldi when we really need him?

    Read more

    Jeffrey Wells

  • The Courage To Act Without A Driver At The Wheel

    Jessie Buckley: “It’s chaos. But that’s our job.”

    Colin Farrell: “To be in the mess. To lean into the mystery.”

    Buckley: “The more I do this, the more I realize the job is to become more human. Take your hands off the steering wheel. How do you…?”

    Farrell: “Drive hands-free? Foot on the gas.”

    Buckley: “Waymo.”

    Farrell: “Every time I see one of those…oh my God. Well done, humans! There’ll be 50,000 drivers unemployed within the next two years. Well done.”

    — from Variety‘s latest “Actors on Actors,” 10.16.25.

    Jeffrey Wells

  • The “In The Bedroom” Solution

    Sources have told People that Nick Reiner was allegedly acting erratically with guests at Conan O’Brien‘s Christmas party last Saturday night. Source: “Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous.”

    Us Weekly was told that the 32 year-old drug-susceptible asshole behaved “creepily” at O’Brien’s soiree, while a third insider told TMZ that Nick looked out of place at the party, wearing a hoodie when the dress code was formal.

    And yet the prevailing view among comment-thread predators in yesterday’s “Odious Aftermath” discussion was that if an obviously disturbed youth is fated to kill his or her parents, it’s better for the parents to just say “okay, we accept this…bring it on”.

    
    I was in a not-great, probably-going-nowhere place for a certain period in my early to mid 20s, but writing and journalism gradually lifted me out of that hole. Maybe a three-year period, give or take. Okay, call it four years. Hell, make it five.
    
    I just barely crawled out of that attitude, that downward swirl kind of life, but while I was “under the weather” I could feel the weight of my vague gloom getting a bit worse each succeeding year.
    
    Yes, I was drinking and drugging back then (pot, speed, Coors beer and Jack Daniels-and-ginger-ale were my constant companions, my beloved hermanos) but not — or so I’ve long told myself — to the point of any kind of insane self-destructive addiction. Thank God I had a certain inner decency or resolution of some kind within…some kind of fortunate spiritual inheritance, probably from my mother’s side of the family. Call it luck or God’s grace.
    
    But to have lived in this kind of sinkhole for 17 years like Nick Reiner apparently has?….for more than half of a 32-year span of life? Forget it. You’re sunk. I’ve seen and felt that downhead vibe in others who never found their way out of the pit…some who just couldn’t turn things around and make something good or half-promising happen.
    
    After 17 or so years of anguish Nick Reiner has finally found his catharsis. He’s murdered the people who brought him into this world and loved and nurtured him as best they could but ironically (or in Nick’s all-screwed-up head at least) never stopped making him feel depressed and enraged. He’s clearly a self-hater of epic proportions…a demonic figure.

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    Jeffrey Wells