The Jeffrey Wells Thread

[matrixschmatrix]

My god, that's sociopathic. Is there anyone actually paying this dude, or is he just some idiot with a website at this point?

[Professor Wagstaff]

Wait, when did Glenn Kenny reach the level of total dismissal?

[Perkins Cobb]

When he started devoting more space to Jeffrey Wells, his close personal friendship with David Foster Wallace, and his days as a wannabe porn hanger-on than to movies?

[warren oates]

Glenn Kenny has a big personality like Wells. But that's about the only thing they have in common. Unlike Wells, Glenn has no problem admitting when he's wrong, for one biggie. Another is that, unlike Wells, he's not a creepy lecher -- he just plays one in Soderbergh films. And yeah, so he happens to occasionally discuss the few famous people he's met and worked with over the years. He's by no means a name dropper. The blog is freewheeling and personal. It's not all about movies all the time any more than Jim Emerson's blog is. I've been reading Kenny for years and I post comments now and then. There's a particularly fun thread right now about your most uncomfortable or inappropriate viewing experience with any given combination of sexy/violent film + disapproving friends/relatives.

[Perkins Cobb]

I don’t know why, exactly, I was the World’s Worst Telemarketer; even in my early twenties I had a relatively pleasant, resonant speaking voice, and I could read from a script like nobody’s business, way better than the other doofuses who would start off on the wrongest foot, ending their intros with a question mark. But I couldn’t sell worth shit. I don’t know if my delivery lacked the requisite sincerity; maybe I read from the script too well.

It was somewhere around there that I deleted my bookmark. Should've done it sooner.

There's a particularly fun thread right now about your most uncomfortable or inappropriate viewing experience with any given combination of sexy/violent film + disapproving friends/relatives.

Of course, we've had that here for years.

[warren oates]

I don't even know why I feel compelled to become the Glenn Kenny apologist du jour, but I guess I'm not getting your vitriol Perkins. If he just didn't matter at all to you, you wouldn't have mentioned him here or compared his Internet offerings unfairly the the stuff that Wells spouts. That quote you cherry picked from GK was meant to illustrate what exactly? That he can be self-indulgent? Too personal? Too not remotely about movies? Just boring? I don't mind Kenny's sometimes rambling style. I find him more human and self-deprecating than you do, I guess, willing as he has been in the past to grapple publicly with his issues of sobriety, weight, depression, unemployment . And I certainly don't fault him for not having originated every possible film-related discussion before the collective minds of the CF. Even if you don't believe his work is actively enriching the discussion of film on-line, like I still do, it's a stretch to say he's degrading the discourse in the way that Wells so often does.

[Perkins Cobb]

That quote you cherry picked from GK was meant to illustrate what exactly? That he can be self-indulgent? Too personal? Too not remotely about movies? Just boring?

Very well put, but how about "narcissistic to the point of parody"?

However I'll agree, for what it's worth, that Kenny is less useless than Jeffrey Wells, by a wide margin. (And he's free to appropriate that as a pull quote for his blog.)

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

My god, that's sociopathic. Is there anyone actually paying this dude, or is he just some idiot with a website at this point?

This is actually something I've wondered about. The guy goes to Cannes every year (and never shares a room with anyone, IIRC), and a month back he was seriously contemplating spending $1,500 to go to the New York Film Festival just to see Life of Pi a couple of months early. Money is obviously not a problem, even though he just does the blog full-time. Can that really all be ad revenue? A massive inheritance? Canny investments? Generous divorce settlement?

[bainbridgezu]

We should all lay off Jeffrey Wells, the man's got problems: three-combs-in-his-pocket problems. Quoted, to avoid directing further traffic to his site:

Since my mid teens I've always carried at least two combs and occasionally three. I never want to walk around with just one comb because if I lose that I'm fresh out, hence the two-comb rule. But I don't even want to be faced with a two comb situation because if I lose one then I'm down to one so it's better, really, to have three. Then if I lose one I at least have two left.

Sociopath? Zero? Nay, this man is a great, suffering saint, and our truest philosopher.

[matrixschmatrix]

What on earth? Is there a context for that? Is he OCD?

[The Narrator Returns]

We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I... oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time. You couldn't get white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...

[Gregory]

He's showing a real mastery of zen: getting better at writing about film by not writing about film, and achieving a state of "no mind".

[CSM126]

What on earth? Is there a context for that? Is he OCD?

It ain't easy maintaining that Honky Tonk Man hair-do.

[Jeff]

It ain't easy maintaining that Honky Tonk Man hair-do.

His vanity does not allow him to change his photo on the banner at the top of his page. That pic is about 15 years old. He's been using it since he wrote for Mr. Showbiz. He's in his mid-60s now. When I read his Andy Rooney rants I always imagine this pic Glenn Kenny took of him at Cannes a few years ago. This pic may also explain why he now carries multiple combs.

[domino harvey]

Is that his Roger Rees expression?

[whaleallright]

I'd always assumed, based on a few excerpts of Wells's ::ahem:: prose than was quoted here and elsewhere (I've never felt the need to actually visit his website), that he was a callow young man whose cockiness and ignorance would perhaps subside with time. That picture really changes things.

[zedz]

Has nobody told him that you're supposed to use the combs one at a time?

[Perkins Cobb]

I'd always assumed, based on a few excerpts of Wells's ::ahem:: prose than was quoted here and elsewhere (I've never felt the need to actually visit his website), that he was a callow young man whose cockiness and ignorance would perhaps subside with time. That picture really changes things.

It was probably mentioned (ahem) elsewhere in the preceding SIX pages, but Wells's schtick is very much that of the cranky, (racist/classist) old man, never more than in his battle with the "hispanic party elephants" who lived in the apartment above him:

People with a little class and breeding and a college degree don't tend to be as noisy or boisterous or loutish as the commoners, cretins, galumphs, bad dressers, etc. The lower end of the gene pool. T'was ever thus.

[Jeff]

Wells in on a roll today. He reviews Ken Burns' The Central Park Five and blames the victim for being raped:

Why the hell was the victim, Trisha Meili, jogging in the vicinity of 102nd street on a dark road inside the park around 10:30 pm? I know New York City and that is flat-out insane. A sensible single woman shouldn't jog in Central Park after dusk, period, much less above 96th street, much less above friggin' 100th street. The only thing she didn't do was drape a sign over her jogging outfit that said "attack me." Everybody knows you don't tempt fate like that. And no one in the film, not a single soul, even mentions this.

[mfunk9786]

Ugh ugh ugh

[zedz]

Surely somebody is up to taking that godawful Cannes photo and adding an "Attack Me!" sign to his festival ID?

[domino harvey]

Wells weighs in on To the Wonder

To The Wonder doesn’t precisely fart in your face. It leads you rather to wonder what the air might be like if you’ve just cut one in a shopping mall and there’s someone right behind you, downwind.

Stay classy!

[tenia]

I don't know if it's due to his history, but having read his review, I instantly wondered how a professionnal critic can write such an awful critic.
Not saying that you cannot dislike what Malick is doing. It's just that his arguments makes me simply wonder why he went to the screening.
His critic is just lacking the "worst movie ever" sentence at the end.

[peerpee]

It's like Andrew Dice Clay is now reviewing films.

[criterion10]

Despite Friedkin personally confirming to Wells on twitter that Sorcerer is to be shown at 1.85:1, Wells still insists that 1.66:1 is better, for no other reason than that he feels the film breathes better.