It is a crime in this day and age not to occasionally check in on Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere, with topics ranging from billboard photos, blind item brunches and oddly angry political rants against apathetic teenagers.
Wells is a classic mix of online reactionary and keen insight, peppered with various “what the fuck” moments and the occasional non sequitur involving Paris Hilton and Al-Qaeda. To ring in the New Year, let’s take a quick look back at our favorite blogged remarks from the man who confused Mike D’Angelo with Ed Gonzalez, and whose random photos of restaurants and lawns oddly resemble–for lack of a better term–art. Also, any use of bold is for emphasis and my own editorial comments are in italics.
Happy New Year, Elephants
On New Year’s Eve, it sounds like Jeff was staying at a raucous party house in one of the Boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn? Who can tell these days.) Conditions were so bad that he was sadly driven to bar-hopping due to his neighbors:
I live below a family of animals — Hispanic party elephants — who stomp around and play music so loud that the building throbs and the plaster cracks. It’s a fairly safe bet they’re going to lose their minds tonight so I may as well just huddle down in the city and bounce around from bar to bar.
Follow-up in the comments from Wells:
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.
…Read more
In continuing to use his movie blog as a platform for Hillary Clinton hate wrapped in the thinest of pop cultural guises, is Jeffrey Wells doing some kind of brilliant, absurdist theater, or has the presidential election simply driven him insane? First, when Baby Mama was announced as the opening night film for the Tribeca Film Festival, Wells admitted “a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for [Tina] Fey’s Hillary shilling.” I went to SXSW and ignored Wells’ blog for a week; when I came back, I discovered a post titled “Funny Games = Hillary Campaign.” Note the lack of prevaricating question mark in the headline: this is an unequivocal statement.
So what’s Wells’ evidence that Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 thriller has anything materially or spiritually in common with the troubled campaign of the first serious female presidential candidate? It’s specious, of course––amongst other things, he notes that the antagonists played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett “are clearly monsters, a term that has recently been used to describe Senator Clinton by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power”; they and Hillary also have “similar” haircuts!––but Wells’ balls-out committment to his own craziness is, as always, engaging.
