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

What’s going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Che? Heard anything recently? I haven’t seen any hard news published in any half-way reputable outlet since Cannes (aside from this report from IndianTelevision.com that Che will soon premiere on––wait for it––Indian television, but the film’s international release has never been in doubt). But that hasn’t put an end to the speculation.

On June 14, Jeff Wells did a post based on a conversation a friend of his had with some other guy who’s “familiar with the comings and goings of” Wild Bunch, the sales agency who funded Che and have been looking for a buyer for it since Berlin. The gist, as Wells passes it along through the various degrees of distance, is that Wild Bunch has given up trying to sell the current cut to a U.S. distributor, and Soderbergh’s too busy shooting his next movie to worry about refining his cut, and everyone’s just sort of shrugging their shoulders and cutting their losses.

I didn’t come across this story until today, when I finally decided to do some digging on a rumor I heard about the film last month when I was in Las Vegas. …Read more

When I read that Patrick Goldstein, author of the L.A. Times column The Big Picture, was launching a new blog under the auspices of the paper, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think the exact thought that popped into my head was something along the lines of, “Oh hey! He likes to package pseudo-populist opinion as though it’s unimpeachable fact––he’ll fit right in!”

But the rest of the internet is, like, freaking out. Shoutcasting the story as “BREAKING” news, FishbowlLA went on to relate that the Times plans to put “Goldstein’s knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.” Finally, a “responsible” corrective for our chaos!

But all meta-commentary on this issue of international importance pales in comparison to the hundreds of words put forth by Jeffrey Wells. …Read more

If my Twitter stream is to be believed, I was the only female, 20-something writer in New York City who was NOT invited to the Sex and the City premiere last night. (Could it have been because of this? Or this? Or this? Hmmm.) Certainly, each picture Julia Allison staged at the event offers up at least 1,000 word on the matter, but who has time to do all that reading? Jeff Wells‘ take is much more succinct:

The film is another Taliban recruitment film — a grotesque and putrid valentine to the insipid “me, my lifestyle, my accessories and I” chick culture of the early 21st Century. Guys everywhere — if you’re in a brand-new relationship, take her to see this thing. If she even half-likes it, dump her and walk away cold. Save yourself!

Funny side note: I remember the moment when, as a senior in college, I decided that I could no longer in good conscience watch Sex and the City. It was, I think, the premiere of the first season to air after 9/11, and there was a scene where Carrie announced that she was going to help rebuild downtown by going shopping. It was such a direct aping of George W. Bush’s commerce-as-opiate for the troubled masses prescriptive of the time that it seemed like the ultimate sign that the show had cut loose the thread of critique that once seemed to be woven into its pornographic depiction of excessive consumption.

We obviously couldn’t have hoped that the movie would have transcended the worst aspects of the show––at least, not after having heard Fergie’s theme song––but I honestly didn’t think it was going to go as far as this, to become the embodiment of not just what *I* hate, but Why They Hate Us.

It may seem a bit early to write 1700+ words on the greatness of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara epic, especially without having actually seen the films (titled The Argentine and Guerrilla), but that couldn’t stop Jeff Wells from contributing such a piece to The Huffington Post yesterday. At least the guy has read the screenplays, both penned by Peter Buchman, but otherwise it’s all a lot of confident speculation and hopeful anticipation, particularly for Benicio Del Toro’s performance, which Wells is sure will be garner Oscar talk (didn’t the casting alone garner such talk two years back?):

With Benicio del Toro, the moody and mesmerizing Marlon Brando-ish actor whose work keeps getting deeper and more fascinating, all but certain to stir Oscar talk for his performance as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the legendary Argentine/Cuban firebrand. Even if the Che movies turn out to be problematic, Del Toro can’t not whip ass. He’s too strange, too gifted. Guevara is too perfect a role for him. All the stars and planets are aligned.

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Esquire has published a piece of “reported fiction” called “The Last Days of Heath Ledger,” in which GOLF Magazine editor (!) Lisa Taddeo, writing in the voice of Ledger from beyond the grave, imagines how the actor spent his final days before overdosing on prescription medication in January. Inspired journalistic risk taking or tasteless garbage? Well, Glenn Kenny won’t honor this “loathsome stunt” with the compliment of a link. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wells, repeatedly justifying the story as an ancestor to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, essentially accuses his commenters who find it distasteful of hating: “All bold ideas are tut-tutted by the tut-tutters.” Tut. Tut.

I tried to read the story in order to make up my own mind, but I couldn’t get past the third sentence––something about the idea of a writer imagining a dead celebrity talking about how often he masturbated before his accidental death got blocked by my puke filter, I guess. If you are of stronger constitution, you’ll find it here.

I try not to get involved in inter-blog fighting, but there’s a rumble happening right now that’s just a little too weird to ignore. I’m trying to follow all of this based on Kate Coe and Mayrav Saar’s coverage at FishbowlLA. I’m still a little fuzzy as to how Fishbowl got involved, but they’ve been publishing an email back-and-forth between film bloggers Nikki Finke, David Poland and Jeffrey Wells that’s shaping up to be the cattiest thing I’ve ever seen.

It looks like it all started when Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere sent an email to Nikki Finke, to “congratulate” her for winning an LA Press Club award. The email started out like this:

Congrats — good for you, good work, hats off. That said, I have to say I’m detecting a culture of clubbiness among the winners. I get the feeling they’ve all hung and schmoozed with each other (or with LAPC board members) all year at various drinky LAPC gatherings.

Finke responded (all lower and uppercase hers):

your email wound up in my spam folder. i’ve never socialized with one member of the LA Press Club. i’ve never even met a single member. no one i know belongs to the LA Press Club. my understanding from my own newspaper is that the club itself does NOT judge the entries. i was told they send out the entries to another major press club who judges it.

Then David Poland got involved, sending an email (to Finke? to Saar?) seconding Wells’ “congratulations”. It read in part:

Considering the lame field of people who were entered in the contest, Nikki had to win. [...] Congrats! One-eyed woman, kingdom of the blind, etc; you are truly the queen of the local newspaper movie gossips!!!

Poland and Wells are clearly just getting catty because they, Finke’s fellow L.A.-based entertainment journalists, were both ignored by the Press Club. At some point, Finke apparently sent an email to the LA Press Club, complaining that other local bloggers were trying to slander their awards. FishbowlLA then published two missives from members of the club, both strenuously denying any kind of voting irregularities, and emphasizing that Finke couldn’t have gotten “drinky” with the voters, because each press club’s awards are decided by press club members in other towns. Cue David Poland:

If I was a judge in some other city and got a dozen (if that) submissions on film, I would certainly think Nikki the most entertaining by a landslide… so long as you don’t know the film business, which judges from other cities do not…Enjoy your award, Nikki. You’re the most popular car wreck in town not directed by Michael Bay. Now, go back to beating up Terry Semel on your gossip blog because some idiot friend of yours is jealous of him and doesn’t realize that Yahoo! was near death when he took over and that he is the only reason the company is at all competitive with Google.

This, apparently, was too much for Wells, who mentioned on his own site earlier this week that Poland gives him a “I’m looking at you but I don’t see you because you don’t exist” look” whenever they meet.

I realized some years ago that the only action I could take that would truly satisfy you as far as my HE jottings were concerned would be to drink hemlock or do a swan dive in front of a moving bus. All I know is, you could have been a little nicer about this.

Where’s this torrid little skerfuffle gonna go next? I know two things to be true: 1) when Saar sums it all up by saying, “This is the equivalent of watching other people’s parents fight,” she’s* totally right; and 2) The HE commenter who says he’d cast Russell Crowe and James Gandolfini as Wells and Poland in the movie of this is on to something. How about Gena Rowlands as Nikki Finke?

*added an “s” in order to connote the appropriate gender.