Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Scott Hicks’ Shine (1996).
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.
Neither the press nor public screenings have yet begun, but indieWIRE reports that there have already been two sales here at the Sundance Film Festival. 
