Jeffrey Wells is a film critic who runs a blog that some people seem to read. Earlier this year, he got some attention for suggesting that Amy Schumer couldn’t realistically play a romantic lead because of her weight; “there’s no way she’d be an object of heated romantic interest in the real world,” he wrote. A few years ago, he begged a director for stills of a female star’s topless scene.
Two days ago, he went to an advanced screening of The Revenant, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a wilderness frontiersman trying to survive after being left for dead by his hunting team. Here’s what he had to say:
When people responded to his tweet by calling it sexist and misogynistic, Wells took to his blog, penning a post he titled “Getting Clubbed Again By P.C. Twitter Goons Over Four Words.” If that sounds like a heartfelt apology, it’s not.
“Agreed — I shouldn’t have said that,” he wrote, before qualifying his tweet. Apparently, Wells saw the film with two women who reacted “quite viscerally.” One of the women was being “such a total candy-ass that I nudged her a couple of times,” and the other called the film “brutal.” Also, a guy he knows said the movie would “totally freak his wife out.” “What would you be thinking?” Wells asked.
Well, Wells, one might think that taking the experience of two women, adding the insights of guy making assumptions about his wife, and then spinning that into a gross generalization about all women doesn’t make much sense.
