Day: December 15, 2015

N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby on The Empire Strikes Back, posted on 6.15.80: “The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It’s a nice movie. It’s not, by any means, as nice as Star Wars. It’s not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it’s also silly. Attending to it is a lot like reading the middle of a comic book. It is amusing in fitful patches but you’re likely to find more beauty, suspense, discipline, craft and art when watching a New York harbor pilot bring the Queen Elizabeth 2 into her Hudson River berth, which is what The Empire Strikes Back most reminds me of. It’s a big, expensive, time-consuming, essentially mechanical operation.

“Gone from The Empire Strikes Back are those associations that so enchanted us in Star Wars, reminders of everything from the Passion of Jesus and the stories of Beowulf and King Arthur to those of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, the Oz books, Buck Rogers and Peanuts. Strictly speaking, The Empire Strikes Back isn’t even a complete narrative. It has no beginning or end, being simply another chapter in a serial that appears to be continuing not onward and upward but sideways. How, then, to review it?

“The fact that I am here at this minute facing a reproachful typewriter and attempting to get a fix on The Empire Strikes Back is, perhaps, proof of something I’ve been suspecting for some time now. That is, that there is more nonsense being written, spoken and rumored about movies today than about any of the other so-called popular arts except rock music. The Force is with us, indeed, and a lot of it is hot air.

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HE is hereby requesting readers to send in their personal 2015 Top Ten list right away. Forget awards season babble, forget the Gurus or Gold Derby, forget what the critics groups have said — just list your straight-from-the-heart preferences. HE reader Adam Lapish has offered to collate all of the info, assign points based on rankings and then tabulate the definitive Hollywood Elsewhere Top Ten from a pure and unsullied quality perspective mixed with spiritual advisories from the Movie Godz. Once it’s all finished I’ll post the list as a sink-in thing that’ll hold for a day or so. The polling starts now and ends on Monday, January 4th. That’ll give everyone except for your proverbial spoiler whiners (i.e., those who wait weeks if not months to see movies in theatres) time to catch up.

I’ve just stored away “guys who sweat indoors” for future use. This is my line of country so hats off.

A guy I know actually said this morning that I was frittering away my time by re-watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens this evening at a Disney lot screening when I could be watching tonight’s Republican debate. Aside from no-brainer option of catching the debate when I get home…aaah, forget it. I have better things to do than watching these loco weeds.

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Nothing specific is revealed here but spoiler whiners will bitch anyway…just saying: Until this morning the review-embargo date for Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight was 12.21 — i.e., next Monday. But this morning Weinstein Co. reps called or mass-texted a bunch of trades and gave them the green light. Screen International‘s Tim Grierson ran first with a review, followed by Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. And then all of them Rotten Tomatoes wordslingers jumped in. In my book that means HE is good to go also, right? Except I’ve been taken by surprise. I got nothin’, ma. Haven’t written a damn thing. 12.21 isn’t for another five and a half days.

So I’ll just say this: The Hateful Eight is, as Kohn says, more or less Reservoir Dogs meets Django Unchained but it’s mainly about archetypal flavor and macho swagger, archetypal flavor and macho swagger and more archetypal flavor and macho swagger. Which is what you always get from Tarantino, and why his films have continued to be popular. Because people like that shit. They revel in QT’s patented, talky, menacing-fellows-doing-a-slow-boil thing.

And with the exception of what struck me as needlessly repetitive sadistic beatings of Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s outlaw character, The Hateful Eight delivers a relatively engaging (and sometimes more than relatively) first two-thirds. If you have a place in your head for this kind of thing, I mean. Which I do to some extent. I was a big fan during Tarantino’s ’90s heyday, I mean, and I can still find ways of succumbing to his material as long as I use a filter, although I started to tune out bigtime with the Kill Bill films and came back in only briefly with Death Proof.

The Hateful Eight serves a nice warm bowl of Tarantino soup. A sense of place and mood and attitude that feels relatively well developed and whole. You get beautiful-as-far-it-goes Ultra Panavision 70 photography. You get tasty, savory performances from Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell and Walton Goggins in particular. You get about 45 minutes of snowblindy outdoor footage followed by two-plus hours inside a large, shadowy one-room cabin (i.e., Minnie’s haberdashery). You get a “Lincoln letter” that delivers a sense of morality and decency in the world beyond and a suggestion that lingering Civil War-era hate and prejudices are likely to erode. And a lotta boom boom boom.

You’re sitting there watching this Tarantino thing and you’re also saying to yourself “Yup, this is definitely a Tarantino thing.” You know what it’s more or less gonna be (including a fair amount of violence and blood), and it more or less does that.

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This is not a mini-review but an acknowledgement that last night’s post-premiere tweets didn’t lie: Nothing more to say until the embargo breaks tonight (or technically tomorrow) at 12:01 am, but rest assured Star Wars: The Force Awakens hit the sweet spot with an overwhelming majority of last night’s premiere-attenders. Two or three guys were “meh”-ing it but everyone else was happy. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega (no longer a sanitation engineer in my head but a kind of a young and beautiful Muhammad Ali with drillbit eye contact and lightning-fast emotional reflexes) hit the pitches over and over with a nice clean crack-of-the-bat. Pic whooshes and soars and skims along in a super-efficient and “fan-friendly” way — you’d have to be some kind of committed shithead to put it down with any conviction. The premiere itself wasn’t a clusterfuck after all — huge but nicely handled — hats off to Disney. It felt cold as a witch’s tit in Chicago last night — windy, blustery. Even inside the big party tent. But the piping-hot mashed potatoes were delicious.

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