Hollywood Elsewhere arrived in Santa Barbara around 5:30 pm, and is now residing in room #214 at the SB Holiday Inn. I can’t attend the opening-night screening of Mark Osborne‘s The Little Prince (sorry but I really can’t do animated) but I’ll be at the Arlington tomorrow night for the Modern Master Award presentation. The recipient will be Black Mass star Johnny Depp, who looks these days like Captain Jack’s slightly portly uncle. On Friday the American Riviera award will be presented to Spotlight‘s Micheal Keaton, Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams. The SBIFF’s Virtuoso award will be presented in Saturday to Elizabeth Banks (Love & Mercy), Paul Dano (Love & Mercy, Youth, that Sundance dead-guy-farting movie called Swiss Army Man), Joel Edgerton (Black Mass), O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton), Géza Röhrig (Son of Saul), Jacob Tremblay (Room) and Alicia Vikander (Danish Girl, Ex Machina). Sunday affords an opportunity to see Terrence Malick‘s Knight of Cups on the big Arlington screen. And on Monday Room‘s Brie Larson and Brooklyn‘s Saoirse Ronan will be honored with a special dual presentation of the Performer of the Year award, which will be moderated by Deadline‘s Pete Hammond. More to come later that week (Sly Stallone, Oscar-nominated directors tribute with Scott Feinberg) but this’ll do for now.

I don’t know what to do here. A Japanese Bluray of Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby‘s 1951 version of The Thing, one of my all-time default comfort films, pops on 2.26. From the RKO Collection, which is also issuing a Suspicion Bluray. I’ve never bought a Japanese Bluray before, but I’m sure the menu has an all-English option so what’s with the xenophobia? Exact same running time (87 minutes) as the 2005 Turner Home Entertainment DVD.

Comedy is tragedy that bends…right, Alan Alda? But something is telling me that an attempt to create humor out of the financial anxiety being endured by today’s 20somethings (which I’ve gotten a good taste of through my sons) with Miles “don’t be a pervert, man” Teller and Anna Kendrick…this feels like it may be a little short of Up In The Air when it comes to capturing the times.

Two days ago I praised FX’s The People vs. O.J. Simpson, which premiered last night, as one of the most arresting true-crime miniseries I’ve ever seen…bracing, crackerjack, really well acted, sharp writing, tightly cut,” etc. Yesterday N.Y. Times reviewer Danielle Henderson posted a response to last night’s debut episode that closely mirrors my own. What I’m looking for in particular are yea-nay reactions to Cuba Gooding‘s casting (i.e., not so much his performance) as O.J. Simpson. From my piece: “Cuba is too small. He looks older than O.J. did at the time. O.J. had relatively trim, clean features while Cuba looks weathered, saggy, baggy-eyed. Cuba has the wrong nose — OJ’s nose was straight, almost Romanesque. Cuba is whiny and raspy-voiced, his shoulders are too narrow and small, he’s too short and too wimpy. O.J. had a fairly deep and resonant voice plus largeness, presence, force. He was a formidable football guy. Cuba looks like his assistant, his trainer.”

The Coen bothers have a near-perfect track record. They’ve never made a “bad’ film, but once in a blue moon they don’t quite nail it. The Ladykillers, The Man Who Wasn’t There, arguably Raising Arizona. (I don’t agree with the alleged consensus view that Intolerable Cruelty is a stumble — I think it’s wall-to-wall hilarious.) In any event it gives me no pleasure (in fact it almost hurts) to report that another mitigated Coen misfire is now upon us. Hail, Caesar! (Universal, 2.5) is a zany re-imagining of early 1950s Hollywood that I loved in script form. This part is funny and that part is cool, but the whole never lifts off.

The smarty-pants dialogue has verve and flair. The attitudes, haircuts, costumes and production design are all aces. Pic has many elements, in fact, that are sharp and zippy and loads of fun (including a sailors-shipping-out dance number with Channing Tatum), but it’s spotty and slapdash. Something is missing. Yes, if you ease up on your Coen Bros. expectations Hail, Caesar! is agreeable enough. It’s not slop. It’s apparently much better than the other January and February openers playing right now.

“Why is this not coming together?” I said to myself during the pre-Sundance screening two and a half weeks ago. “The material works on paper and that the Coens are my favorite boys so what the fuck? C’mon, guys…get it together!” Hail, Caesar! is far from a trainwreck but at best it’s a 6.5 or 7. It’s supposed to be one of their knucklehead comedies but while it’s amusing here and there it’s never consistently funny in a follow-through, momentum-building sort of way.

Remember the inspired “Wheezy Joe” bit in Intolerable Cruelty (i.e., the gun mistaken for an inhaler)? There’s nothing in Caesar that comes close to that. If you ask me Inside Llewyn Davis — by any yardstick a downish, somber-attitude film — is funnier in its own studied way. John Goodman‘s back-seat performance as a junkie musician was a stone classic; ditto that “where’s his scrotum?” scene along with the moment when the amiable G.I. folk singer slurps the cereal milk. There are no bits or performances in Hail, Caesar! that deliver on this level.

Hail, Casear! is a satirical take on Hollywood culture around 1950 or ’51. It’s about real-life MGM general manager and vp Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) and how he deals with the kidnapping of Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), a Robert Taylor-like star during the filming of a Quo Vadis-like Biblical epic called Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ.

MINOR SPOILER WHINERS ALERT: The genius move, for me, is the Coen’s decision to not only cast lefty-commie screenwriters as the kidnappers but depict them as being in league with the Russians — a vision of subversion straight out of the HUAC playbook and the commie-hating minds of John Wayne, Cecil B. DeMille and Adolph Menjou.