I’ll be seeing Tony Gilroy and Gareth Edwards‘ Rogue One: The Cousins (Disney, 12.16) a week from Monday, or three days before it opens nationwide. Variety is reporting that the film recorded the second-highest first day of pre-sales in domestic box office history. The highest first day sale was earned by J.J. Abrams‘ Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That 2015 film opened last year to nearly $248 million. Rogue One is expected to take in more than $130 million upon opening day, Variety has speculated, or a little more than half of what Awakens pulled down.

Wikipedia says that Denzel Washington‘s first screen appearance (albeit uncredited) was in Michael Winner‘s Death Wish (’74), when he was around 19 or 20. The below YouTube clip and a still that I captured [after the jump] seems to bear this out. Denzel played an aggressive, non-verbal thug who was shot by Charles Bronson‘s Paul Kersey. His bio says his first TV appearance was in 1977’s The Wilma Rudolph Story and that his first noteworthy screen appearance in Carbon Copy (’81) with George Segal.

I’m fairly certain I’m going to hate Josh Gordon and Will Speck‘s Office Christmas Party (Paramount, 12.9), but I have to admit I found this wrestling clip moderately funny. Jennifer Aniston as the office bitch, Jason Bateman as the same restrained, dryly sardonic guy he always plays in comedies, and Silicon Valley‘s T. J. Miller as the employee-friendly idiot, Clay Vanstone. I’m sorry but I laughed, watched the clip twice, etc. The all-media Arclight screening happens on 12.6.

Snickering about the National Board of Review has been a media pastime for decades, but for the most part their annual award choices, to be fair, have been fairly wise and spot-on. Today the NBR guys announced their 2016 awards, and Kenneth Lonergan‘s Manchester By The Sea was far and away the big winner — Best Film, Best Actor (Casey Affleck), Best Original Screenplay (Lonergan) and Best Breakthrough Performance (Lucas Hedges). They also gave their Best Adapted Screenplay award to Silence, or more precisely to co-writers Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese. This in itself indicates that Silence might be a serious head-turner. Maybe. Here’s hoping.

Moonlight won two awards — Best Director (Barry Jenkins) and Best Supporting Actress (Naomie Harris). Hollywood Elsewhere respectfully disagrees with the NBR choosing Arrival‘s Amy Adams as Best Actress but whatever. Cheers to Jeff Bridges‘ gruff lawman turn in Hell or High Water, which resulted in the NBR’s Best Supporting Actor award. The Best Foreign Language award went to Asghar Farhadi‘s The Salesman — HE-approved. And Ezra Edelman‘s O.J.: Made in America won for Best Documentary — check.

The only head-scratcher was the NBR’s decision to give a Spotlight award to the “creative collaboration” of Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg, which is mainly a nod to the efficiently spot-on Patriot’s Day. What the NBR should have done was give Berg-Wahlberg a special award for the finest, most crazily chaotic and realistic shootout sequence in years.

In the print edition of an 11.17 Variety issue is a cartographical Rules Don’t Apply promotion — a map of Hollywood landmarks circa 1958, which is when most of the film unfolds. (The map is also on the Rules website.) Within a parapgraph about RKO Studios, which Howard Hughes (played by Warren Beatty in the film) owned from 1948 through ’55, Katharine Hepburn is mentioned. Unfortunately, the Rules map spells her first name as “Katherine,” a misspelling which Hepburn notoriously resented. It’s doubly unfortunate considering that Beatty, who directed and produced Rules, was a huge Hepburn fan who went to great lengths to persuade her to play a small supporting role in Love Affair (’94), which Beatty starred in (and was directed in-name-only by Glenn Gordon Caron). Mistakes happen, yes, and I don’t want to further darken the cloud that’s already hovering above Rules Don’t Apply, but if Hepburn is looking down from heaven, she’d definitely be annoyed.

Santa Barbara Film Festival honcho Roger Durling has gone all in on Denzel Washington. The Fences director-star will receive the Maltin Modern Master Award on Thursday, February 2nd at the 2017 Santa Barbara Film Festival (2.1 thru 2.11). This is tantamount to Durling placing a Nick the Greek-like bet on Washington’s shot at landing a Best Director or Best Actor Oscar, or Fences itself landing a Best Picture Oscar…who knows? When “Nick” bets, the elite award-season blogaroos listen, and they in turn pass their excitement along to Academy and guild members. SBIFF tributes always inject an aura of heft, esteem and good favor, and the Maltin is the SBIFF’s highest honor. It’ll be a hot time in Denzelville that night…wine, excitement, a knockout tribute reel, hail fellow well met, etc. The last time Hollywood Elsewhere witnessed a Denzel q & a in front of an audience was in December 2007 at Harvard University. The Santa Barbara event will be an even bigger lollapalooza.

By the rules of our electoral college system (i.e., not by the popular vote), Donald Trump was legitimately elected as the nation’s president on 11.8. But his cabinet nominees so far, a rogue’s gallery of repealers, deniers and roll-backers, are an echo of the hard-line Communist apparatchik attitude behind the 1991 coup d’etat in the Soviet Union — a severe pushback against the moderately liberal reforms of the Gorbachev era (glasnost). The forthcoming Trump program represents the last dying power grab of the white, nationalist, corporate-centric right — anti-liberal, Republican, climate-change-denying, xenophobic, obstinate, polluting, racist, odious. A current list of Trump’s proposed cabinet members seems nothing short of ghastly to anyone with a vaguely humanist, semi-progressive attitude. The latest blood-drainer is Health and Human Services nominee Tom Price, a six-term, arch-conservative Georgia congressman who apparently intends to repeal or significantly gut the Affordable Care Act. These are the dark times. The earth is weeping, in shock. Every day brings a new permutation of the nightmare.