“So Ben Carson opened the night with a moment of silence and then never really got out of it, except when he showed off everything he memorized from Wikipedia earlier in the week…Donald Trump thinks that the nuclear Triad is a Chinese gang in Los Angeles…Ted Cruz looks like a cross between Count Chocula and Joe McCarthy…Marco Rubio is a well-spoken young man, but he reminds me of Tracy Flick… Chris Christie needs to lose another hundred pounds to be just fat, but he’s real good at reminding us three hundred times that he was right friggin’ there to deal with 9/11…Jeb Bush, who is always being bitch-slapped by Donald Trump, reminds me of every uncool dad that ever lived.” — Rod Lurie‘s Facebook assessment of last night’s Republican debate.

For whatever reason there are no decent images of Lupita Nyong’o‘s Maz Kanata character — a kindly, wisdom-dispensing, Yoda-like character who fraternizes with the Star Wars underclass. Which is odd given that Maz is the most appealing newbie in Star Wars: The Force Awakens when you get past the three leads — Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac. The Yoda comparisons have arisen in that she’s short, hundreds of years old, animated (Lupita had to wear those CG facial sensor doo-dads) and highly perceptive. I would have liked to have seen more of her; perhaps Maz will figure more prominently in Rian Johnson‘s Episode VIII.

Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Paradine Case (’47) is a straightforward portrait of obsession and downfall. It’s a carefully measured, decorous, stiff-necked drama (handsomely produced by David O. Selznick) about a married, middle-aged attorney (a too-young Gregory Peck) who all but destroys himself when he falls in love with a femme fatale client (Alida Valli) accused of murdering her husband. A foolish love affair is one thing, but Peck’s exists entirely in his head as Valli isn’t the least bit interested and in fact is in love with Louis Jordan, whom she was seeing before her husband’s death. Not much of an entry point for a typical moviegoer, and not a lot to savor. It’s essentially a romantic triangle piece (Peck, Valli, Jordan) but you can’t identify or even sympathize with Peck as Valli is playing an absolute monster. But I’ve always respected the tragic scheme of it. By the second-to-last scene Peck’s humiliation is complete and absolute. I wouldn’t mind seeing this again, but it hit me this morning that there’s no Bluray and no high-def streaming. There are DVD versions available but for some reason somebody in the copyright food chain said no when a high-def version was considered.

I never got around earlier today to rough-drafting a review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. I was writing and doing other important stuff, and then I saw SW:TFA a second time tonight on the Disney lot. And now it’s almost midnight and I feel too shagged and fagged to bang out ten paragraphs. I conveyed my enthusiasm about it earlier today, mainly with that sentence about how “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.” As far as mainstream opinions go, I’m just like him and the same as you. I’m certainly not in the mood to piss on this film at all, mainly and entirely because there’s no reason to. It is what it is, and that’s perfectly fine.

The only beef I have is that The Force Awakens is more of a tribute reel or a greatest hits compilation of A New Hope than anything else. It skims and samples from Episode IV rather than picks up a shovel and digs into fresh soil for an original song of its own. And yet SW:TFA is really quite wonderfully assembled — I marvelled tonight at how every line, shot and scene fits together just so, and I was grinning again at the velocity of it all. I chuckled tonight at the same jokes and at a couple of new ones I missed the first time. It was all good, all pleasurable.

And I felt…well, I have to be honest and say that aside from a mild, cruise-control sense of diversion and wonder from time to time, I didn’t really feel a great deal as I watched this puppy. Not in the pit of my stomach or my soul, I didn’t. Because SW: TFA never tries to draw water from the deep well. I guess it’s a sign of the 4G times we live in that SW:TFA has no sequences in a meditative hanging-with-Yoda-on-planet-Dagobah vein. It’s in too much of a hurry for that kind of thing, and too eager to please those 16-and-unders who would probably feel a little bored by ominous forecasts about fate and spirit. This is an ADD Star Wars movie, but as good as this kind of thing gets.

The way it accelerates and pushes and tries like hell to ring the fan bell over and over and over is certainly commendable from a devotional point of view. J.J. Abrams really wants to turn people on with this thing, turn them on and make ’em smile, and the evidence that he’s succeeded is, I think, overwhelming at this point. There are hundreds of different ways this could have been less expert or audience-pleasing, and it dodges every one of them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bill Cosby today countersued seven of his alleged victims — Tamara Green, Therese Serignese, Linda Traitz, Louisa Moritz, Barbara Bowman, Angela Leslie and HE’s own Joan Tarshis, whom I’ve known since the late ’90s — over their recent defamation of character lawsuit related to drug rapes they all claim to have experienced during private encounters with the famous comedian. Cosby is claiming their allegations have hurt his career, and so he’s looking for public retractions and corrections from all seven plus other damages. Tarshis first told me of her Cosby trauma 15 or 16 years ago, and it sure sounded believable back then. She came out on 11.16.14 with a Hollywood Elsewhere-posted, self-written essay about her sexual-assault history with Cosby. More than 50 women have claimed that more or less identical “while you were sleeping” episodes happened to them also.

The Weinstein Company announced today that Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight will have a one-week 70mm roadshow booking in 100 theatres between 12.25 and 12.31, and after that things’ll go digital. A release stated that “starting today, moviegoers can purchase tickets for the 70mm roadshow showings at tickets.thehatefuleight.com” — cool. But let’s be upfront. The consensus among journalists who’ve seen the Tarantino film in Ultra Panavision 70 along with its digitally shot, snow-covered western competitor, Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant, which also opens on Christmas day, is as follows: (1) Everyone loves QT’s revival of 70mm along with an overture and an intermission and the whole roadshow experience, but (2) Emmanuel Lubezski‘s Alexa 65 photography of The Revenant is more of a knockout than Robert Richardson‘s Super 70 celluloid lensing of The Hateful Eight, if for no other reason than the fact that almost three-quarters of Tarantino’s film is shot inside a large but shadowy one-room cabin (i.e., Minnie’s haberdashery) while Inarritu’s was shot almost almost entirely outdoors, and with a camera (Alexa 65) that is extremely light sensitive. The Inarritu/Lubezki drinks in a lot more snowy footage, and delivers colors and light-levels that are much more exacting and yet subtle.