At the end of her report about Oz The Great and Powerful‘s big box office debut ($80.3 million domestic, 25% Friday-to-Saturday increase, $69.9 million overseas, $150.2 million total), Deadline‘s Nikki Finke writes that this impressive haul “cements director Sam Raimi as the real deal when it comes to helming blockbusters.”

That‘s the take-away? Everyone is saying “whoa, that Raimi…he da man”? You’d have to be a cretin to say that with a straight face. I have to figure Finke was just being…you know, “polite” in a political sense.

Remove the black-and-white opener and Oz is a meandering and synthetic CG-mural show. It has (as that Slate subhead read) no heart, no brains and no courage. And c’mon…we all know that family audiences are simpletons who have no taste. They’ll pay to see almost anything that looks splashy and good-natured and vaguely engaging. (For whatever reason they drew the line at Jack The Giant Slayer.) How does making a relatively soul-less film that most of the smart critics hate …how does this make Raimi the champ?

I laughed at “I believe that hors d’oeuvres is pronounced orr-du-vorrays”…and that’s it. Otherwise the energy in this skit was so low (Paul Simon was sleepwalking) that it reached out of the screen and just vacuumed my soul and cleaned me out. I couldn’t move after it was over. I was forced to sit on my couch for 20 minutes after it ended, waiting for my system to recharge.

Clouds, rain, long lines, Drinking Buddies, hills, Danny Boyle and a portion of Trance (it opens April 5th and Boyle doesn’t want to show the whole thing? What’s up with that?), Al Gore, Mud, parties, Before Midnight (which everyone loves), beefalos, woolly-bully, more lines, Spring Breakers (which I’ll finally see in LA on Tuesday) and yaddah yaddah.

The Zero Dark Thirty Bluray (Sony Home Video, 3.19) “is about as faultless as the movie,” writes Bluray.com’s Martin Liebman. “The transfer reveals very crisp details; every square inch of the frame is perfectly defined, whether under bright desert sun or through night vision goggles. Complex aerial city shots are handled just as well as intimate close-ups; the former reveals every texture sharply and with incredible ease, the latter showing details as fine — finer, maybe — than the naked eye might perceive in real life.

“Every worn piece of concrete, each grain of sand, strand of clothing, bead of sweat, and drop of blood are revealed with no effort and the utmost clarity. Colors are equally impressive. The palette is naturally vibrant, again under all lighting conditions. No hue is betrayed by the transfer, none appear washed out or overly processed; each is beautifully displayed in every frame. Black levels are true but still revealing of critical information in the nighttime raid at film’s end. Flesh tones are never problematic. Very light banding — an inconsequential amount — may be seen in one or two moments, but it’s not quite enough to knock an otherwise perfect transfer from Sony.”

My copy will arrive Tuesday, no later than Wednesday.

Three weeks ago N.Y. Times reporter Trip Gabriel reported that the liberal-minded Ashley Judd is probably going to run against Mitch McConnell, the blustery, Obama-hating Senate Minority Leader, for U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Now the well-sourced Howard Fineman is reporting that the 44 year-old Judd “has told key advisers and political figures that she is planning to announce her candidacy for U.S. Senate this spring.”

Fineman hears that Judd “has told one close ally that she plans to announce her run for the Democratic nomination for the 2014 race ‘around Derby’ — meaning in early May when the Kentucky Derby brings national attention to Louisville and the Bluegrass State.”

Judd is an ardent Obama-supporting progressive on most social issues, which doesn’t exactly make her a natural among Kentucky’s conservative-leaning voters. “But [she] was born to campaign,” writes Fineman. “A fighter by nature, she has a quick wit and the ability to raise far more money — not to mention engender more free national and local media — than all of McConnell’s past Democratic foes put together. She is fearless, and would not necessarily lose a bar fight if she got into one, which she is about to do.”

In other words, Fineman knows and likes her as far as it goes.

The Cpt. James T. Kirk created by Chris Pine, director JJ Abrams and screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman in Star Trek (’09) is obviously back in Star Trek Into Darkness (Paamount, 5.17). Basically the same cocky, rule-defying guy played by Taylor Kitsch in Battleship, Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor, James Cagney in The Fighting 69th — brash and brave, resists authority, always waits until the last second to save the day.

Wait…”punch it”? That’s what Han Solo said 32 and 1/2 years ago before throwing the switch for sending the Millenium Falcon into light speed. Who wrote that line? Orci or Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof? Or is it an improv? Oh, and tipping the ship sideways in order to speed through a narrow crevasse? That’s another Han Solo maneuver.

Kevin Hart standing before a huge crowd at Madison Square Garden and being adored like God…they love me! Hart’s narration says Let Me Explain is about the joy of making people laugh. The footage, on the other hand, shows how deeply insecure he is, and how much he needs to fortify his ego. The cheers, the crowds, the adulation…Ceasar!

A press release announces that Hart’s 2012 “Let Me Explain” concert tour made $32 million. Leapin’ lizards…that’s a lot of money! I’ll bet Kevin can afford to buy a shitload of stuff now, right? Nice clothes and shit? Let Me Explain must therefore be really funny. After watching this trailer I wouldn’t see Let Me Explain if Hart personally paid me $100 to do so.

I’m ready and willing to ease up on my John Ford takedowns and I could really and truly go the rest of my life without writing another word (much less another article) on The Searchers.

But yesterday the Hollywood Reporter posted a Martin Scorsese essay on The Searchers — mostly a praise piece — and I feel obliged to respond, dammit. But really, this is the end.

Scorsese’s basic thought is that while The Searchers has some unfortunate or irritating aspects, it’s nonetheless a great film and has seemed deeper, more troubling and more layered the older he’s become.

My basic view of The Searchers, as I wrote three of four years ago, is that “for a great film it takes an awful lot of work to get through it.”

I don’t know how to enjoy The Searchers any more except by wearing aesthetic blinders — by ignoring all the stuff that drives me up the wall in order to savor the beautiful heartbreaking stuff (the opening and closing shot, Wayne’s look of fear when he senses danger for his brother’s family, his picking up Wood at the finale and saying, ‘Let’s go home, Debbie’). That said I can’t help but worship Winston C. Hoch‘s photography for its own virtues.

Scorsese’s wisest observation is that John Ford personally related to John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, the gruff, scowling, racist-minded loner at the heart of this 1956 film.

Ford “was at his lowest ebb” when he made The Searchers, Scorsese writes. “Ford’s participation in the screen version of Mister Roberts had ended disastrously soon after a violent encounter between the filmmaker and his star Henry Fonda.

“For Ford, The Searchers was more than just another picture: It was his opportunity to prove that he was still in control. Did he pour more of himself into the movie? It does seem reasonable to assume that Ford recognized something of his own loneliness in Ethan Edwards and that the character sparked something in him. It’s interesting to see how it dovetails with another troubled character from the same period. Like James Stewart‘s Scotty in Vertigo, Edwards’ obsessive quest ends in madness.”

Jeffrey Hunter, John Wayne

Film lovers know The Searchers “by heart,” Scorsese writes, “but what about average movie watchers? What place does John Ford’s masterpiece occupy in our national consciousness?”

Wells to Scorsese: In terms of the consciousness of the general public, close to zilch. In terms of the big-city Film Catholic community (industry aficionados, entertainment journalists, film academics and devoted students, educated and well-heeled film buffs, obsessive film bums), there is certainly respect for The Searchers but true passionate love? The numbers of those who feel as strongly as you, most of whom grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, are, I imagine, relatively small and dwindling as we speak.

I’m pleased to note that some of my complaints about Ford have at least been acknowledged by Scorsese. “A few years ago I watched it with my wife,” he writes, “and I will admit that it gave me pause. Many people have problems with Ford’s Irish humor, which is almost always alcohol-related. For some, the frontier-comedy scenes with Ken Curtis are tough to take.

“For me, the problem was with the scenes involving a plump Comanche woman (Beulah Archuletta) that the Hunter character inadvertently takes as a wife. There is some low comedy in these scenes: Hunter kicks her down a small hill, and Max Steiner’s score amplifies the moment with a comic flourish. Then the tone shifts dramatically, and Wayne and Hunter both become ruthless and bullying, scaring her away. Later, they find her body in a Comanche camp that has been wiped out by American soldiers, and you can feel their sense of loss. All the same, this passage seemed unnecessarily cruel to me.”

Here’s what I wrote way back when:

“John Ford‘s movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life. A first-rate visual composer and one of Hollywood’s most economical story-tellers bar none, Ford made films that were always rich with complexity, understatements and undercurrents that refused to run in one simple direction.

“Ford’s films are always what they seem to be…until you watch them again and re-reflect, and then they always seem to be about something more. But the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of them can be oppressive, and the older Ford got the more he ladled it on.

“The Irish clannishness, the tributes to boozy male camaraderie, the relentless balladeering over the opening credits of 90% of his films, the old-school chauvinism, the racism, the thinly sketched women, the “gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity” (as critic David Thomson put it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film) and so on.

The closing shot of John Ford’s The Searchers

“The treacliness is there but tolerable in Ford’s fine pre-1945 work — The Informer, Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln , Drums Along the Mohawk, They Were Expendable , The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine .

“But it gets really thick starting with 1948’s Fort Apache and by the time you get to The Searchers, Ford’s undisputed masterpiece that came out in March of 1956, it’s enough to make you yank the reins and go ‘whoa, nelly.’

“Watch the breathtaking beautiful new DVD of The Searchers, and see if you can get through it without choking. Every shot is a visual jewel, but except for John Wayne‘s Ethan Edwards, one of the most fascinating racist bastards of all time, every last character and just about every line in the film feels labored and ungenuine.

“The phoniness gets so pernicious after a while that it seems to nudge this admittedly spellbinding film toward self-parody. Younger people who don’t ‘get’ Ford (and every now and then I think I may be turning into one) have been known to laugh at it.

“Jeffrey Hunter‘s Martin Pawley does nothing but bug his eyes, overact and say stupid exasperating lines all through the damn thing. Nearly every male supporting character in the film does the same. No one has it in them to hold back or play it cool.

“Ken Curtis‘s Charlie McCorry, Harry Carey Jr.’s Brad Jorgensen, Hank Worden‘s Mose Harper…characters I’ve come to despise.

“You can do little else but sit and grimace through Natalie Wood‘s acting as Debbie (the kidnapped daughter of Ethan’s dead brother), Vera Miles‘ Laurie Jorgenson, and Beulah Archuletta‘s chubby Indian squaw (i.e., ‘Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky’)…utterly fake in each and every gesture and utterance.

“I realize there’s a powerful double-track element in the racism that seethes inside Ethan, but until he made Cheyenne Autumn Ford always portrayed Indians — Native Americans — as creepy, vaguely sadistic oddballs. The German-born, blue-eyed Henry Brandon as Scar, the Comanche baddie…’nuff said.

“That repulsive scene when Ethan and Martin look at four or five babbling Anglo women whose condition was caused, we’re informed, by having been raised by Indians, and some guy says, ‘Hard to believe they’re white’ and Ethan says, ‘They ain’t white!’

“I’ll always love the way Ford handles that brief bit when Ward Bond‘s Reverend Clayton sees Martha, the wife of Ethan’s brother, stroking Ethan’s overcoat and then barely reacts — perfect — but every time Bond opens his mouth to say something, he bellows like a bull moose.”

Final thought: The more I think about the stuff in Ford’s films that drives me crazy, the less I want to watch any Ford films, ever. Okay, that’s not true but the only ones I can stand at this point are The Horse Soldiers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Grapes of Wrath, The Informer, The Lost Patrol, The Last Hurrah and, believe it or not, Donovan’s Reef.

When I think of the right-wing guys I know and personally like or admire, John Milius is at the top of the list. I used to call Milius from time to time during my EW and L.A. Times reporting days in the ’90s. I think he regarded me as a kind of loyalist. Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa‘s Milius is playing Saturday, 3.9, at South by Southwest.

In an EW piece called “Romancing The Rhinestone” (included only in 3.15 print version), Adam Markowitz does a q & a with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, the costars of Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra (HBO, 5.26). Douglas plays the closeted Liberace and Damon his much-younger lover, Scott Thorson…but everyone knows that. The thing that got me in the interview has nothing to do with the film. Markowitz asks what Douglas and Damon “think of the possibility of somebody making a movie of your life?,” and Damon answers, “Movies will be dead by then.”

Are we all listening? The well-connected Damon sees and hears everything, and he honestly believes that 20 or 30 years hence movies as we know them will no longer exist.

Right now you can buy “Where Are We Now” from David Bowie‘s The Next Day (which streets on 3.12) but not “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).” The music video is so described by N.Y.Times profiler Simon Reynolds:

“In the video Mr. Bowie and Tilda Swinton play an elderly couple persecuted by a pair of vampiric stars, who stalk them, invade their house and manipulate them like marionettes. But the song itself is less literal. It portrays celebrities as members of an overlord class who ‘burn you with their radiant smiles‘ but also as faintly pitiable creatures, jealous of the quiet, grounded lives of ordinary folk. ‘But I hope they live forever,’ Mr. Bowie sings, a nod to the notion of fame as immortality, a compensation for all the damage and delusion that comes with the territory.”