I began my 12.13 Rogue One review by saying “there are two aspects of Garth Edwards and Tony Gilroy‘s film that I was really and truly impressed by, and I can’t mention either of them. Well, I could but it would be shitty of me. The first weekend crowd is entitled to be surprised as much as I was last night.”

One of those admired elements, I can now say, is the film’s stunning digital reanimation of the late Peter Cushing, who “returns” as Grand Moff Tarkin, the highly mannered senior commander of the Death Star.

Why am I revealing this information on Friday afternoon with most Star Wars fans yet to see Rogue One? Partly because Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Peter Debruge have posted an article this afternoon (at 4:07 pm Pacific) about the Industrial Light and Magic CG that allowed for Cushing’s rebirth.

At least three fanboy sites (Cinema Blend, Screen Rant, Bustle) have also spilled the beans.

Hilarious graph from the Variety story: “A Lucasfilm rep tells Variety that the filmmakers will not be discussing the nuts and bolts of what went into Cushing’s reprise until January, in order for audiences to see the film and enjoy it without being spoiled by details. But the implications raised by the bold achievement, and others like it, are another thing entirely — and they’ve been ringing throughout the industry for decades.”

Updated on 1.1.17: The following is an update of a piece I originally posted on 12.9: With the addition of Alfonso Cuaron‘s Roma and a few others, Hollywood Elsewhere’s grand tally of high-end 2017 releases now comes to 80.

Of these I’ve listed 6 likely Best Picture contenders, a trio of high-end galactic thrillers, 23 pick-of-the-litter films from brand-name directors, 26 films of alternate interest plus 22 others of somewhat lesser distinction for a total of 79.

At least five of these have the traditional earmarks of Best Picture contenders — Kathryn Bigelow‘s Untitled Detroit Riots Drama, Chris Nolan‘s Dunkirk, Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Charles James ’50s period drama, Alexander Payne‘s Downsizing and Joe Wright‘s Darkest Hour, a Winston Churchill vs. Nazi war machine drama.

I would add Cuaron’s film, a Spanish-language Mexican family drama set in the ’70s, for a total of six, but the Academy will most likely consign it to the Best Foreign Language category.

Alfonso Cuaron during the Mexico City-shooting of Roma.

Most people feel that home is where the heart is, but what they usually mean is a structure, a traditional provider of comfort and security…a two-story colonial, front porch, rose bushes, freshly mowed lawn, white picket fence, two-car garage, mounted basketball net. Yes, I have a home that I feel good about and invested in, and many other places, things and regular experiences (daily challenges, festivals, visits to great cities and exotic lands) that make me feel good about my life, but I swear to God this image here is the closest and most intimate representation of comfort for me. Where my heart is, my life is. I feel as close to this image as James Stewart‘s George Bailey felt about Bedford Falls.

The night before last I read Elyse Hollander‘s Blonde Ambition, the top-rated Black List script about Madonna‘s struggle to find success as a pop singer in early ’80s Manhattan. It’s going to be a good, hard-knocks industry drama when it gets made — basically a blend of a scrappy singing Evita with A Star Is Born — and if the right actress plays Madonna the right way, she might wind up with a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Maybe. Who knows?

This is a flinty, unsentimental empowerment saga about a tough cookie who took no prisoners and was always out for #1. No hearts and flowers for this mama-san.

Madonna and producer-mixer Jellybean Benitez, sometime around the release of her 1983 debut album.

The success of Blonde Ambition will depend, of course, on who directs and how strong the costars are, particularly the guy who plays Madonna’s onetime-boyfriend John “Jellybean” Benitez, whose remix and producing of her self-named first album launched her career, as well as her Emmys bandmate and previous lover Dan Gilroy. (No, I’m not referring to the director-writer who’s preparing to shoot Inner City with Denzel Washington in March — Madonna’s ex is/was a totally different guy.)

A Star Is Born‘s logline was basically “big star with a drinking problem falls for younger ingenue, she rises as he falls and finally commits suicide, leaving her with a broken heart.” Blonde Ambition is about a hungry, super-driven New York pop singer who, like Evita Peron, climbs to the top by forming alliances with this and that guy who helps her in some crucial way, and then moves on to the next partner or benefactor, but at no point in the journey is she fighting for anything other than her own success, and is no sentimentalist or sweetheart.

Congrats to Mark Harris for having written what I presume will be a diverting essay about Hal Ashby‘s Being There — his first Criterion Bluray essay. The disc — a new and restored digital 4K transfer, supervised by Caleb Deschanel — will pop on 3.21.17.

I’ve just tweeted my feelings about this exceedingly dry, droll film, and I have to say that while Being There felt just right in ’80, I’m not so sure about now. In high places a man who speaks only in metaphors and parables would eventually be asked to speak bluntly, plainly, like a cab driver or a beat cop. You can play your Zen cards only to a certain extent — sooner or later people of substance and consequence would demand that you put up or shut up. Which is why at the end of the day, the single, solitary joke at the heart of Being There wears thin.

The Academy’s occasionally shortsighted foreign language film committee has released a list of nine finalists for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, culled from a roster of 89 films, and, incredibly, they’ve blown off Paul Verhoeven‘s Elle — a critically acclaimed career rebirth for the Dutch auteur as well as a vessel for Isabelle Huppert‘s hailed lead performance, which has already won several stateside awards and nominations.

And yet they’ve approved (i.e., included among the nine) one of the most deeply loathed foreign-language films of the year — Xavier Dolan‘s It’s Only The End of the World, which was all but spat upon by critics when it played at last May’s Cannes Film Festival.

The committee has also tossed (a) Pedro Almodovar‘s Julieta (Spain), a well-respected midrange effort (I called it “a Joan Crawford mother-daughter hairshirt film”), (b) Palo Larrain‘s Neruda with Gael Garcia Bernal (i.e., “Where is that fat Communist?”) and (c) Gianfranco Rosi‘s Fire at Sea, which won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear last February.

I hate to agree with the late Ray Kroc but the persistence thing happens to be true. There are brainier, more perceptive film critics out there. I’m a fairly skilled writer but there are others in my realm whose prose is smoother or more certain. I know my film history as well as the next USC- or NYU-educated grad but others are more knowledgable in some respects. (On the other hand nobody knows more than I do about aspect ratios…I take a back seat to no one in this regard.) But I’m a hammer when it comes to cranking out this column, which I’ve been doing for 18 years now, and this — discipline, devotion, no days off — has been crucial in my staying afloat and becoming a well-known, well-travelled bigmouth.

The only hitch is that Kroc apparently stole these words from either Francis Beatty Silverwood, who may have written them back in 1913, or from President Calvin Coolidge.

One of the finest opening paragraphs in the history of movie reviewing came from N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in his 5.25.01 review of Michael Bay‘s Pearl Harbor: “The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II has inspired a splendid movie, full of vivid performances and unforgettable scenes, a movie that uses the coming of war as a backdrop for individual stories of love, ambition, heroism and betrayal. The name of that movie is From Here to Eternity.”

Two days ago (12.13) Variety‘s Owen Glieberman used a similar opening-graph strategy in his review of David Frankel‘s Collateral Beauty: “It asks a lot of an audience to sit through a drama about a parent grieving over the loss of a child. The subject is rough [with] a vast potential for programmed pathos and fake sentiment. That’s part of the miracle of Manchester by the Sea. It leads us through one man’s life of locked-in sorrow with a sculptured emotional elegance that is never false; at the same time, the cathartic honesty of its journey allows the audience to touch a nerve of desolation and still breathe free.

In David Frankel‘s emotionally cloying Collateral Beauty (Warner Bros. 12.16), Will Smith plays Howard Inlet, a New York ad agency co-owner in a state of acute grief over the cancer death of his young daughter.

Inlet is holding onto grief as a way of keeping his daughter “with” him, in a sense. But he isn’t just engulfed in sadness — his grief is theatrically grandiose, even tedious. There’s a moment when Inlet pedals his bike directly into oncoming Manhattan traffic, and it doesn’t just scream “go ahead, kill me, I don’t care!” — it also announces “this, ladies and gentleman, is what suicidal nihilism looks like in a Hollywood grief movie.”

Initially Inlet’s shutdown is very sad and understandable until you’re told that he’s been living in his grief hole for two years. I bailed on Collateral Beauty after 50 minutes or so, but I emotionally left when I heard Ed Norton‘s Whit Yardsham mention how long his business partner has been under.

There’s no hard and fast rule about grieving (although psychologists have written about how long it tends to last, obviously depending on the circumstances) but there’s a general notion that it can last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, and as much as a year if you’ve really been walloped hard. But two years is too much. It just is. And eff this movie for throwing Will Smith‘s mope-a-dope into my lap.

Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg has put forward an obviously logical suggestion to improve the calibre of Oscar winners or at least increase the odds that deserving winners will be chosen as opposed to winners of popularity contests.

Feinberg is saying that in addition to the general membership’s across-the-board vote for Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film, the Academy should allow members to vote only in their specific area of expertise.

Only actors should vote for actors, only production designers should be allowed to vote for their own, only screenwriters can vote for screenwriters, etc. Obviously fair, couldn’t be simpler.

“How much do most makeup artists know about screenwriting, or film editors know about costume design, or actors know about sound mixing?,” Feinberg begins. “The answer: about as much as anyone on the street. Why, then, does the Academy allow all of its members — each of whom hails from one of 17 branches of the industry — to pick winners in all of its categories? This process always has struck me as indefensible.

“I speak with Academy members regularly, and they are the first to admit that they should not be voting in many of the categories in which they currently are permitted a vote. One might hope they would abstain from voting in areas they know little about, but that’s not realistic; instead, they vote for the movie they liked the best, or the only one they even saw, or in some cases, the one with a cool title or poster. (Seriously.)

Here’s to the obviously centered, focused, clear-of-heart John Legend on the incorrigible publicity hound and psychologically unbalanced life form known as Kanye West: “Whatever’s on Kanye’s mind, I disagree with him.”

EXCLUSIVE : John Legend reacts to Kanye West's… by cliquetv