Steven Soderbergh at peak strength. My kind of L.A. action flick, my kind of father-daughter film, my kind of half-and-halfer (revenge flick, dark comedy), my kind of Peter Fonda movie, my kind of director-screenwriter (Soderbergh, Lem Dobbs) audio commentary track…one of the most exquisitely right, droll, socially resonant crime films ever made, and an all-time upgrader of The Hollies’ “King Midas In Reverse.” I’m sorry but one Limey is worth at least…I can’t decide on the less-good film but it’s worth at least ten of it.

Late Wednesday afternoon 112 motion picture scores were announced by the Academy as eligible to win the Best Musical Score Oscar, and of course the one score I’ve been really and truly knocked out by — Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s sparely applied, solemn string music for Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s The Revenant — didn’t qualify. That’s because Sakamoto wasn’t the only composer on the film (he was joined by Bryce Dessner and Alva Noto), and Academy rules state that a score “assembled from the music of more than one composer shall not be eligible.” Oscars for original and adapted screenplays are sometimes handed to co-writers but the music branch insists on sole authorship. This is the second disqualification for a musical score composed by more than one person for an Inarritu film. Last year Antonio Sanchez‘s all-percussion score for Birdman was disqualified because portions of classical music were also used in addition to Sanchez’s drumming. Here’s a sample of Sakamoto’s Revenant score.

TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Warner Bros. has canceled 12.23 press screenings of Point Break. A WB email said that “due to unforeseen circumstances we are no longer able to offer the all media screenings as planned.” Sneider notes that “early buzz on Point Break has not been kind” and that Warner Bros. “has taken the rare step of setting the Point Break review embargo on opening day — specifically 12:01 a.m. Pacific on 12.25 — indicating that the studio may not believe reviews will benefit the movie.”

Everything I did as a teenager was wrong or awkward or unsuccessful or insufficient on some level. Dealing with disciplinary action was a constant. I scowled a lot. I hated my home life (alcoholic dad, domineering mom, self-loathing, a sense of imprisonment). My grades were mostly shit and for good reason, I figured, as I hated what I was being taught and I couldn’t care less about college or structure or anything but escape from the dull middle-class gulag I grew up in. I couldn’t land a girlfriend or even a date to save my life. The only happiness I knew was from listening to music and hanging with my friends and getting bombed on beer. I spent many hours each week narcotizing myself with television. And I mainlined movies. I saw (studied) as many as I could back then. They were my curriculum, my major, my lifeline.

I’m sorry but this feels like a tank. The problem (or perception of same) is mainly due to that odd title. If this is a movie about guys acting bravely and heroically in the face of horrific heaving seas (and it certainly seems to be that), you don’t want the filmmakers telling you they’re that — you want to watch the film and discover this for yourself. (Right?) And since this is about a single 1952 episode, shouldn’t a singular “hour” be used instead of “hours”? Many historians agree that the Cuban Missile Crisis was Kennedy’s finest hour — not “hours. “Based on the 2010 book of the same name, the film recounts a real-life Coast Guard operation in 1952 in which four officers of a lifeboat crew risked their lives to rescue 33 oil ship workers who were left stranded at sea when one of the worst storms in Massachusetts’s history hit the East Coast and snapped their tanker in two,” blah blah. Directed by Craig Gillespie (Million Dollar Arm, Fright Night), pic costars Eric Bana, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Holliday Grainger and Graham McTavish. The Finest Hours pops on Digital 3D and IMAX 3D on 1.29.

Today Vanity Fair posted a first-look shot of Natalie Portman as the nation’s First Lady of a half-century ago (1.20.61 to 11.22.63) in Pablo Larrain‘s Jackie, which has been shooting for…what, the last two or three weeks? And then next year or the year after Portman will portray Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg under director Marielle Heller, or so it was reported last June.

Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in Pablo Larrain’s Jackie.

Five years ago Jackie was going to be directed by Darren Aronofsky with his then-wife Rachel Weisz in the lead role, but then they broke up. Aronofsky is producing the Portman-Larrain with his Protozoa Pictures partner Scott Franklin along with Chile’s Juan de Dios Larrain. Fox Searchlight will probably distribute and Portman will be campaigned as a Best Actress contender — all pretty much set in stone.

I’ve posted my 2010 reactions to Noel Oppenheim‘s script once or twice before so why not a third time?

“Jackie follows the former Mrs. Kennedy’s experience from the day of JFK’s assassination in Dallas on 11.22.63 to his burial in Arlington Cemetery three days hence. I’ve read enough about those four dark days to understand that Oppenheim’s script is basically a tasteful re-capturing of what happened, and that’s all. It’s an elegant, almost under-written thing — straight, clean, dignified. The dialogue seems genuine — trustable — in that it’s not hard to believe that Jackie or Bobby Kennedy or Larry O’Brien or Theodore H. White or Jack Valenti might have said these lines in actuality.

“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.