Jeff Nichols‘ Midnight Special (Warner Bros., 3.18.16) is obviously a cut or two above your usual imbued-child, alien-visitation movie. You can just tell — it’s been made by s smart guy and is aimed way above the heads of Deadpool fans. And despite the presence of HE nemesis Joel Edgerton, it has an excellent cast — Michael Shannon, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard, etc. And yet despite having wrapped principal photography nearly two years ago (3.1.14) Warner Bros. decided not to release it all during 2015. (They initially slated an 11.25.15 release but then bailed on that.) So far it has a Rotten Toomatoes/Metacritic score of 88% and 78%, respectively.

“Opening with a child abduction and ending with a spectacular sci-fi finale on par with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Bible Belt-spanning Midnight Special demonstrates once and for all that indie auteur Jeff Nichols is now the go-to storyteller for the kind of slow-burn supernatural thrill audiences once sought from M. Night Shyamalan. Serving up hefty human insight in place of third-act gimmickry, and reuniting him with Take Shelter star Michael Shannon, Nichols’ impressively restrained yet limitlessly imaginative fourth feature takes its energy from an ensemble of characters who hold fast to their convictions, even though their beliefs remain shrouded in mystery for much of the journey.” — Variety‘s Peter Debruge, filing from Berlin.

I lasted a little more than 40 minutes with Deadpool — not bad considering. I decided I’d be leaving early on, or right after the opening kick-ass sequence on the highway overpass when this quip-happy, totally indestructible Daffy Duck wastes…what, 25 or 30 guys? If a superhero flick is smart and clever and well-measured enough (Ant-Man, both Captain America flicks, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) I’m more or less there along with everyone else, but this…this is smug, empty, super-annoying, surface-skimming cartoon-level dogshit. Yeah, asshole — I know that’s the point but the point is submental.

The only reason I didn’t leave at the ten-minute mark (I caught a 5:30 pm show at the Cinerama Dome) is because I wouldn’t have anything to write about if I did that.

The hyper fast-food violence is, of course, deliberately arch and inconsequential and Looney Tunes manic…meta meta meta meta…cheap, self-referencing gags about cliches-upon-cliches that pirhouette into more gags…”produced by Asshats“…exactly what all those empty coke bottles who went to this thing in droves last weekend are looking for.

I was never a big Daffy Duck fan as a kid — I always thought he was too hyper, too screwball, too self-regarding. Same here.

I lasted until the cancer diagnosis. I was slumping lower and lower into my seat….hating myself for paying $15 to see this shite but at the same cutting myself a break. On top of which I could feel my very own cancerous tumor growing in my lower abdomen.

Anyone who goes to this movie and comes out saying “wow, that was pretty good!”…70% contempt, 30% pity. You don’t like good action, you don’t like craft, you don’t care about that thing that the Russo brothers have in spades and that Deadpool helmer Tim Miller will never, ever have. All you care about is sinking into another jizz-wank hot tub that reenforces your glib bullshit attitudes about superhero movies…you’re as low as it gets in the movie-watching (or more accurately movie-sampling) realm.

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I’m sorry for losing track of the name of the guy who created this, but it’s fairly spot-on, I must say. If anyone knows his name, please advise.

31 years ago I worked on Tim Burton‘s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (’85) under my immediate publicist employers, Bobby Zarem and Dick Delson. The guy we spoke with the most was producer Robert Shapiro (i.e., not the O.J guy…another one). I never spoke with Burton or Pee-Wee (i.e., Paul Reubens) but Zarem came up with a notion of trying to lure big-name celebrities to do walk-on cameos in the film….gratis. A letter went out asking 35 or 40 celebs to consider the idea; in each envelope was a hand-written note from Reubens. I was told to fold and lick each envelope and then personally deliver them over a weekend, and so I was given the personal addresses of Jack Nicholson, Johnny Carson, Ali McGraw, et. al. I have to admit that driving around and getting through the security gates and visiting these royal abodes (especially Nicholson’s pad) was pretty cool.

I noticed a month or so ago that the sound is a half-second late when I’m watching domestic Blurays. That’s the fault of either (a) my Oppo BDP-93 Bluray player or (b) the sound settings on my Samsung 60″ plasma or (c) the Samsung sound bar, which has an AV synch button that allows you to toggle forward or backward. An Oppo tech guy told me I can’t just reset the sound — I have to reset the whole player, which means recalibrating all the settings. He said that before that happens I might want to fiddle around with the sound bar synch button, and so I did. This caused an infuriating sound echo effect that I can’t rid of. I became so furious at the Oppo guy and the Big Sleep Bluray and Humphrey Bogart and…you know, life in general that I started calling around for a tech guy who could come in and restore everything. Yes, this is analogous to calling AAA to change a flat tire. Yes, I just want the agony to stop. This situation has consumed more than three hours of my time, and the problem is nowhere close to being solved. Update: I solved it.

Three things are likely to happen in response to the death of Chief Justice Scalia. (1) President Obama will nominate a replacement , (2) the Republican-controlled Senate, in defiance of the Constitution and the will of the 2012 presidential electorate, will refuse to examine or vote on the nominee, and (3) the Senate will go into recess. Could President Obama then install his nominee during said recess? Only, in the just-posted view of Newsweek‘s Lyle Deniston, “if the Senate is taking a recess lasting longer than three days, and does not come in from time to time during that recess to take some minimal legislative action. Both of those circumstances would be entirely within the Senate’s authority.

“The bottom line is that, if President Obama is to successfully name a new Supreme Court Justice, he will have to run the gauntlet of the Republican-controlled Senate, and prevail there. The only real chance of that [happening is] if he picks a nominee so universally admired that it would be too embarrassing for the Senate not to respond.”

CNN’s Dana Bash: Do you think that…do you think that if Republicans continue down this road, that they say they’re not going to bring up whomever the nominee is for a vote, would you recommend to the president a recess appointment?

Se. Patrick Leahy: I don’t even think we’re there. I think the president — and I have talked to the White House last night — I think the president has to nominate somebody, nominate a qualified person, a highly qualified person.

Bash: But would you rule…would you rule it out if things don’t change the way they are now?

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Blurays of black-and-white films of 1940s can look wonderful — Out of the Past, Laura, the 2008 Casablanca Bluray (i.e., not the horribly grainstormed 70th anniversary version), Criterion’s Red River, TCM’s Only Angels Have Wings (okay, late ’30s), Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Alas, the new Big Sleep Bluray is nowhere near as handsome or satisfying as any of these.

This latest version of Howard Hawks‘ 1946 noir looks okay but not significantly better, in my opinion, than any TCM broadcast version or how the 16-year-old, 480p Warner Home Video DVD looked when you played it on your 700-pound 32″ Sony flatscreen. I wanted my Bluray “bump” and this puppy didn’t give it up. I was watching it like Peggy Lee….”Is that all there is, my friend?”

The Big Sleep Bluray (which streets on 2.23) is sourced from a wetgate fine-grain master, which is indistinguishable from the original camera negative, I’m told. A restoration guy tells me it’s “a new scan, properly color-timed…you may not like the dark aspects and the shadows but this is what The Big Sleep looks like. It’s a noir. And every review so far has been a rave. I’ve seen excellent prints of The Big Sleep and this, to my eyes, looks absolutely glorious.”

No — it’s not glorious. It’s just..well, pretty good. It doesn’t look remastered to me at all. Detailed but not that detailed. Some shots look excellent but they’re in the minority. Yes, it’s delivering greater density and tonal improvements and textural detail to some extent but it certainly doesn’t have that reharvested look. It doesn’t deliver anything close to the crisp, satiny textures of that wonderful Out Of The Past Bluray. A lot of it is very handsome but it generally feels too dark and muddy and curiously shadowed. I felt as if a layer of scrim or gauze was hanging over it at times.

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I was riveted by the grand Hamilton number on last night’s Grammy awards. Immediately converted, floored. I’d like to see it when I hit New York in May on my way to Cannes, but I’m hearing tickets are all but impossible to acquire. Hats off and in the air for Lin-Manuel Miranda, author of the book, music and lyrics who also plays Alexander Hamilton. Leslie Odom, Jr. (Aaron Burr), Daveed Diggs, Christopher Jackson, Renée Elise Goldsberry, etc. Twitter went double-triple-quadruple crazy over Kendrick Lamar‘s “To Pimp A Butterfly” jumpin’ jailhouse-in-blacklight performance. I was going “uh-huh, yup, okay, that was striking, yep…fine.” Lady Gagg‘s David Bowie tribute…yeah, sure, pretty good.

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These came today in a box. Maybe I’ll suffer through Deadpool tomorrow instead. Yes, the Big Sleep Bluray contains the 1945 version.

Now that the Oscar race is more or less over and it’s just a waiting game between now and February 28th, I’m reviewing the award-season stories and reviews that I’m modestly proud of for…well, which may have exerted a small measure of influence upon the conversation. The slamdunk Best Picture assurance of Spotlight when it popped in Telluride, the heightening of interest among under-40 urban women in seeing The Revenant, the respectful downgradings of Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance and Black Mass‘s Joel Edgerton, the realization that Eddie Redmayne‘s chances of winning a Best Actor Oscar for his The Danish Girl performance were toast, and the obvious surge of support for his costar, Alicia Vikander.

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In a 2.15 article about last night’s BAFTA awards (“How the BAFTA Winners Do and Don’t Foretell the Oscars”), N.Y. Times Oscar-season columnist Cara Buckley says the following: “Oh, and The Revenant picked up five awards including Best Picture, Director (Alejandro G. Inarritu) and Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), which may or may not mean anything for the Oscars because everything is haywire this season.” No, wrong, no longer haywire — it’s over. Fairly or unfairly, advise and consent of the Movie Godz or not, it’s The Revenant, The Revenant, The Revenant…Best Picture, Director, Actor, Cinematographer, etc. My current Gold Derby picks.

Cameron Crowe‘s Roadies doesn’t launch for another four and a half months (Showtime, 6.26) but it feels…well, like it came from the same well as Crowe’s autobiographical Almost Famous (’00), his last fully successful and popular film. My heart goes out to Crowe — a good guy who’s been through a kind of career nightmare over the last decade. I truly want him to find his way out of the dark forest. Exec produced by J.J. Abrams and My So-Called Life creator Winnie Holzman, the series will focus on the grunts and technicians — Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino, Imogen Poots, Rafe Spall, Keisha Castle-Hughes, Luis Guzman — who assemble the stage, work the laser light show, keep the parts greased and the whole rock-band caravan rolling and gassed up with good air pressure in the tires. Which reminds me: I can’t find a decent clip of that superb Jimmy Fallon scene in Almost Famous when he explains to the band why they need him — i.e., “Your manager needs a manager…if you think Mick Jagger is still going to be prancing around at 50, you’re sadly mistaken.”