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.
Kinship
I’ve just stored away “guys who sweat indoors” for future use. This is my line of country so hats off.
Cruz Ascending, Will Trump Start To Melt?, Bush & Carson Are Finished
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.
Hateful 8 Cat Suddenly Out of The Bag — Weinstein Okays Limited Reviews — Grierson, Kohn Jump First
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.
Warp-Speed Pizazz, That Old Whoo-Whoo Feeling, Gang’s-All-Here Warmth & Humor and More-Than-Your-Money’s-Worth Fun Have Recaptured The Flag
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.
Best Defense Is An Arrogant, Jaw-Dropping Offense
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.
Old Way vs. New Way
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.
Legendary Clusterfuck For The Ages
Check-in for invited guests at tonight’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiere will “begin at 5:00pm at the northeast corner of Orange Dr. and Hollywood Blvd,” says a Disney-generated email. The general presumption is that three theatres — the Dolby, the Chinese and the El Capitan — will screen the film more or less simultaneously at 6:30 pm. Prediction: No way showings start before 7 or even 7:30 pm. The Dolby has 3401 seats, the Chinese has 1152 and the El Capitan has 1100 = 5653 seats. If the event has been invited to capacity 5653 people are going to have to get past a team of Disney staffers checking IDs and names on iPads as well as checking bags within a 90-minute period (i.e., 5 pm to 6:30 pm). That means at least 61 guests per minute or one person per second will have to be processed. If you’ve ever been to will-call at a movie premiere you know that’ll never happen. On top of which (this is stunning when you think about it), the invite states that “no cameras, video recorders or cell phones with camera/video capability will be allowed in the theatre.” In other words no phones at all — 5600 people sitting in their seats without the ability to check messages or text or tweet or anything. How many hundreds are going to be unaware of this rule and attempt a losing battle at getting in regardless? What percentage will try to sneak their phones in? This is going to be a complete and total zoo.
Russell Could Stand Up To Trump
Hollywood Elsewhere traffic spiked so strongly a week after the Kurt Russell thing that yesterday Liquid Web sent me a note of concern and suggested I might want to expand my bandwidth capacity. Thundering hordes of rightwing loons have glommed onto this (88,000 have watched this video), all of the commenters saying I’m a deluded liberal fool and so on. Russell was allegedly “upset” after our discussion (or so I was told by Weinstein publicists) but look at him now — he’s suddenly the new super-stud of the rightwing blogosphere, Snake Plissken reborn. He could run for the Republican nomination right now and probably fare pretty well against Donald Trump — seriously. And I’d still love to see him play his late father, Bing Russell, in a feature film version of The Battered Bastards of Baseball.
Half-Decent Garbage
I just stumbled upon this Spirit track an hour ago. Hasn’t been in my head for eons but I’ve always felt an affection for this cut, particularly the downshifting at the one-minute mark into a generic-sounding jazz piano riff by keyboardist John Locke. Spirit’s most popular song was “I Got A Line On You.” Singer-guitarist Randy California drowned off the coast of Molokai in 1997, at age 45. California is arguably best known for a gentle guitar intro to “Taurus“, a Spirit song, that was ripped off note-for-note by Jimmy Page in the creation of “Stairway to Heaven.”
Citizen’s Plea to UCLA Marketers: Stop Pushing “Change The Game” Videos
Think positively, be giving and unselfish, have faith in enlightened brains, don’t be a cynical nihilist, think constructively, don’t get bogged down in cultural resentment, etc. These are tenets of the UCLA Optimists marketing campaign, which I completely…well, mostly admire and believe in. (I derive too much pleasure from hating on under-educated Tea Party rurals to give that one up.) Why, then, do I absolutely hate this YouTube “changing the game” video that’s been playing before almost every trailer I’ve watched for the last two or three months? Mainly because it’s been playing before almost every trailer I’ve watched for the last two or three months, but also because I hate listening to serene sanctimonious bromides and especially the pat, peppy tone in the narrator’s voice. Chalk on a blackboard. Close to the breaking point.