If anyone hears of any tweeted or tapped-out reactions to today’s Fort Hood screening of Chris Nolan‘s Interstellar, please advise or pass along. The showing is apparently happening at the Palmer Theatre, and this Nolan fan site claims Matthew McConaughey will attend. It’s likely that a certain percentage of viewers at tonight’s FH screening say “reach for the stahhrs” or “to break bahhriers” with the same yokel accent that McConaughey speaks with. It’s not generally known that Fort Hood has a greater concentration of military film critics than any other military installation in the continental U.S., but it’s…okay, I’m kidding. Seriously, this is obviously some kind of respectful gesture to the Fort Hood community for some Interstellar– or McConaughey-related reason. Tomorrow night’s Manhattan screening is strictly for friends and family of Paramount honcho Brad Grey, I’m told. Elite press will probably get their first look sometime during the coming week, but no official word has gone out yet.

Nobody knows what Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken has in its quiver and nobody should say anything until they do…period. And yet the spitball games continue. For whatever reason (most likely the instinct to show obeisance before power) Jolie’s World War II-era survival saga has been enjoying a kind of speculative semi-front-runner status. Not king of the mountain-y but roughly on par with the Best Picture prospects of Boyhood, The Imitation Game and Birdman…all at the front of the pack.

At the very least Unbroken has seemed like one of the top hotties since Tom O’Neil‘s Gold Derby and David Poland‘s “Gurus of Gold” began asking Oscar-watchers for their hunches and guesses just before Telluride/Toronto. That’s been the general impression, I mean.

Which is why I was surprised to discover a couple of days ago that in the latest Guru chart Unbroken is now ranked seventh…even though it’s still ranked as the #2 favorite at Gold Derby. Seventh is almost indistinguishable from ninth, and if you’re going to be in ninth place you might as well be in tenth. Yes, it’s all hot air and bullshit, I know. But I was curious about who the actual friends of Unbroken are at this stage. And I was wondering how to explain the disparity between being a #2 choice vs. being seventh-ranked.

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Birdman began playing yesterday in four theatres (two in Los Angeles, two in Manhattan) and took in $135,602 or $33,901 per situation…pretty big-timey. Presumably a portion of the HE community saw it last night and…well, you know what. Please. Thank you.

“Birdman is one of the most antsy, emotionally exposed, drill-down big-city comedies I’ve ever experienced, and probably the most transcendent, spirit-lifting film I’ve seen this century with Children of Men running a close second. It’s actually more of a psychological angst-and-anxiety movie with an infusion of Ingmar Bergman enzymes and occasional hyena laughs. It’s not a laugh riot per se but when it connects it’s fall-on-the-floor.

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There have been complaints about missing comments in stories that are more than a year old plus a reported inability to upvote or downvote comments. Two or three days ago HE’s tech person tried to restore the missing comments but couldn’t quite crack it. If anyone knows anything or anyone who could help, please advise. HE tech comments/analysis after the jump:

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From a producer friend: “WWII movies and difficult spiritual journeys are two currents during the current fall season. Whiplash and Foxcatcher don’t quite constitute a third as they number only two — obsessive-compulsive crazy coaches and their brilliant protege/prey.”

Kathryn Bigelow‘s big night happened a little less than five years ago. Doesn’t feel like it but that’s the math. All that love in the room…and then two and three-quarter years later Bigelow and her Hurt Locker collaborator Mark Boal delivered Zero Dark Thirty, a brilliant, even better film, in my humble view…and some of those who were cheering Bigelow for her Hurt Locker triumph turned right around and allied themselves with a cabal of p.c. lefties and helped to engineer or at the very least support the ugliest takedown in Oscar history. Find me someone in this town who isn’t a one-eyed jack and I’ll call bullshit. The only emotions you can really trust are resentment and envy — everything else is suspect.

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I decided to download and install the recently-popped OSX Yosemite on my three computers (2011 Macbook Pro, 2013 Macbook Air, 2009 iMac) today. It takes a while but once it’s all installed it’s pretty sweet. For some reason Adobe Flash Player was erased by the Yosemite installation…pain in the ass. The only real problem is that Yosemite keeps asking you to install computer-to-phone Cloud capabilities that won’t function unless you have IOS 8 installed on your phone, which of course has been glitchy if not problematic for those who don’t have the iPhone 6. I’m not buying the damn thing until there’s an iPhone 6 Mophie juice pack, which won’t be ready until early 2015…nice! Apple is a racket. The point of new operating systems isn’t just to make things work more smoothly, but to goad you to buy new devices. I’ll probably have to buy a new Macbook Pro by the end of the year or soon after.

Deadline‘s Mike Fleming is reporting that Relativity will distribute Mike Binder and Kevin Costner‘s Black Or White, a racially-flavored child custody drama that I went apeshit for after catching it last July. (Here’s the review I posted as the Toronto Film Festival began.) I recognize that other critics weren’t as enthusiastic but I don’t care…fuck it. Fleming is saying the film will be released this year to qualify for awards action but I heard…well, that things aren’t finally decided. Relativity will release the film “through its newly formed multicultural division,” obviously an indication that they expect Black and White to hit bigger with non-whites than with whites…right? It’s a movie about both sides of the racial divide, guys. It’s mainly about parenting.

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Variety‘s Tim Gray recently tried to kick up a little Oscar dust for David Ayer‘s Fury, which is expected to earn…oh, maybe $25 million this weekend. Below-the-line nominations, Gray means — Roman Vasyanov’s cinematography, production designer Andrew Menzies, editors Jay Cassidy and Dody Dorn (I could actually see a nomination for these two) and so on. I think we all know that Fury is just a good old-fashioned war flick with amped-up gore and a ridiculous nihilistic ending. It ain’t on the awards hunt, and that should be good enough for the parties concerned. If they gave an Oscar for Best Girly-Faced Wimp or Actor Most Deserving Of an Early Painful Death, Logan Lerman would be a strong contender but otherwise forget it. Incidentally: It’s 6:30 pm New York time so enough people have seen Fury and presumably have an opinion about the ending. Read the piece, think it over and, if so moved, add your name to the HE Honor Roll of Six Critics who found Ayer’s Wild Bunch finale loony.

“’I used to say no to almost everything, because I thought, I’ve got enough dough, I know what I want to do, and I know what I’m capable of,’ Michael Keaton says before switching to a baseball metaphor, something the Pennsylvania native and lifelong Pittsburgh Pirates fan has a habit of doing. “It’s really like saying, ‘I’m going to make you throw me my pitch. I’ll foul a bunch off, but ultimately I have faith that somebody’s going to throw me my pitch.’ By those terms — the Keaton version of ‘I am big, it’s the pictures that got small’ — Birdman may best be described as a fast-breaking curveball the actor manages to hit out of the park.” — from Scott Foundas‘s Variety interview with the Birdman star.

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Fear is irrational. When people get scared, they don’t want explanations — they just want to feel safe. And when that happens, they always turn to the hard guys on the right. Which is why the less-than-aggressive response by Obama administration and more particularly the Center for Disease Control’s Tom Frieden to the recent Ebola scare ensures that the Republicans will win a U.S. Senate majority next month. President Obama wouldn’t have decided to appoint a new Ebola czar (Ron Klain has the job) if he wasn’t seriously concerned about Frieden looking like a weak sister over the last several days. If there was even a hair-breadth’s chance that the Republicans might not win, that hope is all but dead now. Frieden’s mild-mannered, bordering-on-milquetoasty responses to questions about his agency not being hard and decisive enough have surely created a sense of elation among Republicans. People who were teetering on the fence now have a reason to go with the hard guys. It’s over. The Right is going to fuck things up horribly between early 2015 and early 2017, and it’s basically due to the Ebola crisis but more particularly to Frieden.