That horrible blank-screen, page-refusing-to-load problem that has afflicted Hollywood Elsewhere for almost three days has been solved. The guy who fixed it about an hour ago is known to Softlayer customers as “Jefferson S.” I felt this huge surge of affection. I wrote him and said “Please call me or let me call you so I can thank you profusely! I can’t believe it. YOU FIXED THE PROBLEM!” After three or four other tech support guys couldn’t crack it. A smelly 75-pound monkey has been lifted off my back.

What January 2013 films are even half-worth seeing? I don’t believe that Ruben Fleischer‘s Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 1.11) is going to be much. Taylor Hackford‘s Parker (Film Disrict, 1.25)…who am I kidding? For the most part Jason Statham seems opposed to starring in crafty, above-average films — his last decent effort was ’08’s The Bank Job. I’ve heard that Kim Jee-Woon‘s The Last Stand (Lionsgate, 1.18) is a real January release. Mark Wahlberg + January 18th = Allen Hughes‘ Broken City. We’ve all heard about Andres Muschietti‘s Mama (Universal, 1.18)…half decent, not too bad.

This is why the Sundance Film Festival (happening this year between 1.17 and 1.27) is so terrific. It saves you from the January blahs and provides a respite from the Oscar race (which, yes, is a lot more interesting this year).

I haven’t read James Wolcott‘s Vanity Fair cover piece on Jennifer Lawrence, but I know this photo argues strenuously against almost everything she delivered in Silver Linings Playbook. Tiffany is/was/always will be the no-bullshit, stare-into-your-soul, broken-wing girl — a little gothy, fucked-up, vulnerable, impulsive, brilliant, feisty, raspy-voiced, loyal and honestly…? Not all that “hot” in a conventional flash-glossy Maxim sense. She’s way above that, a force of nature, a powerhouse. In short, the VF cover shot is a kind of diminishment.

Apart from the submental whoo-whooing from the drunks, last night’s Eiffel Tower light show in Paris was really sub-par…if this is in fact what happened. Where were the fireworks? Was their absence an austerity measure by French president Francois Hollande? The Tour Eiffel sparkly-twinkly thing happens every night in Paris after dark. It’s nothing. I saw the greatest fireworks show in my life 13 years ago in front of the Eiffel Tower…me and the kids. I’ll never forget it.

Posted two years ago: One, I haven’t been to a New Year’s Eve party in ages. And two, my last really cool New Year’s Eve celebration happened 12 years ago in Paris. But as I have nothing new to say, it couldn’t hurt to post the best-written humbug rants from the last four or five years.

Posted last year: “There’s nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of this idiotic celebration of absolutely nothing.

“I love clinking glasses with cool people at cool parties, but celebrating renewal by way of the hands of a clock and especially in the company of party animals making a big whoop-dee-doo has always felt like a huge humiliation.

“Only idiots believe in the idea of a of a midnight renewal. Renewal is a constant. Every morning…hell, every minute marks the potential start of something beautiful and cleansing, and perhaps even transforming. So why hang back and celebrate a rite that denies this 24/7 theology, and in a kind of idiot-monkey way with party hats and noisemakers?

“I would feel differently if I was in Paris or Prague or Rome. It’s another thing over there.”

Posted six years ago: “My all-time best New Year’s Eve happened in Paris on the 1999-into-2000 Millenium year — standing about two city blocks in front of the Eiffel Tower and watching the greatest fireworks display ever orchestrated in human history. And then walking all the way back to Montmartre with thousands on the streets after the civil servants shut the subway down at 1 a.m.”

Posted five years ago: “I need to stay in the city until sometime in the early morning, despite the intense cold and wind. I live below a family of animals — Hispanic party elephants — who stomp around and play music so loud that the building throbs and the plaster cracks. It’s a fairly safe bet they’re going to lose their minds tonight so I may as well just huddle down in the city and bounce around from bar to bar. New Year’s Eve is the emptiest holiday ritual of the year, and an opportunity for shallow under-30s to act like assholes.”

Posted seven years ago: “I’d say ‘Happy New Year’ to everyone, but…all right, ‘Happy New Year.’ But I’ve always hated saying those words. Nothing’s ‘happy’ by way of hope. Happy is discovered, earned, lucked into, found. At best, people are content, joyously turned on for the moment, laughing or telling a funny story or a good joke, placated, relaxed, energetic, enthused, full of dreams, generous of heart, intellectually alive…but ‘happy’? The word itself has always struck me as one that only simple minds would use.

“I’m not forking over $14 to any bartenders for a drink. Anywhere. I don’t care who I’m with or what anyone thinks of this policy/attitude. I’ll give $14 to a homeless person first. I won’t give my money to anyone or anything that rubs me the wrong way tonight. I hate everything about New Year’s Eve, especially young guys going ‘ooowwwoooaaagghh!’ in animal bars as midnight approaches.

“We all know the same mistakes are going to be made over the next twelve months, and that the only thing certain is that everything will be more expensive twelve months from now. The only comfort I have is this: the morons who believe global warming is a myth are going to meet each other at parties and get married and have kids and try to teach their children that global warming is a myth, but a significant number of these people are going to fail in this effort because kids always see through their parents’ bullshit.”

From the Wiki page: “‘Auld Lang Syne=’ is a Scottish poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song. The title may be translated into English literally as “old long since”, or more idiomatically, ‘long long ago’, ‘days gone by’ or ‘old times.'”

Crippling website problems, WordPress transfer finessings and server shiftover issues have occupied me constantly for the last seven hours. Things are either getting better or starting to look better…or are more or less exactly the same way they were yesterday. Either I don’t know or I’ve forgotten or I’m so exhausted and/or bitter that all I want to do is nod off or throw up. I know I can’t do this any more today. All I can say for sure is that so far 2013 has been a shit year.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil has written that Lincoln is “looking good” for the Best Picture Oscar, “but don’t wager money on it…it’s not a lock. Lincoln will probably have the biggest tally when nominations are announced on January 10th and that’s key. The movie with the most bids wins the top Oscar about 75% of the time. However, it’s very vulnerable and its rivals are strong.”

O’Neil suspects that Lincoln won’t win Best Picture from the Critics’ Choice Awards on January 10th “and that usually matters a lot,” he writes. “Over the past 10 years, that trophy has successfully forecasted the top Oscar seven times.” O’Neil looks at average 2012 scores given to the Best Picture nominees by members of the Critics’ Choice voting group (i.e., the BFCA) and notes that Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Silver Linings Playbook have scored higher than Lincoln.

With all the online-voting issues going on, you’d think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would extend the balloting deadline by 72 hours, or to Monday, January 7 at 5 pm. Give people a bit more extra time to watch those screeners, etc. But no — they’ve decided to bump it a mere 24 hours. The new deadline is Friday, January 4th, at 5 p.m. Pacific.

Those who can’t finagle their way through the Academy’s much-lamented online voting software will have the option of submitting a paper ballot. They can buy #2 pencils and erasers at CVS or Walmart.

“By extending the voting deadline [by 24 hours] we are providing every opportunity available to make the transition to online balloting as smooth as possible,” Academy COO Ric Robertson said in a statement. In other words, extending the deadline to Monday at 5 pm would’t be feasible? The nominee announcement happens at 5:30 am on Thursday, January 10th, so the Academy would have a full two days to tabulated the votes of the last-minute stragglers. That’s obviously more than enough time.

Today and yesterday friends and readers have told me they’ve gone to the site and seen nothing — a blank page. Or they’ve gone to the site, seen the front page but gotten nothing when they click on a jump page. I noticed this myself early this morning while using Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, and occasionally with Safari. (I don’t use IE or Opera.)

I naturally took this up with the all-but-worthless, know-nothing techies at my appalling internet service provider known as Softlayer. I started a trouble ticket with them but it took hours to find a tech support person whose vocabulary and attitude indicated even a glimmer of intelligence and/or a willingness to try and solve the problem.

This is my fault, of course, because I didn’t ditch these guys last year. My life becomes a head-throbbing hell when this stuff happens. And it totally turns off the juices that need to flow in order to think and write articles.

I tried to enlist my regular tech-support guy but he’s got a full plate and a family and so on. About 25 minutes ago I finally found a very nice, intelligent-sounding Softlayer techie named Nicole who is now trying to figure out the coding problem that is causing the white-page Janusz Kaminski appearance.

The second splitting headache has been caused by Firefox. A bug in Firefox 17 (i.e., the current version) has retained the malware warning that was going up when I got attacked by a Kazakhstan trojan on 12.24. Hollywood Elsewhere is totally free of trojan infection — Google has issued a clean bill of health, the ad server where the infection was centered has been updated with the password changed, and the password to the guts of the site has also been changed — and yet Firefox is still warning people about nonexistent malware.

There’s no way to remedy this as long as Firefox 17 is current, but the situation will be fixed when Firefox 18 is made available sometime between January 6th and January 9th. So the Firefox malware flag will allegedly disappear when you go to Hollywood Elsewhere IF you start using Firefox 18 a week from now, but it will hang around if you stay with Firefox 17. Firefox 19 will be released on 2.19, it says here. Many thanks & Happy New Year, Firefox!

I was working on a Most Noteworthy HE Jottings of 2012 piece. Pick and highlight the best stuff posted throughout the year, month by month. But that was too hard to do in a single day. I should have begun a few days ago — my bad. And then some more technical crap happened. Awful stuff. I’m glad I don’t own a gun. Sometimes I just want to inject opiates. But there’s comfort, at least, in knowing I’ll remember Fake Armond’s “fine mulled wine” tweet for many years to come.

It’s being reported that Republican intransigence will cause Congress to miss the fiscal cliff deadline, and so the country technically will go over it tonight…but with a bungee cord. So forget crashing on the rocks.

2012 began with the depression of The Artist being the all-but-guaranteed Best Picture winner, and it’s ended with the depression of Oscar handicappers (Gurus of Gold, Gold Derby guys) lazily forecasting with all the vim and vigor of a 74 year-old fat man that Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln has the strongest head of steam, blah blah. Please don’t listen to their tired consensus thinking, which is a kind of virus that spreads from one lazy mentality to the next.

Not Lincoln — I’m down on my knees — and anyone but King Poobah Rajah Sultan Spielberg. Zero Dark Thirty‘s Kathryn Bigelow, Silver Linings Playbook‘s David O. Russell, Amour‘s Michael Haneke…please! And dear merciful God, not Quentin Tarantino!

There is something so profoundly passive and deflating with the idea of choosing a rotely admirable procedural about passing a certain piece of legislation as The Year’s Finest Film. History demands that you bring something more than droopy eyelids and tired blood to the debate. Lincoln is almost the President Mubarak of Best Picture contenders. I say “almost” because it doesn’t espouse venality and corruption. But it’s certainly the safe, traditionalist choice. Civic-minded and old-schoolish, heavily funded, nicely crafted except for Janusz Kaminski‘s milky lighting…a nice, easy, retirement-village pocket drop.

I recognize that the Spielberg-kowtow crowd believes that Lincoln is the easiest nod-off (in the same way that Chicago and The Artist were easy-wheelchair picks) and therefore a default Best Picture winner. But why? I am telling you with every fibre and molecule that I can bring to this moment and this sentence that they’ve just slumped into the idea because everyone else has slumped into it. Why do they believe everyone else has swallowed the same sleeping pill? One reason is that the Gurus of Gold and the Gold Derby guys are saying so.

Do you see now what a terrible thing it is to listen to these guys (and I’m saying this as a member of the Gold Derby team)? They propulgate safely mediocre thinking.

As The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a very tedious film to sit through, I find it appalling — almost mystifying — that fans the world over are paying to see it in record numbers. $222,703,000 stateside, $464 million overseas and a general worldwide haul of $686 million. There really is something wrong with spending that much on a film this tiresome and overlong. Taste (even geek taste) has little to do with it. They saw the Rings trilogy so they have to see the new one. Obsessive, sad, depressing. I’m averting my eyes from here on.