Nerd in the 'Noke

The Hateful Eight (2015), R, 167 minutes (187 minutes Roadshow 70mm)  - Quentin Tarantino announced this film in late 2013, about a year after he released 2012's  Django Unchained .  Shortly thereafter, the script leaked online and he threatened to cancel the film entirely.  Fortunately for those of us who are fans of his work, he changed his mind after hosting a live reading of the script in Los Angeles and by the end of 2014 had begun production on his eighth feature length film. The Hateful Eight (which is the second western in Tarantino's stable of films) takes place just years after the Civil War on a Wyoming mountain pass leading to Red Rock and finds a colorful bunch of characters holed up at Minnie's Haberdashery while a nasty blizzard blows by.  This bunch includes two bounty hunters - Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and John 'The Hangman' Ruth (Kurt Russell), their bounties - including Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the new Sh...

Nebraska (2013), R, 115 minutes - I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this film.  I had first read about it in a small blurb in Entertainment Weekly a couple of months back.  I hadn't seen a full trailer and only knew what little I had seen in that magazine piece: it was a film about an old man from Billings, Montana who decides to travel - one way or another - to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim a million dollar sweepstakes prize, and that it included great performances from Bruce Dern and Will Forte.  I'm glad that I had seen that little write up because what I encountered when I saw Nebraska at my local art house theater the other day was a very heart felt, endearing, humorous film that was one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen this year. Woody Grant (Dern) gets a letter in the mail stating that he was 'a $1,000,000 winner!'.  We've all seen this kind of junk mail (or at least any of us over the age of 30 have, who knows if they still circu...