Beltmann

Couple of short documentaries made by Stanley Kubrick: Day of the Fight / 1951 Flying Padre / 1951 And also a short made by Tony Scott while still a student: One of the Missing / 1971

I'll second these recommendations. Both are great--especially Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which is one of my all-time favorite movies. Top 20, maybe.

I'm resigned to that possibility, especially since Velvet Goldmine was pretty lousy. But Haynes has made at least two masterpieces--Safe and Far from Heaven--and has enough artistic finesse to make this Dylan gimmick work. I like his chances more than most. (Far from Heaven also relied on an arch, stylized conceit, and that totally worked.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SS!

Right up there with Spike's best work.

I don't have anything invested in Ryan Adams one way or another. If you notice, I haven't offered my opinion of Easy Tiger in this thread or anywhere else. I'll just say this about Adams: In his work I hear many influences, including GP, but I also hear plenty of his own artistic voice, too. If you're searching for "evidence" that many "educated" ears find value in Ryan Adams, let me direct you to the links below. For every critic that dismisses Adams as a poor derivative, there seems to be at least two or three that are convinced he offers something more than that. Taken as a whole, cr

What Light?, you seem confused about why your posts have raised so many hackles. It has nothing to do with cliques, and everything to do with your tone. People reacted badly to your posts not because you expressed an unpopular opinion, but because you coupled that opinion with a smug, patronizing tone. You implied that anyone with a differing take must, without exception, be guilty of blind fan worship or plain ignorance. You then refused to engage with opposing arguments, choosing to instead dismiss them as merely the addled opinions of thoughtless, uneducated lemmings. What it boils dow

I have met Paul Molitor, Jim Gantner, and Pete Vuckovich. Once, when I was about 12, my left knee appeared with Molitor on the evening news.

The '56 version is by far the best... but I always welcome new updates, because, much like zombie movies, the body snatcher movies are malleable enough to have ripe metaphorical functions in each new era. I think we talked about McElwee's Bright Leaves once before... did you ever catch up with that one?

It's been a long wait, but David Fincher has finally made a masterpiece. I loved everything about this movie.

Carnal Knowledge?

I liked Jack Black a lot in Jesus' Son, and even Shallow Hal (a very underrated movie). But you're right--School of Rock was the last time he was enjoyable rather than insufferable. Lately he just seems to be playing overblown caricatures of himself.

What I liked about this intimate epic spanning two generations--the first is a Bengali man and his wife who left Calcutta for NYC, the second is their grown son who now identifies with American culture rather than his parents' heritage--is how the movie never settles for superficial cultural and generational tensions. Instead, Nair, along with her amazing actors, has created a very real, very dynamic family. It's a movie about people rather than cultural tokens.

Me too.

One of my all-time favorite albums.

The Outlaw / Howard Hughes / 1943 Western in which Jane Russell's cleavage creates a magical vortex where bullets go to die.

Yeah, that's definitely one of the great greats--and it has one of the coolest "introduction of a character" moments ever filmed. And this is a nifty companion piece: Vincent D'Onofrio's recent short film Five Minutes, Mr. Welles imagines how the killer last line from The Third Man's ferris-wheel scene might have been conceived. It's in beautiful black-and-white, filled with whimsy, and wistful about old cinema. But something more than simple nostalgia is at stake: While D'Onofrio the actor channels Welles (as he did in Ed Wood), D'Onofrio the director indulges in baseless speculation onl

That's how I felt about From Justin to Kelly.

Fat Girl is one of Breillat's better movies, I think. If you haven't already, you should check out Sex Is Comedy, because it's an interesting, somewhat successful companion piece. Anne Parillaud plays a film director much like Breillat, struggling to shoot two sex scenes from a movie much like Fat Girl (in fact, the lead actress in the movie-within-the-movie is the same actress from Fat Girl).

Last fall I was at the Milwaukee International Film Festival, and between screenings I was hanging out in the lobby of the Oriental Theater with another festival hopper. Suddenly she said, "Hey, it's the Maestro!" Sure enough, Mark Metcalf, who played the Maestro on Seinfeld, was ambling through the lobby. I turned to my acquaintance and said, "And he's with Harold Ramis." Ramis was in town to introduce a screening of Groundhog Day, part of the festival's tribute to his career. As he neared, I said hello, and as luck would have it, his festival guide asked him to wait right there while th

That's it exactly. I'll vouch for the neti pot, too. As for the ear candles, I have never used them. But my wife tried it and somehow singed her womb. I don't think she did it right.

Plus, the eMusic download comes packaged with an exclusive Track 10, "Love To a Monster."

I nearly threw up while this was happening. Even worse, the Brewers used five pitchers after Gallardo, thereby completely taxing an already overworked bullpen in a fruitless endeavor. This team has been breaking my heart on a nearly daily basis ever since the All-Star break. But Gallardo's going to be okay. He's going to be a rock star pitcher in the very near future.

Renaissance / Christian Volckman / France / 2006 A gorgeous landmark in animation--live-action footage was painted over, rotoscoped into high-contrast black-and-white--but still one of the year's biggest disappointments. The dystopian sci-fi story (some nonsense about corporate greed and a covert attempt to unlock the secrets of immortality) is comprised of dull action and stock dialogue. There just aren't any characters or ideas to latch onto, which renders all that beautiful animation utterly soulless. There's never anything at stake other than style.