Ha! Never heard that quote. Would have saved me a lot of painful hours in college screening rooms, suffering through Godard's unwatchable movies, trying to figure out what I was missing.

kinski and treadwell
Funny this ran today; I just watched Grizzly Man again this morning for a project I'm working on, and I was struck by a moment in the film I hadn't focused on before. Treadwell is going on an insane rant to his camera about the fucking Forest Service, how they're fucking him over, they can't stop…

speaking of the Richard Thompson score, which is wonderful, the DVD of the movie comes with a long feature showing the recording of the score. It's a major treat to watch Thompson play, and a major treat to watch Herzog directing Thompson.

Spike Jones
When I was a kid I used to get a big kick out of listening to my parents' Spike Jones album (no, not Spike Jonze), especially his version of the William Tell Overture.

The Lisa character on SFU was awful — a West Coast type I know very well: all smiles on the surface but with all sorts of anger and tension and control stuff going on just beneath surface. Come to think of it, the same could be said about the 60s as a whole. Such a beautifully written and wonderfully acted role. Very…

Cliaclos: Your perspicacious analysis has won me over. I concede!

Jesus. I should have learned by now that there's no sense trying to make even slightly subtle distinctions on discussion boards. Shall I say it again?

were

I'm not sure that's right. Some artists have an onstage charisma that makes it virtually impossible for them to do a bad show. Granted, if kd (or bruce) got a severe case of the stomach flu immediately before going on, she (or he) might be capable of a bad performance, but that would be an exception under exceptional…

Brad Paisley is huge with Jay Leno's audience. Not big at all with the AV Club audience.

Get Back
Jay isn't doing himself any favors with the promo for his big return to the Tonight Show, using the Beatles' "Get Back" as the theme song, as in "get back to where you once belonged." Jesus, the guy really is trying to make himself the most hated man in America. Then again, booking Sarah Palin suggests Jay's…

Avril
Does this mean she's got a new album coming out? Or that she's out of rehab? My daughter will be, if not thrilled (too many years have gone by for that), interested.

lyle and kd
Interesting that you mention kd and Lyle Lovett together. In the mid 80s I had just discovered Lyle's Pontiac album, just released, and I was obsessed with it. Walked around Manhattan listening to it on my Walkman (pre iPod), resisting the impulse to tell fellow pedestrians they just HAD to listen to LA…

Not true, Lovecraft. It's just five guys you consistently hear about. There was a whole beat culture that thrived in the 50s, in Greenwich Village in New York and North Beach in San Francisco, mainly, with lots of cool or strange or ridiculous people. You don't hear that much these days about Lawrence Ferlinghetti,…

By the way, to any of the above who are construing my comments as maintaining that the Beats and/or Kerouac were proto-hippies, that wasn't my point. I was responding only to Tiger of the Mirror's comment about counter-culture attitudes as a whole. Obviously the Beats had a profound influence on the CC (via Dylan, for…

A characteristically thoughtful and generous comment, Lobsters 1! Delivered via technologies developed, largely, from individuals who were deeply enmeshed in the counterculture (see Fred Turner's "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" and any number of books on the history of Apple). You demonstrate why a lot of the…

@Tiger of the Mirror: If you run into the same former hippie assholes I do at the food co-op, I can definitely understand why you would have a dim view of counterculture values. Still, that's too broad a brush, I think.

come to think of it, Brad's character in Kalifornia was pretty badass too.

couple more
Brad Pitt as the gypsy boxer in Snatch and as Achilles in Troy

Interesting that no one seems to have mentioned Rambo, either. I never watched any of those movies but wasn't he supposed to be the maddest red white and blue badass of all time? I guess he failed on some level. Maybe because he became a joke instead.