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Chris Ward
avclub-1906f3350e1fa43adced642ff351c943--disqus

Video Clerks
One of my favourite video clerk moments: guy comes up to me with a copy of Taxi Driver and asks if it's the sequel to Taxi. It was a close-run thing between doubling over laughing or telling him to get the fuck out my shop. In the end I settled on a withering 'no, no it's not'.

Die several years later?

You Do The Meth.

Y'see, jazz is like the new Coke - it'll be around forever.

Also, possibly corollary to the start of Futurama, with David Cohen and a couple of other top-notch Simpsons creative staff jumping ship.

Yeah, Behind The Laughter really hit home for me that things were changing. Funny, but a different kind of funny ("The Simpsons dream started out on a wing and a prayer, but now the wing was on fire, and the prayer had been answered… by Satan"). If you're looking to get more specific as to the start of the decline,

Were said jumpers Blazing Squad, by any chance, come to finish the job they started with the cover of Crossroads?

A little bit, aye. And not in a good 'hey, they're just like me!' way. More an 'oh Jesus, that's every kid I spent my teen years trying to avoid' kind of way.

Eugh
I cannot fucking stand Skins. It's like Nathan Barley played with a straight face. The characters just remind me of the idiotic fashion victim twunts that took Film & TV with me in my first year at uni, the ones that laughed all the way through Gilda and came out of a screening of Mulholland Dr. (following on

Viva Knievel!
Has anyone actually seen the Evil Knievel movie? Whilst never quite as utterly, unself-consciously over-the-top as it should be, it does still feature Gene Kelly as his drunken roadie sidekick who just wants to be reunited with his son dammit, Leslie Nielsen as the evil head of an international drug

The Dears
I didn't even realise The Dears' new record was out. And I love The Dears. Sometimes I feel like I might as well have been carrying out my own version of Popless this year.

Two biggest non-Roseanne roles?
Rabin, you forget Roseanne's sterling work as your guide to the world of facts.

Spacious Thoughts
Saw him support Public Enemy earlier in the year as Dr Octagon. I say 'support', as far as we could tell he was lip-synching. He was wearing a shirt like Sandman's from Spider-Man topped off with a glittery golden scarf, and at the end handed out porn to the front row from a plastic bag. Not

25th Hour's pretty good, if only because it took the chance to film in the immediate aftermath while it was going - even though it doesn't deal with it directly (although the metaphor's pretty clear), the credits sequence with the towers of light and the scene in Barry Pepper's apartment overlooking Ground Zero are

"I haven't even heard of half these costumes!"
"Elmo… Jenny Mc Carthy?"

Pull-quote…
…for the 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray:

I've seen him twice in Glasgow in the past four years and they're the two greatest gigs I've ever been to.

I thought he was… EGYPTIAN?!

The Twilight Sad
Man, The Twilight Sad are just about my favourite band of the moment (their only rivals for that title being The Hold Steady, even though the two sound nothing alike). I was hooked from the opening notes of Cold Days From The Birdhouse when a friend put it on a mix CD, and have since become a totally

Agreed - I've seen them twice, and was preparing to make it a third until they cancelled their entire UK tour two days before the Glasgow show. Curse you, Tad Kubler's pancreas - curse you!