The Pixies (and Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, maybe also GBV to a lesser extent) are in a special category as whey have reached a place where they are essential touchstones in the history of pop music; you'll always have people getting into their music just like you'll always have people getting into The Beatles, Pink…

There's also probably a new Neko Case record.

I just saw his review of Waltz (or one by someone with the same name who used to write for Las Vegas Weekly) as I was curious to see a point of view that didn't like it (I don't recall reading anything remotely negative about it, I had liked it, but I didn't think it was a masterpiece nor do I plan on seeing it again).

I haven't seen that Lvovsky, but I quite liked Les Sentiments and I loved the recent Camille Redouble. I remember quite liking VBT's first movie as well.
She always struck me as the quintessential Telerama actress rather than Cahiers (I can't think of an appropriate English language comparison, Telerama is basically a…

Her first movie definitely was liked by les Cahiers. i seem to remember she even made the cover then. And she is very much part of the "high brow/quality" network of French cinema.

I'd try to make a joke, bur the thought of Logan just makes me too upset to properly function.
I seem to remember that he is at his most despicable at the beginning and gets marginally better, but maybe it's just that my standards had lowered as the show went along.

If you find that disturbing, you should read Mansfield Park.

I'm very curious about this, if I remember correctly from my (superficial) forays into philosophy, Berlin was rather opposed to Marx and his ideas.

My guess is that people just expect it to be difficult and are not really giving it a chance; as you say it is fairly linear and straightforward (by his standards).

Yes, I remembered you'd written something along those lines, Slow Learner wasn't the first published, but it's the first things he's written (I haven't read it either, and apparently the most interesting thing about it are his comments).

I've been vaguely wanting to see that Transformers since the NYT review made it sound like it shouldn't even be classified as cinema the way we know it; is it crazy worth a look or crazy waste of time/frustrating?

My only memory of Dogville is that my English professor in business school let me write a review of it for a final exam instead of whatever business subject we were supposed to write about (yes, my degree is bogus). You'd hope that after writing a couple of pages about it I'd remember something, it was definitely a…

I've never seen that show, it's on my ever growing to-watch list.
My summer catch-up schedule is full already, so maybe next year.

I don't know if any of the shows on that tour were filmed, but I imagine they would make for a very good DVD.
It started with a 30 minutes film going through their history, with the concert itself alternating music  and introductions and walkthrough of their career. It's never the same to be there, but there was…

Movies

I love Josie and the Pussycats and Clueless, but I saw them  without having heard anything about them which might have helped.
I thought Josie walked the line perfectly between satire/subversion and movie for teens, it's probably less daring than most comments make it out to be, but it's still huge fun, and it gets…

The problem with Pynchon is that people expect it to be difficult (among other things), I've met a few people who told me they abandoned V. after a few pages as it was too difficult and I really don't understand what caused it (although I say the same thing about Ulysses, but in that case really just about the first…

Should X-Men be the starting point? It's true that it was the first successful one (on all accounts) but one (probably essential) difference is that the biblical epics had built-in cultural cachet (all the more so for Quo Vadis as it was adapted of a novel that earned its author the Nobel). I'd rather put the start of…

French people do (or did rather).

On the other hand, given that I'm guessing there are more movies you want to see than you have time for already, it might not be a bad thing.