I thought Thandie Newton was the best thing about W. - transcendentally weird.

@Senor Bagocrap ah yes the UC… I put in six years at Cal and went there a lot, between that and the Pacific Film Archive Berkeley was a great movie-going town. In general, I was pretty lucky in terms of coming of age when rep houses were going pretty strong - I grew up in Cambridge when the Harvard Sq. Theater and…

Yeah, in terms of feeling like you're actually hanging out with the commenters, THE THING and REPO MAN have the best tracks - the RM one is like a reunion party with half the cast and crew - everybody laughs all the way through the "get in the car white boy" "blanks" scene.

Again - sacrificing yourself for the rest of humanity is a weird way to "cave" in my book.

"I'd rather live w/ Hawk's hip heroes, than die Carpenters dreary nihilists."

no excuses
"Yet I never quite got around to seeing them, perhaps because in the abstract, The Thing From Another World sounds ridiculous."

Yeah, in general I'm not a fan of remakes but Carpenter's THE THING blows the Hawks version out of the water - I saw the Hawks out of film geek duty and while I can appreciate that it was good for its time, it's really pretty tedious.

Four or five fucking awesome movies over a 30 -odd year career is a pretty good.

WHAAA…..?
That's JOHN CUSACK?%$!*/&?? christ, he's starting to look like Broderick Crawford.

woops - didn't see that TR made the same point already. It's already hard to keep up with the different threads.

I didn't see LC as a MPDG because adorably quirky and free-spirited as she might be, the primary purpose of the MPDG is to engage in a healing relationship with the shut-off, ineffectual hero, and that's sure not what happened here. Alex Thomas probably is actually more akin to a MPDG IMO.

I'd be happy with Brown or any of the others mentioned but I'll throw out a few others -

doesn't matter
He can cast Phyllis Diller in this for all I care, I'm just happy that I know for sure Maggie Gyllenhal won't be in it. YMMV with these things of course, but in my book she has the most disagreeable screen presence since Judd Nelson.

screw you mckay
THE FRENCH CONNECTION holds up like a motherfucker.

mouse and his child
I remember reading it as a little mite, and I don't remember much about it, but I do remember it was heavy shit. It would probably frighten me more now.

"Before you going blaming us Canadians lets all think long and hard about where Dane Cook is from."

One of the few upsides of seeing SHUTTER ISLAND was that it made me realize I've been a little hard on BRINGING OUT THE DEAD all these years. Far from Scorsese's best, but it's got some great scenes - how can you not sort of love a movie that shows Tom Sizemore taking a baseball bat to Marc Antony? And compared to…