I read the script of 'The Beautiful Days At Aranjuez' last year, and noted my favorite lines, which I present here for your reading pleasure:

You weren't the only one.

Remember when you were begging the gods for Malick to make another movie? And now you're ready to kill your first-born to make him stop.

Dunham's galactic-level solipsism and unbelievably insular, you're-a-special-snowflake upbringing have seen her ruthlessly strip-mine her own experience and turn it into mediocre art. When you consider how many really gifted, provocative female writers are out there—Michelle Ashford, Ann Biderman, Jill Soloway, Ana…

Always listen to your DoP.

Exactly. It's not about 'you should believe in God, not machines'—because, frankly, where else is the notion of an actual, genuine deity really advanced here?—but about not trusting in 'false images' over actual experience. And you're right: the inevitability of the narrative is precisely what gives it its power.

(Speaking of Idziak, I also remember Thandie Newton telling me how, after he'd photographed her in 'The Journey of August King', he apologised to her at the end of the shoot, feeling he hadn't done her justice—in part, he said, because her skin was 'complicated'. Newton: "I was, like . . . Are you trying to say…

Thanks for the write-up of these beautiful, essential things. I remember seeing them at the Sydney Film Festival back in—I guess 1989? One a day, every day of the festival. I'd never heard of Kieslowski, then, and it was nothing short of revelatory, one of the crucial filmgoing experiences of my life.

'Even though the 10 films employ nine different cinematographers, they share the same utilitarian look . . . '

Yep. Many performers give you pleasure, or satisfaction. He's one of the very few that gave joy.

It says something, I think, about how empty the Antoine Doinel films are—'The 400 Blows' notwithstanding—that virtually all the comments here are actually about another filmmaker.

I wanted to see it, too, away from the hype that surrounded its premiere. (Though of the six people I know who saw it at Sundance—two critics, three buyers and a producer—not one of them thought it was anything but 'okay' . . . though they felt it better to keep their opinions to themselves, such was the righteous…

Exactly. Everything is under threat at all times: your wealth, your health, your home. Enemies are everywhere. It's like listening to that great-uncle you'll be secretly happy to learn has died.

Yeah, the bar is not exactly high. This is, though, the problem with American Conservatism today: the lack of intelligent voices espousing anything resembling an actual philosophy. I guess because it's always been so adversarial in nature—from Commentary, back in the day, defining itself against the Soviet threat, to…

I've taken to listening to 870AM ('The Answer') while driving, because I derive a grim pleasure from the ongoing meltdown of the Right. There's no Savage, thank god—but there is Dennis Prager, one of the most pompous, sanctimonious pieces of shit I've ever heard, who when he's not railing about the sanctity of…

Yeah, those 'travelling' people . . . fuck them.

Their video for 'Take It There' (with John Hawkes and the Asian Girl Dancers of Death) is one of the best I've seen this decade.

McDonald's line about James Earl Ray, Martin Luther King's killer, celebrating his sixty-sixth birthday in prison – and planning to spend it 'much the same as any other day: being continuously raped from morning to night' – still strikes me as the funniest Weekend Update gag I've ever heard.

I'm . . . not sure what's happening to this once-fine website.

I met him once, but forgot to ask exactly what episode of 'Doctor Who' he'd been in.