Kubrick's 2001 was the ultimate in puzzle-box movies, no? (Clarke's novel, and his sequel novel 2010 and the movie made from it in 1984 by Peter Hyams, were much more straightforward and enormously less memorable.)

Another (even older) example is "This Girl Is a Woman Now," a hit by Gary Puckett & the Union Gap: "Our hearts told us we were right / And on that sweet and velvet night / A child had died, a woman had been born!…"

Diesel is doing a third Riddick picture that comes out later this year.

As long as they include no music by Bill Conti, I'm fine with it. I was never a fan of "Gonna Fly Now." (Conti's music ruined, for me anyway, the otherwise very enjoyable late-'70s Paul Mazursky movie An Unmarried Woman with Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates.)

Well, of course, it was Tom Hanks who asked Scott to act Tom Hanks-like in the Tom Hanks-written, Tom Hanks-directed That Thing You Do! (which I happen to like a lot). Co-starring Tom Hanks.

To learn more about Munch you pretty much have to go back to Homicide - one of my favorite episodes concerns his revisiting the suburb where he grew up, Pikesville, while working a case. Others concern his ex-wives played by Carol Kane and Valerie Perrine. All this was pretty much put on the shelf when Munch…

Yes! I'd forgotten. Saw it first-run.

Sincerest thanks for mentioning "Fall Out," the concluding episode of The Prisoner, and for the astute observation of "the way it implicitly acknowledges that after all that build-up, no sensible ending would ever have satisfied." Long before Lost ended, I expressed the hope that the writers of the final episode would…

The correct answer is: Tie for best, with Mannix (1967) - both by Lalo Schifrin.

I heard the parody version "Matzah Number 5" (by "Louis Bagel") before hearing the original, and it's in all ways superior (including the melody in the chorus, and the fact that it doesn't overstay its welcome; only one verse and one chorus). Can be heard at www.bageldance.com, among other places.

Yes, but the run up to the mother ship segment of the movie could be said to be more interesting than the final act itself. That is, you could argue that the mysterious aspects of the smaller UFOs, Roy and others' compulsion to create Devil's Tower representations, etc., were more interesting moment-to-moment than the…

When I was 7, my dad bought for me My Son, the Nut, the newest album by Allan Sherman, with full orchestra. It worked quite well as a kids' album. The popular cut was "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh" but my favorite was probably "One Hippopotami."

Criminy. The movie was just plain old Star Wars during its year-long first run in theaters (the "Episode IV: A New Hope" subtitle was added only after The Empire Strikes Back came out 3 years later) and hence John Williams never wrote any "New Hope" music. We need not yield to George Lucas' retroactive attempts to…

T. J. Bitch: No, the novel does not indicate, covertly or otherwise, that Deckard is anything but human. In the first scene, he and his wife are arguing over the settings of their respective Penfield mood organs (he wants her to dial a setting that will induce in her a desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it);…

"Silly Love Songs" is about 15 to 20% more tolerable (well, less intolerable) in the post-Wings version heard in Give My Regards to Broad Street in the mid-1980s; for a while it got some airplay, but it's hardly ever heard today. It modulates up to a new key in the middle and then back again.

For speculative-fiction fans, the least interesting part of any modern science-fiction movie is its final act…
I see what you did there - including "modern" so as to exclude 2001, whose final segment - whatever opinions one holds about it - is never less than compelling. (For decades  2001 remained the quintessential…

R. A. Ticker: Blade Runner did poorly upon initial release in 1982 when I saw it, and I think any version of it released since on home video (with or without the awful narration) would have done likewise in theaters, because it simply didn't work as a story; hence, all the later-day (latter-decade?) efforts to…

You mean, I trust, the long sequence that begins with a 1980 on-screen date and the opening bass line of Harry Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire." Scorsese was (reputedly) pretty damn accurately conveying someone under the influence of lots of cocaine over a long period, as derived from his own experiences in the late…

I suspect Boylan saw his work on The Yellow Album as not terribly dissimilar from his work on Chipmunks. They were both novelty joke albums for children; one just happened to be a spin-off of one of Western civilization’s premier accomplishments.

"The bar fight is as fun as it was in its original form…" I wish. Without the music composed for the original Tribbles episode (by Jerry Fielding), and with the substitution of the usual post-TNG sludge, it's not nearly as much fun as it could have been.