Mrs White is too busy dealing with the flames - flames! - on the side of her face. Breathing… Breathle - - Heaving breaths, heaving…

I bet Armond White thinks the best and most intelligent Vietnam War film is Operation: Dumbo Drop.

I believe that Principal Lewis in American Dad! was drawn to resemble Kevin Michael Richardson, who provides the voice of the character. But there is a James Avery connection, as Kevin Michael Richardson is the voice of Shredder in the current Nickelodeon TMNT cartoon.

Shredder was a shining symbol of racial pluralism. A Japanese man with the voice of a black man and the outsized ambitions of a Reaganite white man? With multi-ethnic appeal like that, he should've left the Technodrome and run for office.

That was, I'm fairly certain, the very first episode of TMNT I ever saw (in 1990, which is the year Australia first got that show). And that "Will you shut up?" line of Shredder's is the piece of dialogue that got me. It was so hilarious, and not the sort of thing I was used to hearing from villains in cartoons (I…

So, has Janet Hubert accused Will Smith of assassinating James Avery yet?

"Willie" rhymes with "Philly." The theme song writes itself!

Lothariocutus of Borg?

Yaphet Kotto had quite the 70s death-reel. Death by inflation in Live and Let Die. Death by poison inhalation in Blue Collar. Death by alien in Alien.

Blue Collar is incredible.

One of my favourite reviews of New York, New York is in Danny Peary's Cult Movies III (1989). Peary argues that although Jimmy is obnoxious and Francine is dewy-eyed and "perfect," when you examine their actions, Francine is actually the villain of the film. Peary goes on to theorise that the entire movie is perhaps…

"You're off the case, Hassenger!" does have a ring to it.

I just got depressed when I realised that this'll be the first Martin Scorsese film without a review by Roger Ebert.

I think Loose Cannons also boasts a theme song performed by Katey Sagal.

"Reuniting with Scorsese for the first time since that ’70s milestone, screenwriter Paul Schrader…"

I'm quite fond of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but The Brothers Grimm and Doctor Parnassus are middling, and Tideland is execrable. It gets increasingly difficult to sympathise with Gilliam's swaggering one-man-against-the-big-bad-studio-system schtick when he keeps making below-par movies that don't turn a…

He likes both of them. Baron Munchausen is "more fun than most movies of its time" and "a rip-roaring adventure that doesn't quite get under your skin as much as Gilliam's earlier work; nevertheless it's a stunning example of his flights of surreal imagination." Time Bandits is "a lavish, nightmarish fantasy [that] is…

Although Ross is off-target at times, a lot of his assessments are very good - Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, for example, get especially good write-ups, and Ross also boosts the very underrated And Now For Something Completely Different (sharing my opinion that a lot of the sketches in the film improve upon the…

Ross gave Clockwise a decent couple of pages. His feelings about the film were mixed. Some excerpts:

The Monty Python Encyclopedia is packed full of useful and interesting information, but Ross's opinions are frequently infuriating - and it's not just the wrong-headed Wanda review. Ross devotes a mere paragraph to Splitting Heirs - a film written by and starring Eric Idle, and featuring John Cleese - yet Casper, that…