Hey, Rob Bowman made plenty of great X-Files episodes before going on to a long career of shitty, shitty movies.

@DC: 'Cause it's gonna keep Ian McKellan hangin' around.

He's working on the proper stylistic follow-up to The Lovely Bones, of course.

Giving The Hobbit to Brett Ratner
…is the cinematic equivalent of giving your child to Jeffrey Dahmer.

Goddamn it, Geddy Lee. People have a right to leave their houses and not have creeps follow them around and take pictures. The paparazzi are basically an industry of stalkers.

It seems to me to be a clear descendant of Merriweather Post Pavilion and Dan Deacon's Bromst, as well as European electronica. It features the wild, almost dervish-like bursts of transcendent joy of Deacon, but remains tethered by its excellent beats to Earth.

Agreed, Fresh Jive. The issue for me isn't age, but principle. Why the fuck is it legal to take and post unwillingly captured pictures of anyone's junk?

Me either, Arsenio. The entertainment culture that produces and sustains people like him is a cancer on human society. I hope his fall is taken as a sign.

One of my favorite albums of the year. It's like eating an ice cream cone too fast and not getting a headache. It never ceases to push the limits of perceivable ecstasy even as the songs go off in distinct directions. A listener might be taken aback by how nakedly gleeful it all is if he or she wasn't too busy dancing…

JVS, Phel can't get a work visa for six months, so they're living separately. Join us all on Twitter! We all float down here!

When you start watching it, Black Narcissus seems like the most arch, over-the-top, grotesquely indulgent film to have ever been called a masterpiece. As it progresses, though, you fall under its hypnotic sway just as the central character does the sway of the setting. It's then that you realize that Powell wants the…

Vague memories all. But I have seen most of them a few times on DVD.

@Louis Canon: Oh to live in that apartment, etc…

I agree wholeheartedly, Information. Tales of Hoffmann is a little narcoleptic after its first scene.

B&W Cinematography
Mike, do you know anything about the background of this film? The visuals in this scene are drastically different from those in Powell's previous b&w films, A Canterbury Tale and I Know Where I'm Going! The latter had a bright, almost washed-out look that complimented its bright setting. This film…

Michael Powell Said
…that the reason he loved to work with Emeric Pressburger was that Pressburger always put into the screenplay precisely the language necessary for the audience to understand his characters, the narrative they were part of, and its themes, and not one word more. This sequence does precisely that.…

And #2 on mine, after Ingmar Bergman. Or, rather, Powell is, because Pressburger was a screenwriter.

Brilliant, DC. Now if only they could work those words into a sentence that ends with "overdose"…

…Seriously, I hope Silver's version is beset by tornadoes, avalanches, and indefatigable windmills.

Another One Bites the Dust.
Doesn't anyone in Hollywood know the word "quixotic"?