There's a difference though between a place gentrifying/becoming less of the grimy hellhole it was and losing all sense of neighborhood and soul it had. What's become of CBGB's is a travesty, and it had nothing to do with the Bowery slowly being subsumed into the East Village.

A Frayed Knot—Without knowing the episode in question, my guess for the Star Trek episode "rocks" you speak of is Vazquez Rocks, an absolutely gorgeous hiking area that I've been to a few times on various film shoots. It looks a little otherwordly, and so is often used in things like Star Trek to stand in for other…

Victor Mature—you did a NYC oldest pubs pub crawl without going to McSorley's? For shame. McSorley's predates all the bars you mention, having been founded in 1854.

I grew up in NY from '82-'00 (and then again after college from '04-'06). I got to see it go from grimy hellhole to the gentrified wonderland it became.It was certainly a strange transformation to witness.

While I'm sure torrenting is on the rise, it's certainly no where near as commonplace as music file sharing. I've never torrented a film—I tried torrenting an episode of Man Men once, though, and it was enough of a pain in the ass that I said screw it and looked for a free streaming site to watch the episode on. As…

Right, noise!

I know it's common knowledge, but it just seemed odd to me that you'd champion a Will Ferrell movie as a possible alternative to Apatow.

Most of the Adam McKay/Will Ferrell movies are PART of the Apatow cultural hegemony. Check out producer and executive producer credits. It's all made under the aegis of his production company.

I think the equivalent, to get to specific in comparing movie to videogame, is the choice being to keep it, ad then the eating of it/gun assembly as a cutscene.

I think the big difference is that the way agency exists in videogames, you often have no choice but to complete a task but it's presented as a problem that needs solving in order to advance, rather some something you are compelled to do. A better example than the one I gave above is the assebling of the bomb parts in…

Actually, eXisteZ is one of the few Cronenberg films that I liked less on the second go around. The first time I thought it was a masterpiece full of deep ruminations on the mediums of virtual reality and video games. On the second viewing, while still really, really liking it, I started to notice some of the issues…

I guess D'Angelo's point is if you actually could taste and smell and feel the effects of that rancid toilet, would you still do it? You don't HAVE to take that mission to see how much radiation you can get so that woman can test you, so doing such a thing isn't equivalent to a "genuine gaming urge."

Nah, eXistenZ is way better than Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix. All three movies were about Virtual Realities and had riffs on Baudrillard, but eXistrenZ, for all it's problems (like the way Cronenberg mixes in his obsession with body horror with videogrames thus getting somewhat offbase in the way D'Angelo mentions…

What are you talking about? Debbie Harry was fantastic in Videodrome. And hot as hell.

Amen to that Belgand.

I agree with people that say both mixes are crappy. But the mix ain't the be all and end all—the mix on Husker Du's Zen Arcade ain't great either, but the roughness of it is part of what makes it great. Similarly, the Bowie mix is part of the album that blew me away when I first heard it. It's kind of like saying…

Sound editing was no where near as important to films then as it is now. The changeover to more attention being payed to sound design was the 60s and 70s. It was probably just some bad ADR (and the ADR could be for all sorts of reasons—Jimmy Stewart garbling the line, it was originally a different line, a desire for a…

Well, it is (I originally had the first CD version, which did not remaster and instead went with the original LP mastering when released, and sounds really, really lousy), but it didn't seem like they were referring to the sound mastering of the album in the article.

Making sentimentality tolerable
One of the many times I saw this movie, my dad point, in the scene where Mary shows George the old house, proposing that they live there while they're serenaded by Bert and Ernie, the little thing Capra does to undercut the incredibly sappy nature of this scene—the way Bert kisses Ernie…

Well what are we waiting for? Let's go get 'im!