In a perfect world, Brad Bird would be directing.

Well, FuriousGeorge, maybe we each mourn in our own way. When most great artists die, I have a tendency to explore their lesser-known efforts or outright failures, because they often reveal more about their creators than the better-known stuff.

No disrespect intended…
…because, seriously, Lumet at his best was absolutely unassailable. But if we're going to talk about the man, we should mention the whole of his career, which includes some real stinkers. The Wiz is the most obvious one—it should be used in film schools as a perfect example of how NOT to…

Yes, very good, sometimes great. At its best, yeah, I would put it up there with The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

So if we can all agree that Benton at his best is amazing, can anyone account for The Human Stain? Because that was just…wrong.

Gern—I suspect Twilight would be terrific and underrated. Still Of The Night is another Benton movie that didn't seem like much at the time, but I kind of love it now.

Yeah, The Long Goodbye is a genuinely great film, but I don't love it the way I do The Late Show. Carney's performances in that and Harry And Tonto are among The Greatest Things Ever, and I wish he'd gotten more good character roles as a result of them.

Yeah, but he was right about one thing—I do need to lose weight. My doctor told me so this morning.

Uh, anyone else wanna jump in here? Someone who, you know, isn't a dick?

Well, yeah, that's kind of my point. Seriously, have you seen any of Arthur Hiller's other movies? Man Of La Mancha, WC Fields & Me, Making Love, Burn, Hollywood, Burn—these aren't bad movies, they're sloppy and technically incompetent. Aside from The In-Laws, Hiller's only really good movies were The…

Thanks, Caret. Just the type of thoughtful response I was looking for.

Seems like a good place to bring this up…
It's long been my opinion that The In-Laws is one of THE best comedies ever made. Arkin's great in it, and Peter Falk, and dear God, Richard Libertini, and the script is a thing of beauty. But the director is reliable hack Arthur Hiller, who brings absolutely nothing to the…

I've said this before, and I'll keep saying it: Travolta's performance in Blow Out is as fine as any ever put on film. His muttered "It's a good scream" in the final scene makes me lose it every time I see it, and I've seen it plenty. The film as a whole is one of DePalma's best, but it might have been a little too…

But The Swarm and Airport '79 are entertainingly bad, but Meteor is just dull. And don't forget When Time Ran Out, the end of the line for Irwin Allen's theatrical career. An entire case of cheap beer can't even make that one bearable.

The awesome thing about Airport '77 is that it has Christopher Lee AND Darren McGavin, so if you sit there hoping that Kolchak is going to figure out that Dracula is on the same plane, it becomes much more entertaining.

That's a really underrated movie, but yeah, it is really brought down by the crappy Jim Steinman songs littering the soundtrack.

Altman
I'd never even heard of the Amos & Andy project, but the Altman film I most would have liked to see was his adaptation of Ragtime. He was unquestionably the perfect choice to direct it, just as Milos Forman was absolutely wrong for it.

The whole "I hate musicals" mindset…
…I just don't get it. If you love movies as anything resembling an art form, you ought to recognize artistry, in whatever form it takes. Ziegfeld Follies, for instance, is mostly a mess, but one segment, the Vincente Minnelli-directed Limehouse Blues, is an absolutely stunning…

Yeah, but remember, the entire sequence is supposedly being described by Kelly and O'Connor to the head of the studio. After we see the elaborately-staged sequence, we come back to Kelly, O'Connor and the studio guy, who says, "I can't quite visualize it."

@Craig J. Clark—Yeah, and Some Came Running comes from the same period, so there's that. But there's Brigadoon, The Courtship Of Eddie's Father and—ugh—Kismet to deal with. And after he left MGM, it got a whole lot worse.