little mistake
David Fincher made Zodiac, not Ridley Scott.

I haven't seen Picnic at Hanging Rock, but I'll check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.

While I was writing that I hoped someone wouldn't think I was oversimplifying horror, but I didn't want to get too long-winded in qualifying my position. You're absolutely right that there are horror films that operate on a philosophical level (The Shining and Profundo Rosso are my favorites).

what's genre got to do with it
For me, the movie is inextricably bound up with the hype surrounding its release- particularly a Sci Fi channel special that tried to keep up the charade with straight-faced interviews about the "witch." Of course, by the time I saw it I had figured out the truth, but I found myself…

actual budget?
One thing I missed during "cult on the cheap month" was the discussion of original budget vs. actual budget, i.e. what the film ended up costing after the studio that purchased it finished post production on it, something that usually costs tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

you are right about green day, I forgot they made albums on indie labels… but like I said, I don't care.

Ben Folds
I love Ben Folds, and he made some particularly strong albums throughout his career, but his self-titled debut with Ben Folds Five has a depth of songwriting and ease of execution that all his subsequent records lacked. The cliche about having your whole life to write the first album was definitely true for…

great film
Primer is a good example of a question about movies that has dogged me for a while: whether it needs to be apparent to the audience what has happened in a movie for them to have some kind of emotional reaction to it. Primer spirals out of control towards the end, and I'll confess I had no idea what was…

bud light with lime
You should do a taste test for Bud Light with Lime. It's not exactly obscure, but it looks to give Miller Chill a run for the title of worst beer in the world.

bonus
This song gets bonus nostalgia for inspiring the jiggle-tastic character Mai Sharona in the Fatal Fury games, surely the sexiest pile of pixels my adolescent eyes had ever seen.

Shoot the hostage.

Virginia Madsen
I was really glad to see his career take off after Sideways, as well as Sandra Oh and Paul Giamatti (who was already ascending). But what happened to Virginia Madsen? A little while after Sideways I saw her judging some kind of pet show on animal planet and I thought it must have been pre-Sideways…

man, I don't know, I was listening to that early mix of "You! Me! Dancing!" for a while, and then when they released the final version I felt like the glockenspiel was just cutting through the mix. Should a glockenspiel ever sound harsh?

zabriskie point
Why hasn't this ever come out on DVD? It seems like every film ever made, good or bad, has come out on DVD, why should one of the master directors have some of his work still unreleased?

rebels on the backlot
You really REALLY need to do "REbels on the Backlot" by Sharon Waxman. It's an alternately informative and utterly trashy book about the studio politics of the 90's and the often insane personalities of maverick directors like Tarantino, David O. Russell and PT Anderson.

there was an AV Club review for a movie called Sheriff that called it "COPS meets Frederick Wiseman". but maybe COPS is cops meets Frederick Wiseman

I just saw this recently. I held off for so long, even though I love Lost in Translation, because I had listened to the "boring, no story" catcalls from reviewers, but when I saw it I loved it. I don't even think of it as a historical drama, it was an American teen movie refracted through a historical period that…

When I tried to picture Jumper as a low-budget indie (less the gay cowboys) I immediately thought of Pi. I bet Darren Arronofsky could have done some good things with it if he was working on a similar scale.

Shirley Manson-meets-'90s-rockabilly/garage-rock-revival
Is it really that much of a cliche if you have to combine that many concepts and references just to describe it?

against fame
http://www.theonion.com/con…