Agreed!  I was surprised they didn't make the article.  Great stuff, and a cult *novelty* act in America.  If that…

Agreed!  I was surprised they didn't make the article.  Great stuff, and a cult *novelty* act in America.  If that…

The *real* reason he's named Totoro:

I think that clip is the closest the movie gets to being explicit about what Stillman's artistic goals were in making it.  So maybe you'll be better prepared to absorb what is a pretty odd movie if you've seen this clip.  Not sure if it will really have that effect….

The discussion was a lot of fun.  Stillman seemed genuinely please to see so many actual fans (as opposed to the preview audience hell I assume he had recently been subjected to).

I adored the movie, but I think you're right that it has the potential to drive a certain type of mind right over the edge.

I was at the DC (Maryland if you want to get pedantic) premier where Whit Stillman at the discussion afterwards seemed stunned that you could fill a whole theater with people who had actually seen his previous films (apparently that's not something he's used to).  So maybe the studio was convinced DC was fertile…

John Barry's score for  "The Knack…and How to Get It" is worth the price of admission all by itself.

I think Herzog admits on the commentary that they really did kill the sow whose piglets continue trying to nurse after she's dead, which is really damn creepy.

But there was already a TV Series adaptation of "Inherent Vice" called "Terriers" :)

Am I nuts, or did the music cue when Naoto finds Kamon's corpse sound exactly like the riff from  "Gone Daddy Gone"?

Guralnick is wonderful.  For a great "what it all means" think piece, follow it up with the Elvis chapter from Griel Marcus's _Mystery Train_.  And then, for utter batshit insanity, read Lester Bangs' "Notes for Review of Peter Guralnick's Last Train to Memphis".

Oh God yes, Sandy Denny's delivery of the first verse of Autopsy just slays me every time.

What he said…

And don't miss Lester Bangs' "Notes for Review of Peter Guralnick's Lost Highway". Indescribably hilarious. And insightful if you squint hard enough.

Son of Paleface
I don't believe I've seen any of Tashlin's later Bob Hope movies, so they may, indeed, be limp, but "Son of Paleface" is a hoot. And pure Tashlin with 4th wall breaking, cartoon stunts, and strange subversive undercurrents from Jane Russell's character name (Mike) to Hope sleeping with Roy Rogers'…

I'm one of the few Colin Baker fans. I thought the scripts had more punch and odd dark humor than I was used to on Who. I'll often say Revelation of the Daleks is my favorite show: translating Evelyn Waugh's _The Loved One_ into a Who episode is just such a crazy idea. And I thought the Rani was just a wonderful…

Bikini Widow
What, no mention of Lord Love a Duck?

Yep. Hope it's not gone for long. The quality level of the selections (and comment threads) has been unbelievably high in this group.

Maybe I'm just gullible, but I assumed that Gold had a real world antecedent for all the tricks he describes, and when he made exactly that claim in the first sentence of the "Program Notes", I believed him. So I didn't see the King of Siam's watch and so forth as fantasy or "magical realism", just descriptions of…