Handy video reference on the scene and its progeny:

The reasons for the Battle Royale Program are explained a bit more in the book. Though both are awesome, I recall preferring the book to the movie once I got around to reading it. A lot more detailed, a lot more fully developed. I read it about the same time I did Ender's Game, and - seconding The Juggernaut's…

I loved the Invention of Lying overall, despite its arbitrary romantic subplot. But the missed opportunity wasn't its inclusion, it was in not taking the story in a more bitter, cynical direction in its final third. How about this? Scrap the "true love" angle. Instead, despite the fact that the object of his…

Hipsters in public
Has anyone yet mentioned:

It's still out there
A fair number of these songs (3AM, If You Could Only See the Way) still show up relatively frequently on the adult contemporary stations in my area. I think. Or maybe its just that I stopped listening to radio sometime in the mid 00's and my image of the medium of FM is stunted.

The team of Mulder and Scully was a great reason to watch the show, particularly in its earlier years. I was mostly there for the freakiness. With all Scully had seen though, after a while, why was she always so skeptical that maybe - maybe - there might be something supernatural behind what was happening? Part of…

I re-watched the show, seasons 1 - 8, over the course of the last few years and there's a lot that still holds up. I even think Doggett was a good character and contrast to Mulder and Scully, even if switching the cast midway through the show was a bad idea. Season 8 still had some great stuff, particularily the arc…

"how blissfully indifferent Tarantino is toward any pop culture which precedes, say, the 1960's. "

I echo a lot of the comments on this article about American Beauty and thread about Donnie Darko. I watched both just as I was getting into that whole big wide world of 'movies' beyond just whatever was at the theater that week. Watching both now, I do feel like I've grown some and they've lost a lot of their…

Seconds on the awesomeness of both Eyes without a Face and Death Becomes Her. The documentary about Parisian slaughterhouses on the Criterion 'Eyes' disc (both films have the same director) is also worth a watch. Beautiful cinematography of some of the more trashed areas of the city, coupled with fairly thorough…

The Last Life in the Universe
Anyone else see it and think it also deserves some end-of-the-decade recognition (or more recognition, period)?

Crossroads - horrible in unexpected ways
The thing that always bugged me about Crossroads - moreso than other other vanity projects with wretched acting and music - is how much I imagine the movie must have been a disappointment to its target audience. The thing was advertised as a light cross-country romp starring…

By which I mean that when I watch something like The Happening, I can discern a thought process that went into its making. I can speculate on how particular aesthetic choices resulted in the movie, as a whole, just not working. A year after watching it, I have not yet figured out a way to understand The Spirit on any…

I'm back and forth as to whether or not The Spirit can truly be called a "bad movie." The thing is just so committed to being confounding and inconsistent in every damn one of its creative choices - from the beyond-campy tone to Julie Taymor-like costume eclectics to the army of Frank Black clone henchmen - that it,…

The Wager
Bridging two bad-movie staple genres of the 00's - megachurch-produced melodrama and musicians attempting to act - was a 2007 film called The Wager, in which Randy Travis plays action star Michael Steele, who falls out with his director after refusing to do a sex scene and has a public "child abuse" scandal…

Patrick Bateman as satirical construct
On one of the extras on the American Psycho DVD, Gavin Smith from Film Comment talks about how in satire, characters are unimportant, citing how in Gulliver's Travels Gulliver basically changes based on whatever the scene requires him to do. Later, director Mary Harron says:

Bubba Ho-Tep
Don't forget about Bruce Campbell as a nursing-home bound codger who may or may not be Elvis. Both him and Ossie Davis (as "JFK") nailed the tone of the movie perfectly and imbued it with poignancy about the struggle to feel / be relevant in life. Now where's my Bubba Nosferatu?