@Janet: I recently realized that Claude Rains in "Casablanca" may be my favorite character in any movie, ever. He's certainly the most quotable. There's a Renault line appropriate to any occasion. A recent example, apropos of a friend's commitment issues: "How extravagant you are, throwing away women like that.…

Hey, you're talking to someone who wrote 100,000 words of X-Files fanfic between the ages of 15 and 17. But even I have to admit that the show was uneven.

Kyle MacLachlan
From a recent interview:

@The Anachronist: I'm just watching the third season of "Mad Men" now, and I definitely see what you mean. Riding lawnmower, anyone?

@Dowd: I completely agree about the music. I was too young to follow "Twin Peaks" week to week when it was first broadcast—although the episode where Maddie dies scared the shit out of me—but my parents had the soundtrack, and I played it to death when I was growing up, along with the first two Julee Cruise albums.…

Consistency
Sometimes I think consistency is overrated, at least when it comes to the kind of show we're talking about here, which is really more about a state of mind. I was recently shocked to realize how inconsistent many of my favorite TV shows were, given that I'd devoted hours of my life to watching them: as…

From the Wikipedia page for Fraternity Vacation:

I smiled, and got a little sad, when I read the line "I don't work very much…" Because for me, Michael Caine was always the guy who would do anything, and make any movie better in the process. It wasn't until I saw the "Harry Brown" trailer that I realized he might be my favorite living actor.

I was going to make the argument that the lyrics to "Slow Jam" are excellent, but then I realized I was wrong. (Love that song, though.)

And I third the love for Cradle Will Rock. The politics are a little too on the nose, especially near the end, but it's the kind of sprawling, angry, entertaining epic that you don't see very often, at least not in this country. It makes me wish that Tim Robbins would direct again.

@miles_underground: Ah, the parenthetical reveal—is there any punchline it can't improve? (No.)

For all its problems, I'll always have a soft spot for Magnolia, if only because I got to interview PTA for fifteen minutes after it was screened at my college. I also saw a very attractive girl at the screening whom I thought I recognized from one of my sections. I was about to go up and say hello, but then PTA went…

I agree that Magnolia could probably stand to lose half an hour from Act II, and that it hasn't held up as well as some of Anderson's other movies. But I always saw it as a sort of opera, with big scenes like emotional arias for all the main characters, and its high points—Jason Robards's deathbed monologue, most of…

1999
I once thought that 1999 saw the release of more great/culturally definitive movies than you tend to see in any two ordinary years, but now I think it's more like three. Consider:

@ortenzia: I was a monster on Wikipedia back in the day, although I imagine that my citations aren't up to current standards. Proudest moment, aside from Darin Morgan: creating the article for "mix tape."

I don't know—I find "Vanilla Sky" a lot more interesting than the original, if only because of its insane (and only partly intentional) deconstruction of the Tom Cruise persona to its constituent elements. Then again, I find Cruise's recent filmography a lot more worthwhile than is generally assumed, so maybe it's…

"Vanilla Sky" is the second most underrated movie of the last twenty years. The first is "Eyes Wide Shut." Sorry, but somebody had to say it.

@Enkidum: I like "Le Ton Beau" a lot, if only because it's the kind of book absolutely nobody else could have written. Even the tiny touches are great: his "Umberto Eco" / "Humbert Humbert" joke is just a throwaway, but a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that pun.

No, you're not the only Darin Morgan stalker—hell, I'm the one who created his Wikipedia page back in 2004 (!). (Although I don't know anything about that superhero comedy.)

I love Hofstadter—especially Metamagical Themas, which I read to pieces growing up—but I lost a little of my faith in him after his terrible, terrible translation of "Eugene Onegin," wretched typeface and all. That said, the second he publishes another massive book in the "Godel, Escher, Bach" vein, I'm reading the…