Richard Kelly
Wait…so a movie in which Richard Kelly was involved is incoherent, painful, and borderline unwatchable? I refuse to believe this.

Forget his kitschy rendition of Prince's "Kiss"
Actually, that cover is awesome. How can you not love the Art of Noise? Not to mention the video:

I really hope that they do their cover of "Brazil."

I'm really looking forward to the writeup of "Quagmire." Not one of the show's more profound stories, to be sure, but still probably one of my ten favorite episodes of the series.

@Gern: Mason's reading of "I see my point of view is NEW to many of you" is pure Hitchens. Plus the way he lights that cigarette.

Well, it's all relative, of course. But yes, it was "widespread" relative to, say, Babylon and Ancient Egypt.

Renner
Jeremy Renner seems to have his post-Oscar nomination career nicely figured out: he gets to costar with Philip Seymour Hoffmann in Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie AND play Hawkeye in Joss Whedon's Avengers. Not a bad combo.

The alphabet
By the way, you can definitely make an objective case for the alphabet as the greatest invention in human history. Nonalphabetic languages, or even alphabetic languages without written vowels, have always been the province of an educated elite. With the alphabet, which is so much easier to learn, the…

For the first minute of the clip, I was hoping it would be Christopher Hitchens, but by the end, I was pretty sure that it was Beck.

Here's Pollak's impression of Brooks, which isn't exactly safe for work:

I actually remember some of the promos for this episode, and I agree that it was misleadingly advertised. Luckily, this is right around the time that I got more involved in the X-Files fandom, so I knew exactly who had written this episode, and what to expect as a result.

Same here, mostly, but I'm actually shocked to see that there's an Albert Brooks character out there that I haven't seen. Maybe I should track this one down…

Apparently Brooks was hired for Taxi Driver expressly so that he could improvise and flesh out what had been a pretty thin character on the page. Afterward, it seems, Paul Schrader thanked him for it personally.

They briefly considered making Scorpio the villain in The Simpsons Movie, but apparently the idea didn't appeal to Brooks. Personally, I would have loved to have seen that character again.

In the DVD special features for The Aristocrats, there's a deleted scene in which Kevin Pollack tells the Aristocrats joke while doing an Albert Brooks impression. He concludes by noting that he's actually funnier while pretending to be Albert Brooks than he is when he's just being himself. I always thought that was a…

@simonel: I hate to say it, but "kicks work both ways" may be the closest thing to an explanation that we're ever going to get.

Limbo presents all kinds of problems. The movie makes a big deal of how Cobb needs to convince his wife of the dream's unreality before either of them can wake up, but then Ariadne just dumps Fischer off the balcony, and it seems to work just fine.

@ArthurDent: All of your points are valid ones. It just seems to me that the whole point of a kick should be to wake you up from your current dream. That's why the mechanism, i.e. the sensation of falling, is so specific: it's a sensation designed to travel up the line to your dreaming self, jolting it back into…

@JacksSupermanPunch: I agree that if the kicks were clearly meant to wake you up from the level below, it would make things a lot easier. However, there are problems with this theory, too. For example, it was evidently part of the plan from the very beginning for Eames to blow up the snow fortress, even when they…

The bottom line, I think, is that the way the kicks are handled isn't entirely consistent. Common sense suggests that a kick is intended to wake up the dreamer in the level ABOVE, which pulls you out of the dream level you're currently in. Which means that the sequence of kicks would look something like this: