The return of Darin Morgan
This doesn't have much to do with either of the episodes under discussion, but I thought this might be as good a time as any to bring up "Tower Prep," the show on the Cartoon Network that is currently airing the first new Darin Morgan scripts in eighteen years. Todd did a writeup of the…

The craziest thing about Cool as Ice is that it was photographed by Janusz Kaminski.

Hey, what about a prequel of something? Everybody loves prequels.

"A Boy Named…" and "Snoopy Come Home" are fine, but when "Bon Voyage" and "Race for Your Life" come out on DVD, I'm buying the shit out of that. (Sorry for the vulgarism, but I love those movies.)

I remember that song. I'm afraid to click on the link.

An old rule among dramatists
"You don't give the audience what it wants, you give it what it needs."

I actually haven't read any Woolrich. Any recommendations on the best place to start?

@Sam: Totally agree. As Tom Wolfe points out, nobody can match Cain for momentum—although he also deserves more credit for his twisty, clever plots, which are really ingenious.

James M. Cain
Just wanted to put a good word in there for Cain, whose books are truly awesome. If you've never read "The Postman Always Rings Twice" or "Double Indemnity," you need to check them out right now. (I've never read "Mildred Pierce," but this new miniseries seems like as good an excuse as any.)

I assume that Hyden is referring to the fact that basically every Bowie album since the mid-90s has been called "a return to form." (R.E.M. seems to suffer from the same phenomenon.)

What I love about "The Long Goodbye" is that it's a complicated noir that devotes maybe five minutes to the actual plot. The rest is behavior, observation, and atmosphere. It's by far my favorite Altman movie.

@Saucy Jack: Nicely done.

I'm not too sure about the movie as a whole, but Michael Parks as Fred Phelps is some dynamite casting.

It is happening…again.

A landmark
This is probably the first episode of "The Simpsons" that I can still watch today without having to mentally adjust for tone. There are great episodes before this—"Three Men and a Comic Book," for instance—but this is the earliest episode that could really be inserted into any of the classic seasons…

WHERE'S FENSTER?

According to IMDb, Brainy Smurf is voiced by Fred Armisen. Wasn't Quentin Tarantino supposed to do this at some point? (It's not like he has anything better to do, right?)

Even though I disagree with just about everything it says, I think that JFK—at least in the original cut—is the most technically accomplished American movie of the last twenty years. Next to it, even Scorsese looks a little lame. (I love Nixon, too, even though it's more of a problem picture.)

A sadly deleted scene, described in the commentary track:

@Handrail: I actually owned and listened to the FWWM soundtrack for years before seeing the actual movie, which was something of a letdown by comparison. (My favorite track is "Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do.")