John Turturro has never been nominated for an Oscar
Even though I just typed that, I still can't believe it.

@Wallflower: Agreed. And a well-timed intermission can be very powerful as a narrative device. I just watched Barry Lyndon again on Blu-ray this weekend, and the timing of the intermission—as well as the titles for Parts I and II—adds enormously to the experience. (Although Doctor Zhivago may have the most dramatic…

@Miller: Those old orchestral scores sometimes get to me, too. That's one reason why movies with less traditional scores, like The Third Man, have held up so well.

A related question is when it became commonplace to have no opening titles at all. The first time I noticed it (aside from the occasional outlier like Apocalypse Now) was with Vanilla Sky, which was back in 2001, and at the time, it seemed like an unusual choice. Now it seems like every other movie skips an opening…

Cold open
So when did the cold open in movies become so commonplace? As Mike points out, it feels like a majority of mainstream movies these days, especially thrillers, open with a prologue before the opening credits, but this wasn't the case until fairly recently. Any ideas as to when/why the change took place? (The…

I find the self-referentiality of this double post weirdly amusing.

The fact that this is ranked lower than Bad Teacher on Rotten Tomatoes (39% vs. 49%) is the saddest thing I've seen in a long time. But am I really going to skip seeing a new Pixar movie on the big screen? I don't know, I don't know…

Basically, I see it as a choice between the way of 2046 and the way of My Blueberry Nights. If he chooses the latter, yes, we'll probably end up with a lot of slight, disposable movies. But we also might get another Chungking Express. For me, that's a risk worth taking.

I'm going to put in a vote for the 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon, starring Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann. It's an awful, inexplicable, and incredibly fascinating.

@Burl: I was just about to mention that Murch/Ondaatje book. It's one of my favorites.

"Pier Pressure" suffers from its utter lack of Tobias, but overall, yes, it's probably the most satisfying episode of the series. It's the one I'd use if I were trying to convince someone to watch this show.

@Craig: It was, although the Antonioni segment was so awful that it single-handedly made it one of the worst movies I've ever paid to see.

Manic Pixie Dream girls
Nobody does 'em like Wong Kar-Wai.

Not a great movie, but a step in the right direction
I really admire Wong's more ambitious films, but I miss the spontaneity of his earlier work, before he disappeared down the rabbit hole of Kubrickian perfectionism. That's why I like My Blueberry Nights, even though it has problems: it's a looser, more likeable…

Even more quixotic and pedantic: "Starry Night" is in MOMA in New York. (There's a painting called "Starry Night" at the Musee D'Orsay, but it's not the one that most people know.)

Another vote for The Limey here. Although I also unironically enjoy Ocean's Twelve.

See for yourself:

There's a great moment in the outtakes of The Aristocrats in which Kevin Pollak tells the joke while doing an Albert Brooks impression. He notes that he's actually faster and funnier when doing Brooks than as himself, which says a lot about the esteem in which Brooks is held by other comedians.

It reads even better when you're an adult. I don't think anyone can truly understand the Terrible Trivium, demon of petty tasks and wasted effort, until you've had your first job.

One of my friends went to Yale Law with Charlie Korsmo. Apparently he once went to a Halloween party dressed as a Washed-Up Child Actor. (It was just him carrying around a bottle of vodka.)