Late 70s/early 80s New York was indeed an amazing place and time in the arts.  The scene was described pretty well in Fire in the Belly (and less so in And the Band Played On); are there any other good books on that moment?

Mad Men, this fall on the Disney Channel.

Brian Helgeland is pop culture's worst abuser of the lifetime pass.

"You think you're the only one who can give me that Scott Tobias feeling?  I GOT TWENTY CONTENT PROVIDERS UNDER CONTRACT I CAN GET A TOBIAS-TYPE THING FROM!"

Foreign milk, Scott, dwarf reactor chocolate.

Warren Oates?

Days of Heaven also takes a chunk of plot from Henry James' The Wings of the Dove.  Whether it's coincidence, homage, or theft I couldn't tell you.

YOU WILL NOT SPEAK THAT WAY OF CULVER'S, YOU BASTARD.  It's a tie between them and In-N-Out for Finest Mass Market Burger.

Your comments on The Shield have made me realize how my experience and evaluation of The Sopranos are almost the exact opposite of it.  The Sopranos has a complex, literary surface that does cue us to deeper evaluation.  It's just that when I go deeper, there's no dramatic interest, only a continuing diagnosis and…

I was thinking that too.  I'll see what happens first (and I'll stay on until the end of the Shield reviews in any case) but I am definitely worried.  I gotta tell ya, ya suspect, AV Club.

I'll add one more to that list (and my vote for the best of them):  Eyes Wide Shut.  Because there, "your reality isn't real" isn't an either-or proposition, it's a matter of degree. Eyes Wide Shut gets across the Freudian idea that our reality is already changed and made by our fantasies and our unconscious.  (Freud…

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (really, there should be an NCC subseries just for Clive Owen)

That's true, and my argument isn't against them.  If they "explicitly critique" that idea, it means they take it seriously, and don't assume God is this all-powerful figure who just happens to agree with their own values.

The Thin Red Line is my favorite, because the strength of the characters balances out Malick's love of nature and beauty, so that each part of the film illuminates (take that word as literally as you want) the other. And it has the best music.

Does that mean the Cease and Desist order was lifted?

"The God who stood at the end of some human path, even a religious path, would not be God." (Karl Barth) One thing you see here (and in Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant) is that God's sense of justice is not our sense of justice. It's something that many, if not most, believers in our time have forgotten, or maybe never knew…

Do you know how long Tobias will be gone?

Why do we have to resort to nonviolence? Can't we just kick their asses?

FUCK THE FUCK YEAH Because sci-fi can do two things wonderfully: comment on our society and blow shit the fuck up. I am so on board for this.

Well now you've gone and done it.