Mann does not get anything close to the credit he deserves for working with actors.

Crimes and Misdemeanors is. . .OK, but there's nothing there that Patricia Highsmith hasn't done better.  Annie Hall is up there, but I'd vote Husbands and Wives as his closest thing to greatness.

He looks like. . .(cut to Farina) (cut back to Lopez). . .nobody.

I think he's made a lot of really good movies.  But I don't think he's ever made a great one—the kind of work of art that just shakes you up and makes how you see the world forever different.  His movies are perfectly made, but not shaking-things-up in the way Kubrick's or Kurosawa's are.

Do we count Husbands and Wives as underrated?  That would be my favorite. EDIT: also, can we count Wild Man Blues as an Allen film?

About the only non-irking thing about it is that it concisely shows, in about 45 seconds, how Snyder fucked up.

My dad had no idea he was an actor until he saw a picture of him.  He said Farina always carried himself like a retired cop.

There's a single line from Harris in Red Dragon that sums up Farina's performance:  "Crawford's excellent administrative instincts were not tempered by mercy."  Farina always had that cop's sense of this is how the world is and this is what we've gotta do about it.

He was one of the few actors that deserves Quentin Tarantino's description (of Eddie Bunker, I think):  "the face is the backstory."

He had the kind of effortless authority that (I suspect) you can get only by being an actual authority figure for a few decades.  (Just watch the way he blows off a detective early in Manhunter.)  He was one of the great character actors, just owned any role you put him in, no matter how big or how small.  It would…

Peeta does get his definitive moment of ownage in Catching Fire, at least in the book.

This.  It ended emotionally exactly as it should.

The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  Nice touch?

Dennis Farina just died.  Fuck.  Fuck.  He was what we mean when we say "great character actor," and the first and best goddamn Jack Crawford ever.  Fuck.

Rorshach always refers to his mask as his face, another perfect character detail (and one, as I remember, Snyder utterly botched in the film).  And that detail of the face plays into his last moment.

It is a damn shame, and I think what people miss is how much the psychiatrist is necessary for that chapter.  One of the things that made Watchmen work was the sense of everyday life going all through it, sometimes backgrounded, sometimes foregrounded.  (And this being a comic, both of those are often literal.)  The…

"There are still wonderful, personal stories I’d love to tell at the Con."
Do you think we could hear a few, now?

Also:  Rorschach is my surrogate and that scares me on every level.  Sometimes I think what I want most in life is to have my last thoughts be like his last diary entry.  (Note, by the way, Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) says the same thing in The Thin Red Line.  Both of them are men who absolutely live by an absolute…

Dreiberg is fascinating, and it's an example of how ambiguous Watchmen is as a work.  That scene can be read so many ways: it's silly, dangerous, moving, heroic, and necessary all at once.  It's equally wrong to read Watchmen as a tract about the folly of superheroes as it is to read it as a glorification of them.

Also:  not emotionally involving?  Really?  I think part of Moore's accomplishment is that all the characters exist in an intellectual, symbolic framework and are also emotionally alive; I do think, though, that the strongest emotional beats come at the end for the characters, as they should for a story.  In…