Truffaut in Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I've said it before, but Sidney Lumet is the master of brilliant yet unobtrusive visuals.

How on earth did Bambi Meets Godzilla not get Best Animated Short???

I'm not a serious theater/drama person at all, but LDJIN remains one of the two or three most moving, life-altering works of art I've ever encountered (via the faithful 1962 film).  It didn't so much affect my choice of career or tastes so much as shift my perspective on the entire world.

Shaw, Milius, Carl Gottlieb, and Howard Sackler have all claimed or been claimed at some point to have written it.  I imagine they all had some hand in shaping it (though of course Shaw had the final say — literally — save the editor).

Sidney Lumet's Making Movies does a great job of showing how a ton of thought and work goes into the making of mainstream Hollywood movies; it is 100% legitimate to analyze those choices (many of which are made or influenced by the director even on non-"auteur" projects).

Drama?  No.  Unintentional comedy?  Frequently.

Good things about PLL:

JFK has very little factual in it, but it's an amazing movie.

I really hate that "it was ghost-directed by …" crap, particularly since I've had far too many arguments with idiots who think Orson Welles directed The Third Man. An artist's body of work is by its nature inconsistent.  We need to learn to deal with it.

Let's not forget Richard Gilmore and Cosmo.

Scofield virtually takes over The Train to the point where his character essentially usurps the role of the protagonist.  Seriously, in the last 30 minutes of the movie, Scofield has a tragic arc, while Lancaster has zero dialogue aside from grunts.  (He's great though.)

1994 was just an overall bad-ass year for movies.  Let's not forget that Shawshank and Shallow Grave came out that year as well.

I believe that after Demi Lovato got shipped off to rehab, the sketch show her character appeared on was defictionalized into a real sketch show on Disney … but even that must have been a few years ago?

"Actors don't talk about stuff without motivation."

Iago has a lot more lines than Othello.

I thought the first 45 minutes of Hancock were brilliant and the last 45 — which were basically a different movie — were boring.  But I'm amazed an Arrested Development fan would turn off so quickly a movie in which Jason Bateman and Charlize Theron play a married couple.

Directors still get forced out all the time.  That clause just means that the replacement has to come from outside the production.  It partially protects directors, but not fully.

One of the few examples where Seinfeld lost the meme war.

The strange thing about Keanu is that he kept getting cast in period pieces (Dangerous Liaisons, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Much Ado About Nothing) and they've been some of his best performances (mostly because they were minor roles, but still).