Well, Crowe won his Best Actor Oscar for The Insider before Gladiator came out, so he was famous and well regarded already. And he hadn’t starred in anything that could be considered a major blockbuster (I think The Insider even lost money), but L.A. Confidential was a real success: it grossed 3 times its budget…

We were all just so tired of the Vancouver public library.

She doesn’t try to speak English with a Russian accent, but she actually speaks a little Russian in the interrogation scene in Avengers. And it really isn’t that bad, it’s just not convincingly native. But on the Russian accent scale of Scarlett to Clint, her end is the better one.

See, if she were older, she would’ve seen Boris and Natasha on Bullwinkle and really learned something.

I think she only did it in Avengers, in her introduction scene when she’s being interrogated by the Russians. And once or twice she says “Боже мой,” but I think that’s it. Her accent didn’t seem bad, but her pace of speaking made it obvious she didn’t know the language.

It bugs me too. Anything that isn’t an indie production should have an accent coach for that stuff. How can a guy named “Pavel Chekov” be unable to pronounce “V” as anything but “W” unless it appears in his own name. I don’t know what accent he was doing. Maybe Polish?

Exactly. I loved it too. Saw it in the theater even. But I was like 10.

Are we talking Scarlett Johansson in Avengers bad? Ensign Pavel Chekov bad? Or Clint Eastwood in FireFox bad?

The next conference will be at the Ritz . . . cracker factory.

A parking lot between a porn shop and a crematorium is the perfect place for them to fuck off and die.

I seem to remember Ebert and/or Siskel kind of liking Q. Am I nuts? Sounds like something Rog might defend...

I prefer to be called a sucrephile.

Wow, my wife is going to be thrilled to find out that I finally look like George Clooney!

Genius!

I’m still a big fan of Fifth Element too! For years, it was one of those movies that I would watch whenever I came across it on cable. The writing and editing are so much fun, and it’s pretty much peak Bruce Willis (although it’s a tough call between that and 12 Monkeys).

L.A. Confidential, Men in Black, Grosse Point Blank, Boogie Nights, and Gattaca all came out in 1997 too. And I’m one of those people who even liked Fifth Element and Face/Off. We went to the movies almost weekly in 1997.

No, that would be ‘Nam, Eh?, the classic Canadian comedy about US draft dodgers in Ontario.

A headline that really says, “We fired all our copyeditors.”

Ed Wood is a Halloween favorite in our house. It’s obviously not scary, but it just has a great Halloween vibe.

He did!