Ocasek is hardly a piece of shit. The guy has spent nearly his entire post-Cars career producing and promoting small and indie bands.

It's a bummer of a situation, for sure. But I think the big fuckups here are Matador. And yeah, they're small and indie and all that, but they've been around for a helluva long time. It's not like they're noobs who didn't know any better.

Because their early stuff is powerpop gold, just really tight, jangly riffs, cool hooks, great harmonies. Love the Cars.

Yup, and I haven't seen them all, but apparently, depending on the version you watch, they're very different films - some much more action-focused, some that go really deep into character development . . .

I'm pretty sure the first version was a theatrical release. Only later was it recut and shown as a miniseries.

David Remnick's piece comparing LBJ's response to Hurricane Betsy with GW's response to Katrina is a fascinating read that really gets at the kind of heart LBJ had:

No matter how many times you say it, Keaton's never won an Oscar . . .

"Is the only way I can be satisfied. If I use my right, over too quickly."

I have to admit, I don't know her music that well. But this lovely collaboration with Miley Cyrus was one of my favorite things last year:

In the long run, I think, the bigger thing the auteurists accomplished was moving the focus of film criticism away from what at the time was mostly narrative analysis (with some attention to performance) to a more visual formal analysis - for them grounded in mise-en-scene, but also editing and other components of…

Those were examples off the top of my head - not sure how successful the previous two were, although one did star Bette Davis.

Since when have trailers been such a big deal? Some trailers are good, some suck. Some great trailers promote movies that end up shitty, some crap trailers happen to promote films that end up great. It happens all the time.

But Hollywood has been remaking movies from the beginning. This isn't anything new, it's a deeply entrenched component of Hollywood's industrial practice and marketing strategy. "Sense" has very little to do with it. $$$.

She's long been popular around these parts.

It got a fantastic review by Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, so there's that . . .

I guess I get the "sheen" bit, but were The Cars really an example of AOR? (Was AOR even about sheen?)

I love the way "Wouldn't It Be Nice" opens and closes the film Shampoo and how different the song becomes in both iterations . . .

One of my favorites is Five Easy Pieces because the film is structured towards him having some sort of epiphany, but his entire realization is that he wants to continue being an asshole.

Thanks for that! Her mental illness issues have been heartbreaking to follow over the past few years - in part because they've resulted in some very public acts that have shown just how much agony she's been in. That's not meant to excuse this recent outburst (especially if it's a total fabrication), but yeah, it's a…

"American Tune" is a fantastic song . . . but I could do without seeing it in a film for at least a decade or so.