He also did something similar in In a Lonely Place, also several years earlier. Plus all of the films where he played bad guys. If anything, it's the movies where Bogart played a romantic lead that seem like left turns.

That's a perfect part for him. As weird and alien as he can seem sometimes, he does have a lot of screen presence. So he manages to do a lot playing a weird little knife thrower who lurks in the background.

At least the fights in The Resistance are about the game. Monopoly is just 3 hours of long-standing resentments bubbling to the surface.

It sure is. I love that game.

Poker is a good game, but you have to learn the probabilities of all kinds of situations, it has player elimination, it encourages you to sit out a lot of hands, and it's only fun if you play it for money (which can be both a plus and a minus.)

I thought so too. It's not a crowd pleaser, but it's measured and confident and gives the viewer a lot to chew on. I thought it was his best and most mature movie since Jackie Brown.

5. The Seeger Sessions
4. The River
3. Darkness on the Edge of Town
2. Born to Run
1. The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle

I think that's probably due to his 90s goatee.

Kind of? For me, the biggest problems with those two movies are the way they reduce slavery and the holocaust to fodder for revenge stories, and completely miss the terrifying oppression (in the biggest sense of the word) that fueled them.

I love Jackie Brown. In a lot of ways, I think it's his most grown up movie. And like all of his movies, it has some really great performances in it.

Thank you for sharing that clip. It's amazing how everyone else is politely waiting for him to stop talking about True Blood, and he won't take the hint.

I remember hearing John Rodgers, who wrote Leverage (not a very grounded show) saying that test audiences loved any scene of the characters doing the things that they were good at doing, *even if they didn't understand what was happening.* He called it "competence porn".

There's really no reason to read the Discworld books in order. Terry Pratchett got both more ambitious and more fun and readable as he went along, which is a pretty rare combination. I would jump ahead to the start of the Vimes books, maybe.

There's a spiral that happens when audiences start losing interest in something, so the die hard fans and creators double-down on the more esoteric bits, which leads to ever-smaller and more difficult niches.

Podmass is the only thing that keeps me coming back. And then I click around on a couple links, find myself on this page, type this comment out, then close the browser and wait until next week's podmass.

It's only a little related, but here's my favorite youtube video. Featuring Bert & Ernie!
https://www.youtube.com/wat…

It's a real bummer how many of the articles are just quick descriptions of something else on the internet. Sometimes just a straightforward recap of a commercial or trailer that's embedded right underneath, which is a really disheartening thing to see. A summary of a commercial! It reeks of the worst kind of content…

High Mighty, the Jon Gabrus podcast, is my current new favorite. I like that it's a comedy podcast where they regularly get so excited about whatever they're discussing that it lapses into a completely earnest conversation. The Predator, Long Island, gambling, and fantasy novels episodes are all amazing.

The only problem with that ad is that it's 5 minutes long and they play it all the time.

For a gateway to more recent Tom Waits, I recommend Alice. He's still singing with his Tom Waits rasp, but the songs are like a funhouse mirror version of his earlier, whiskey-soaked melancholy songs.