*showers tim pat with dollar bills loaded with metaphorical significance*

I wasn't a huge fan of his performance, which primarily consisted of being Tommy Lee Jones and wearing a wig. PSH would have been my choice, but it's hard to argue with McConaughey who had a pretty amazing year.

Arkham City is a lot of fun. I tried playing Arkham Asylum after having finished AC, and AA really paled in comparison. It's just crawling around in vents for hours!

Man, I love Make Way for Tomorrow so much. If you're on a McCarey kick, you should check out The Awful Truth, made the same year. (It's the movie for which McCarey won the Oscar, famously declaring he'd won for the wrong film.) It is quite possibly my favorite screwball comedy.

"Wuthering Heights" is definitely not the best intro to Kate Bush. The video for "Babooshka" might be the best gateway - it packs Kate's multifaceted weirdness into one little package.

I can't wait! In the mean time, I'm going to watch some more Charlie Brooker stuff. I have A Touch of Cloth queued up next.

I'm pretty sure all the dialogue in Lady Terminator is dubbed. I doubt they recorded any live sound.

My girlfriend and I went out and ate some KFC immediately after finishing the movie. True story!

I was surprised how well Gary Cooper worked as a boho painter bumming around Europe. That's, like, the anti-Sergeant York! I think it helps that he's not portrayed as a particularly good or passionate artist, just an American guy who gets a kick out of living life on the skids.

I finished up The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuscinski's excellent book about the decline and fall of Haile Selassie's regime, as told by ostensibly verbatim quotes from servants of the palace. Kapuscinski is an incredible writer, able to draw out incredible metaphorical details. There's always a question of whether and how…

You're friends with the Lady Terminator?! That is truly amazing! Does she often meditate in the nude?

If you enjoyed Rififi, you should most definitely track down some of Jules Dassin's other films, especially Night and the City, which is amazing.

Have you ever seen the original, documentary version of Kon-Tiki? I haven't seen it in a coon's age, but I remember really liking it when I was a kid. (I'm not sure why I saw it as a kid - maybe my grandpa showed it to me?) Anyway, I should probably watch it again some time.

Cheyenne Autumn is an incredibly flawed movie, but also one of John Ford's most beautiful. It's awesome that you got to see a 70mm print!

I spent much of the weekend catching up with some recent British TV.

This is sad news for me. I used to do a show on my college radio station from midnight to 2 am, the last live-person show of the day before we switched over to automation overnight, and I would close out every shift by playing Patti Page's recording of "Tennessee Waltz" (from a copy of the Zabriskie Point soundtrack,…

That Thompson book is excellent. I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions - he was a hardline socialist til the very end, and his writing can sometimes regress into leftist cliches - but as a history of radical movements in England, it's still an essential read. I used it for a paper on the Luddites in…

I am a big fan of Thinking the Twentieth Century and have mentioned it in the comments a few times. I hope you enjoy it, though I will caution that it helps to have a working knowledge of 20th century history and historiography.

Portnoy's Complaint is probably the funniest novel I've read. One of the few novels that has ever legitimately made me lol.

I don't think highlighting or notetaking is necessary, though if you really love it you might want to go back and do that later. My recommended reading strategy is to start skimming the Johnny Truant footnotes because they are pretty abominably written.