Christopher Smets

Incredible sequel to ZODIAC.

EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

The CD revival is real, too. Value Village, the thrift store chain here in Ontario, used to be overflowing with discs; I went in on the weekend and there were barely any, and mostly just Christmas and classical.

I'm always a little skeptical of articles like this -- like of COURSE there are a substantial number of physical media obsessed twentysomethings living in LOS ANGELES or NEW YORK; talk to me when this is happening in Des Moines -- but in this specific case, I want to believe.

His score for 1979's DRACULA kind of rules. It has a real Gothic sweep, and you can hear motifs he'd go back to in EMPIRE and RAIDERS. youtu.be/r8M79q3xg2k?...

Every time it's funnier. Does the Hinterland film crew pop up in the Goin' Down the Road parody? I can't remember.

YouTube video by Shatner Method CBC on SCTV: Hinterland Woodchuck/ Monday Night Curling - 1983

SCTV doing a Hinterland Who's Who spoof on their CBC episode where the joke is just that they play it completely straight, like it's a found object. Genius. youtu.be/7xpuEmnOMNw?...

Truly. My friends and I all would all see each other at school the next day and talk about "last night's episode" of a show that was a decade old. A pretty rare thing.

I have all the Network 90 DVDs but I think I love the 30 minute versions the best. My mother and I used to watch the reruns every day on City TV and just kill ourselves laughing. (Half-Wits was her favourite.)

Bessent is always such a smug, smooth-talking asshole and here he sounds like he's simultaneously shitting his pants and fighting back tears. Very satisfying to watch. More of this, please.

Robert Kline as Bogdanovich stand-in Roger Deal in HOOPER.

Ryan O'Neal as Bogdanovich stand-in Albert Brodsky in IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES.

It's incredible how both stars of Peter Bogdanovich's NICKELODEON went on to drag him onscreen. Burt Reynolds spikes the camera TWICE before punching Robert Kline's Bogdanovich surrogate in HOOPER (then gives us a thumbs up), while Ryan O'Neal imitates him mercilessly in IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES.

Elmore Leonard's last short story.

Reading C.M. Kushins' very good biography of Elmore Leonard, Cooler Than Cool, and I don't think I realized that in the last novel he was writing when he died, the villain was an agent of ICE. (He turned a chapter into a short story called Ice Man.) The man knew a bad guy when he saw one.

Wow.

The cast in this is in-sane.

Bonus points if there's a scene in the middle where out of nowhere they just find themselves in Shangri-La.

Saw this and loved it when it came out -- I want to say at Cinema Village? -- and then didn't get another chance until the Criterion Channel had it a couple of years ago. But in between, it genuinely felt like it was lost to time. I'm glad people are becoming more aware of it!

How many of those pages are about Co-Op?

What a rock star.

Yes he did. They hired him to adapt it but the caveat was, Can it be set in Israel? He hated the whole process but wound up living in Israel while he did it and getting another book out of it, The Hunted. And he adapted it for them in the late '70s but that script kicked around for years.

Currently reading the very good Elmore Leonard biography Cooler Than Cool and just got to the 52 Pickup adaptation. He's got a screenplay credit but didn't technically work on it -- they gave it to him out of respect simply because they used huge chunks of his dialogue throughout!

I mean, if this poster doesn't make you want to watch THE OUTFIT right now, I don't know what will.

I got a daybill version of this Italian poster for THE OUTFIT a few years ago. One of the best adaptations of a Richard Stark novel, Robert Duvall goes incredibly hard as Parker, a knockout supporting cast of '40s noir actors (Jane Greer, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor and Robert goddam Ryan).

Robert Duvall, never flinching once as Colonel Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW.

I remember the first time I saw APOCALYPSE NOW in a theatre, what struck me most about Robert Duvall's performance as Col. Kilgore was how explosions are going off all around him and he never flinches once. (In contrast to the young guys, who are jumping constantly.) Just 100% dialled in.

Who really writes 'Gilmore Girls'? Among the things that get circulated on the Internet — and sometimes make it into the mainstream press — the rumor about who was actually writing the WB series "The Gilmore Girls" was decidedly strang...

You guys remember when there were rumours going around that Gilmore was actually ghostwritten by Sorkin? Insane stuff. (Also hilarious that this 25yo article is from what appears to be a church newspaper.) www.deseret.com/2001/7/25/19...

In that Matt Singer book, he describes how they'd request certain scenes and the studios used to send the show's producers actual 35mm film reels they could cut them from, which seems insane.

when Taxi Driver was new, a disturbed cypher like Travis was an outlier in society, a powerless person beyond his own capacity for violence. Now a guy like Travis is practically a demographic being marketed to. Scorsese called it

The funny thing about this being a dad movie is that my mom was actually the one who was obsessed with it and made it a point that I sit down and watch it. (It also helped that a lot of her guys were in it, including McQueen, Garner, and this guy right here.)

It's still funny to me that he decided to recast Scott Glenn with Harvey Keitel because he thought Keitel felt more like the real FBI guys he'd met. The original film won a directing Oscar but hey, you do you, Brett.

John Candy in JFK.

Went to see JFK on 35mm in the middle of the snowstorm on Sunday, and every time John Candy came onscreen, the delight in the audience was palpable. I wonder sometimes about what roles he might have played if he'd lived longer. He would have been terrific in FARGO, for example. What else?