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Thanks for setting this up, BDA!  It's a terrific idea.  I'd been thinking about something similar, but don't have the time at the moment to really do the organization/cheerleading. 

Here's a suggestion for the proposals:  This maybe could get a little unwieldy, but what about when you suggest your movie, you write something (perhaps really briefly) about why you picked it?  Even if it's just "always been meaning to see it", maybe say a little something about *why* you want to see it, what attracts you to it, what your expectations are, etc.?  Especially if it's something a little non-mainstream, it'll give people some idea of where you're coming from on it.

If that's maybe too much to ask given that most people's suggestions won't get picked, maybe after the movie is officially selected, the proposer does the above in a separate post to signpost and kickoff the discussion?  Maybe a brief intro if it's a film they know well or just "Always been meaning to see it because I've heard XYZ and think ABC about it" if it's new to them?

Yeah, that's one way you could look at it for sure.  The thing is though that Gaff's first origami, the one of the chicken, really does seem plausibly like a comment directed at Deckard, seeing as it comes during the scene in which Deckard is expressing reluctance to come back and be a Blade Runner.  (The idea being that it's cowardice that's behind Deckard's initial refusal; i.e., he's chicken.) 

Now I realize that we're straying dangerously close to "Death of the Author" territory, but that does make it kind of interesting to see whether that thread can be maintained, once you give up what was apparently Ridley Scott's conception of the connection between Deckard and the final origami unicorn. 

The middle one is kind of a problem too though -- the matchstick man figure, which Gaff makes when they're searching Leon's apartment. 

I have to say, it wasn't until I encountered that cesspool of immorality that is the internet that I ever thought of the matchstick man as having an erection.  I always figured it was just a small counterweight or something so that the figure would stand up.  However, I have yet to see any explanation of it that really felt right. 

Indeed!  I somehow completely missed that, but you're absolutely right -- the line is what's crucial there.

[Not really overly outraged, more valedictory, but....]

'Chapter One. He adored DIF.  He idolized it all out of proportion.' Uh, no, make that: 'He-he romanticized it all out of proportion. OK... To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a podcast that existed in mp3 and pulsated to the great tunes of Teague Chrystie.' Uh, now let me start this over...

'Chapter One: He was too romantic about DIF, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle bustle of the forums and the traffic. To him, DIF meant beautiful avatars and street smart posters who seemed to know all the angles.' Ah, corny, too corny for, you know, my taste. Let me, let me try and make it more profound...

'Chapter One: He adored DIF. To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity that caused so many filmmakers to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the podcast of his dreams in..' No, it's gonna be too preachy, I mean, you know, let's face it, I wanna get some User Karma here.

'Chapter One: He adored DIF. Although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitized by hackneyed VFX, over-compressed soundtracks, studio cynicism, poor story structure, needless sequels...' Too angry. I don't wanna be angry.

'Chapter One. He was as witty and informative as the podcast he loved. Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled critical power of a jungle cat.' Oh, I love this! 'DIF was his podcast, and it always would be.'

Glad you guys did this one as I had been wanting to revisit it since forever.  Unlike Invid, I was not a smart fourth-grader in 1979, and I remember seeing both this and ST:TMP in the theater. All I remembered about The Black Hole though was (a) that the TV/teaser trailer with the voice-over and the green vector graphics scared the living bejeesus out of me as a kid for some reason. (In fact, I had a mild panic attack seeing the trailer again as an adult as a DVD extra on some 80's exploitation flick that Robert Forster was starring in.) and (b) that I cried when BOB died. 

Seeing it as an adult, holy mother of God what a mess.  But for everybody wondering where the story money went, just look at the credits: story by Jeb Rosebrook and Bob Barbash & Richard Landau, screenplay by Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day. I guess if they ever get that remake going it'll at least stop the world bitching about how they only ever remake good films and how much more useful it would be to remake bad ones. 

I do think the guys were being a little harsh on Mr internet tinfoil-hat douchebag though.  Now I haven't actually studied literature in almost 30 years, but two seconds of googling confirmed my intuition that there is a long and honorable tradition of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism with respect to Frankenstein-type monster stories.  So this guy is not coming out of left field or anything.  Of course one might claim that academic literary criticism is in actual fact empirically non-distinct from tinfoil-hat douchebaggery, but seeing as I work in a department that includes colleagues in English Literature, I'm sure I couldn't possibly comment.  It certainly pre-dates the internet though. 

And I'm not sure about falling into a black hole as a way to die.   A parachute not opening, that's a way to die. Getting caught in the gears of a combine. Having your nuts bit off by a Laplander, that's the way I wanna go.

I thought it was like poetry.  When the landspeeder cuts across the water in front of the X-Wings, you know, it rhymes.

Looks very cool actually, but what's really sold me are the episode titles.  They include:

Episode 2: Setting the Old Woman`s Qualms Aside, the Flying Pussyfoot Departs
Episode 10: Czeslaw Meyer is Forced to Rework His Tremble-Before-the-Specter-of-Immortals Strategy
Episode 13: Both the Immortals and Those Who Aren`t Sing the Praises of Life Equally

Just on that basis, there's no way it can fail to be great! 

I'm afraid I really don't have a lot in the way of recommendations.  I haven't seen a lot of anime, and the ones I have are not particularly obscure ones:

Paranoia Agent:  Oh...my...sweet...Jesus. Probably the most disturbing thing I've ever seen on television.  Desperately bleak and completely brilliant.  Here's the opening credits.  Even having the transliteration and the translation of the lyrics pasted onto the screen doesn't make this any less unsettling. 

Serial Experiments Lain: About halfway through, my friend and I started referring to it as 'Ralph Bakshi's Last Year At Marienbad'.  If that sounds appealing, you'll probably like it.  And as undergraduate cod philosophizing goes, it's actually not too bad, unlike other shows we might name.  (*cough* Battlestar Galactica *cough*)

FLCL:  This must be what our grandparents saw on the screen when we were watching Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry cartoons.  A breathlessly bewildering kaleidoscope of crazy crap presented in a way that's almost incoherent.  But in a good way.

The only even maybe slightly obscure one I've seen is Kino's Journey, which I liked a lot.  It's a little hard to describe.  Sort of a travelogue fantasy with old school fairy tale overtones about a young girl and her sentient motorcycle who travel from country to country, but only staying for three days in each one.  Oblique and interesting. 

And just out of curiosity, any suggestions for relatively recent (say last 20 years) family-friendly anime series, especially for a precocious 8-year-old girl who likes video games and comic books?   We've seen (or know about) the classics (e.g. Speed Racer, Star Blazers, Heidi, Sailor Moon, etc.) but I have no idea what's out there more recently.

Wow, just shocking news.  All of us here will be sending good thoughts his way, and to friends and family as well.  If somehow there's something beyond well-wishes and donating that we can do to help, whatever that might be, don't hesitate to let us know.

So, episode 2.  A significant improvement from last week, as we go from 'bewilderingly awful' to 'not very good'.  If the present trend continues, who knows what heights we might scale?

Peter Capaldi is still very good to excellent, though perhaps slightly let down by the aspects of the script.  Sure, it's supposed to be new regeneration and blah blah blah, but I think it's in the Thor commentary where the guys talk about drafts that just have the first thing you thought of for a line or a joke or whatever, and you then come back later to fix those.  Except if feels in places like they just never did that. 

But the big problem though is still the story. 

In the writer's guide for the original Star Trek, one of the things that Gene Roddenberry is at pains to emphasize is that science fiction doesn't have its own dramatic rules.  In principle, any story for Star Trek should be 'translatable' into something that would work in a police procedural, a hospital show, a legal show, etc. and be dramatically satisfying.  And that just doesn't happen in this episode.  You can hang all the lanterns on it you want, which they do (and I think this episode must have needed a dedicated gaffer just for that), but that doesn't make it better.

And what's kind of frustrating is that, just last week's episode actually, it seems like there's the core of a good idea here:

And even at 40 minutes the episode feels padded, though it's not as bad as last week.

I see from Wikipedia that starting with episode 7 we're getting a run of episodes by people who seem never to have written for Doctor Who before.  I'm quietly hopeful that maybe, with a little luck, those might possibly be 'meh'.

Well, I'm back.  I've always loved this movie from literally the first second.  The very beginning of it is, weirdly enough, one of those moments that I remember really clearly from the theater.  When the Miramax M logo fell away as "Across 110th Street" started up, I was just swept up into this amazing, diffusely sad, elegaic vibe before I'd even seen an actual frame of the film.

Actually, can I ask a favor of the assembled company?  Because I have such a strong memory of that first second of seeing the movie for the first time, I cannot stand the fact that my Region B bluray doesn't start with the original theatrical Miramax logo, but rather has the modern flight-through-a-CGI-Manhattan logo.  It's got music over it.  It's part of the goddamned film.  What the hell?

Is there any bluray anywhere in the world that has the original Miramax logo at the beginning?  If there is, I will buy it.  (If you live in the land of not-America, you can't survive without a multiregion bluray player.)  For reference, and proof that the internet has everything, if you go over to the Closing Logo Group's wiki page for Miramax, the one I'm talking about is the 3rd logo.

Anyway, as it turns out, I don't really have much to say in detail.  I'm pretty much on the same wavelength as Dorkman in terms of what I like about it and why, probably just more so (like I say, this is one of my favorite films).  I love the characters, and the sort of world-weariness of the Max/Jackie relationship.  I love the dialogue.  I love the pace, and the way he lingers on people so that you can watch expressions play across their faces.  And the end is just unbelievably affecting, with Robert Forster going out of focus a brilliant sympathetic touch.  (I always assumed that he was turning her down permanently, that in contrast to her he just doesn't quite have the courage to make the leap.) 

So really just a few random odds and ends to throw out.

In terms of why it didn't do well, I always think of an interview I read with a band talking about why their second album didn't do as well as their first, with the result that they got dropped from their label.  They said "the problem was that we made our fifth album instead of our second album".  That to me sums up why people didn't respond to it.  If QT had made a few more cartoons and then this, it would be a lot better regarded I think. 

Having said that though, in terms of commercial success, a quick look at Box Office Mojo turns up the fact that Jackie Brown made about 3.5 times its budget back at the domestic box office.  Made for 12m, as I think Trey says, and made back just a hair under 40m.  That's a better ratio than Reservoir Dogs, Inglourious Basterds or Django, and not hugely far off Kill Bill (which is about 4.5x)

On the subject of foot fetishism, funnily enough there are serious neurological proposals about that one.  Basically, if you look at the part of the brain that processes the sense of touch, there's a sensory 'map' which is more or less laid out in the shape of the human body itself, just upside-down.  So the area for the feet is on top, moving down through the area that covers the torso under that, and then the area for the mouth at the bottom.  The one exception is the area for the genitals, which is next to the feet on top.  And the theory is that foot fetishism is due to electrical/neurological 'cross-talk' between these two areas. 

As to why Max Cherry sort of acknowledges Louis when sees him in the department store, I always thought that had to be part of Jackie's plan.  Max as a bail-bondsman must have tons of experience following people and staying out of sight (like when he has to recapture someone who's jumped bail), and from the way it's shot during 'his' version of the exchange, it does look like he sees Louis and Melanie before they see him. 

So why would he want Louis to see him?  I assumed this was part of setting up Jackie's endgame with Ordell.  Her story is going to be "I was always trying to keep your money safe.  I was never trying to rip you off", since she knows it'll take Ordell only about 30 seconds to realize that she's got his money.  And Louis and Melanie seeing Max kind of giving them the high sign could be used as evidence later that she had nothing to hide.  Not only doesn't she care that they saw Max there, Max went out of his way to draw their attention to it.  Obviously though the real intention is for it to play out as it does in the film, with Ray killing Ordell for her when he comes to get the money. 

Last and least, does anybody really like Orange Julius?  That stuff always seemed totally disgusting.

Sorry, didn't realize what the US schedule was like.  Done.  Didn't think I'd mentioned anything really spoiler-y.  Maybe I'll go back and be a bit more explicit then.  [Edit:  Can't be bothered.  And I do see one thing that I hadn't intended to be spoilery, but I now see could be interpreted in a way that would make it one.  TLDR:  Capaldi good and....Capaldi good.]

Well, slightly surprised that this thread seems to have died.  Woulda thought there would have been a bit more enthusiasm.  I've been avoiding any discussion for the last 10 months because I dropped out after episode 4 (mostly just on at a bad time and couldn't catch up), but I finally went back and watched the whole series. 

It definitely picks up, and on balance I liked it a fair amount, but even so Marvel-itis frustratingly rears its ugly head.  (There's a spoiler tag in the thread title, but since there aren't really any above, I'll be suitably oblique.)

There's a cataclysmic event which basically drives the plot of Captain America 2 and which has a huge impact on Agents of SHIELD.  The show builds up to it really well and it hits with a great deal of impact.  I was watching the episodes where it all comes to a head thinking "Man, if these two episodes were the finale of Season 1, I would just be living in front of my television until Season 2 started."  (Though there seems to have been a music clearance problem, as the second one is called "Turn Turn Turn" but the music that it features prominently at the beginning is "Don't Fear The Reaper".  I like it better with "Turn Turn Turn", but I'll forgive them if they use the Byrds' version of "Chimes of Freedom" sometime near the beginning of Season 2.) 

Unfortunately though, because Captain America 2 came out in March/April instead of May, that means all this happens about 3/4 of the way through the season, so they've got this five episode coda that they've got to sort of spin out.  They make a decent fist of it, to be fair, but then the actual season finale ends up being kind of anti-climactic.  The main immediate fallout more or less appears to have been tied up.  The 'cliffhanger' stuff about Skye just feels like small beer in comparison with what's gone before.  And the Coulson-related 'cliffhanger', which is the very last scene of the season, just reminded me of M Night Shyamalan, and not in a good way. 

I like Coulson's character a lot though, sort of like if Kermit The Frog was the leader of SEAL Team Six.  And in general the characters do change/develop a surprising amount during the season, and it all manages to stay just the right side of soap-opera-esque.  So I'm looking forward to Season 2, but I'm less psyched than I feel like I could have been, which is a little disappointing.

Oh don't you worry about that.  Just keep watching....