Holy crap... I watched Charlie Wilson's War a few hours ago (and praised PSH's performance in this thread). Then the news came. The synchronicity was shocking.

A great loss. Cinema has lost someone truly special.

Yet another movie that I discovered only thanks to FIYH (it was mentioned in one of the commentaries).

Charlie Wilson's War is an interesting look at the Soviet-Afghan conflict, amusing and depressing at the same time. Pretty solid writing and acting (Philip Seymour Hoffman's character is particularly adorable). Don't miss it.

I've heard of that one a few times, but somehow I kept forgetting to watch it.

Great. Now I have one more reason to check it out.

Watching Home Alone has become the most popular modern Christmas tradition in my country. Every year, Polish TV networks are flooded with e-mails requesting the airing of this movie.

Oh well... Seems like everyone will jump the shark sooner or later.

Nowadays, Shyamalan is the guy we like to make fun of. After Lady In The Water, The Happening and The Last Airbender he became a laughing stock. Deservedly. But don't mistake Unbreakable for one of those turds. I'd say it's just as good as The Sixth Sense.

Come to think of it, now I can pinpoint the exact moment Shyamalan jumped the shark: it's the stupid revelation at the end of Signs.

A simple yet engaging story with some pretty impressive CG animation. An adventure the whole family can enjoy. The two upcoming sequels will have a tough act to follow.

Clerks is definitely worth checking out, it's one of the most influential American indies (and an interesting time capsule of the early 1990s).

Are they also working on Citizen Kane: Resurrection? 

I sincerely hope that's true, because it would mean that a good quality DVD/Blu-Ray release of the original trilogy (without all that Special Edition tinkering) is possible. But I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Unsurprisingly, the most interesting event of my early childhood was also related to Star Wars.

In the 1980s Poland was not a very happy place (although it could be a funny place on occasion - our best comedies come from that era). Of course it wasn't nearly as bad as North Korea (even other communist countries found North Korea appalling), but times were pretty tough (food and some other resources were rationed by the government). I was born during the first month of the martial law. Telephone lines were disconnected and the taxi service was suspended (my father had to ask one of the soldiers who were patrolling the streets to call an ambulance). The martial law ended in July 1983, but we were still isolated from the Western world. Even as a small child I noticed that something was wrong. To buy Western goods (Lego bricks, Coca-Cola, real jeans etc.) we had to go to a special shop and pay with dollars... except that owning dollars (and other Western currency) was illegal, so our bank was issuing fake dollars. Chocolate was also fake, because we couldn't import cocoa beans. Occasional power outages lasted for hours. There were only two TV channels (both owned by the government, of course) and "Rubin" TV sets (made in the Soviet Union) were killing a few people every year by causing fires. Political censorship was enforced in all media in a rather chaotic manner (many censors simply weren't intelligent enough to spot covert "subversive" messages), but in general, Western entertainment wasn't banned (cinemas screened many Hollywood movies, some American TV shows were aired on TV). That's communism in a nutshell.

Anyway... I was attending kindergarten. Around 1987 the kindergarten got this amazing piece of technology called a VCR (those things were rare in Poland back then). You couldn't simply buy or rent VHS tapes, they had to be imported from the West. One day we watched a strange movie. It had spaceships, a trash can on wheels, a furry monster and a mouth-breather in a black suit (at the time I thought he was a robot). I didn't even notice if it had a Polish translation or not... Quite frankly, I couldn't care less. It was the most awesome collection of images and sounds I've ever experienced. I probably didn't even understand the plot, but it changed my life forever. And for many years I didn't have an opportunity to see it again. But I never forgot.

Believe it or not, the next defining moment of my youth involved that other big sci-fi saga.

In 1989 communism collapsed and our media changed drastically. In 1990 TV started airing a show unlike anything I've seen before. It had short aliens with huge ears, a cool spaceship with a name I couldn't pronounce and a beautiful blonde in a tight-fitting spandex suit (she was my first kid crush). In the second episode that blonde got drunk and fucked an android. Awesome! I became a die-hard Trekkie.

The next important thing happened 7 years later.

Home video became fairly popular in the 90s, but my family couldn't afford a VCR. Around 1993 a few privately owned TV channels appeared, but none of them aired Star Wars (and they didn't particularly like Star Trek either, so I had to watch it on German TV). Finally, in 1997 the Special Edition came out in the theaters and I loved every second of it. Even the bad CGI Jabba and "Jedi Rocks" didn't bother me. I was still too young to know better. Jurassic Park was great, so CGI must be great, right? Only after a few years I started to notice that the CGI additions stand out like a sore thumb...

Finally, 1999 deserves a special mention. As we all know, The Phantom Menace was supposed to be the biggest movie event of that year, but turned out to be the greatest disappointment in the lives of countless geeks. Star Wars can suck? It was truly shocking. Fortunately, that year also gave us the most influential sci-fi movie of its era (the one with Keanu Reeves, trenchcoats and kung fu).