Part of the reason lurkers persist in their lurking is because few podcasts/providers of online content have an actual community. The forums here are one of the things that set DiF—I mean, FIYH apart. Welcome.

I think The Skin I Live In could have been interesting, in a different way, had it starred Nick Cage and been directed by Tony Scott. Could even the late Tony Scott have saved The Phantom Menace? That's another matter...

I call bullshit. That's better than any Reader's Digest story I've ever read. Looking forward to more tales about this new hero, "George Clooney"...

I just saw that Gravity trailer at a screening of Gatsby. I don't know if the film will be good or not, but some of those tumbling-through-space shots did look cool on a big-ass IMAX screen.

Well, the advance reviews of Gatsby are currently trending negative. Di Caprio, however, seems to be getting some praise. It's a tough part to cast, since Gatsby is classy, but the whole point is it's an inauthentic, affected kind of classy. He's basically a poser. So you need someone who can do the classy-handsome-man thing but at the same time give off that undercurrent of pathetic overreaching.

None of the prior adaptations of Gatsby that I've seen are particularly impressive, including the Robert Redford one for which Coppola was the screenwriter. Some of the novel's main themes seem so specific to the time in which it was written.

That's it alright. It's in part a critique of the vacuous pleasure-seeking and cynicism of upper-class folks in the 1920s... but, yeah, that critique is bound to feel less urgent for us here in the present day. And probably less so on the big screen.

I read it recently, too, and there's a heavy sadness to the novel that I'm eager to see how Baz Luhrman handles. His movies seem to love swinging tonally from exuberance to melancholy, sometimes in the same scene.

I doubt I'd be of much use when it comes to the labor, but I'll buy stuff/donate to any fundraiser that goes down.

Ann B. Davis had to be pissed off when they wrote cousin Oliver into the series instead of giving Alice more storylines. She was the best character on the show. That whole weird blue-collar romance between her and Sam the Butcher—that shit was a helluva lot more interesting than Maureen McCormick getting hit in the nose with a stupid football, or Greg falling off a surfboard because of a voodoo curse.

Speaking of Mars, the lastest issue of The New Yorker has a feature piece about Curiosity and some of the scientists who created her. If you're a NASAhead, you might already know most of what's in the article, but there's some interesting little factoids in there as well. The writer definitely captured just how cool the sky crane's engineering was:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013 … ntPage=all

So far my favorite suggestions have been the ones that harness the show's signature figures of speech (like "hanging a lantern," etc.). I like the idea of making a show title out of one of these little gems because they emerged right out of the show itself. There'd be a sense of ownership there (which is evidently something the name "Down in Front" can no longer offer...).

That's a damn funny picture.

In a sense, he's already the most prolific vampire in the history of movies, having sucked the life out of a generation of Star Wars fans. [Rimshot.]

Welcome guys!

PorridgeGun, your list of favorite films includes The Thin Red Line and Mr. Baseball, and the list of TV shows includes Twin Peaks and Jackass. For this, you are already awesome. That is all.

(Also, your list of TV shows makes me long for a show that combines Breaking Bad and Black Adder. It would be cerebral show that follows a long line of British meth cooks in their misadventures through the ages. With a laugh track.)

It is kind of a relief that that was his final review. He liked Malick. It's like the difference between someone's last meal being stale saltines and someone's last meal being... whatever the culinary version of Terrence Malick is. I don't know. Something gourmet and fluffy, vaguely European in appearance but decidedly American in flavor.

It's frightfully uninteresting, I'm afraid. The company I worked for had an internal, Skype-powered show, on which nerds like me addressed common tech issues. That, and I'm just a big user of Skype and Google Hangout, enough to where I can definitely attest that group videoconferencing is not as much fun when the sound is less-than-ideal. The flip side is that it's way more fun when everyone's miked-up and broadcasting from a relatively quiet room. Even the most low-end mic goes a long way.