I hadn't. And it's pretty damn brilliant.

That was a great episode. The ending was hilarious.

"Crass" is the word Teague was looking for. I was shouting it, but no one was listening to me.

And don't get me started on South by Southwest, where Cary Grant would have ended up in Arkansas via an uncomfortable budget airline.

Great episode. I like seeing the same visual and storytelling style in a director's work, as long as it doesn't go too far. Tim Burton is a good example of a director who goes too far sometimes, especially with the horizontal stripes and stuff.

Grand Theft Auto is the Ron Howard film Trey was thinking of.

This space left empty for Elijah.

Peter Bogdanovich said that auteur theory is probably a big part of why French directors complain that have a hard time finding good scripts. Who wants to write a script when all the credit goes to the director? (I don't love Bogdanovich as a film maker, but he's a good journalist.)

Regarding Tony Scott, I highly recommend The Hunger. Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie are vampires. and Catherine Deneuve seduces Susan Sarandon.

Screw Steven Soderbergh. I liked Ocean's 11 and Out of Sight, and that's it.

Screw Woody Allen. I can hardly stand anything he's made since Zelig, and even his early stuff was better when Sid Caesar was doing it.

I so want to love Martin Scorsese, but he's really hit and miss for me.

If Charlie Kaufman was anymore Charlie Kaufman, he wouldn't be David Lynch, he'd be Rain Man.

"If you peel back all the layers of Fincher movie, instead of a mushy beating heart, you find a perfectly round, steel ball bearing that's always somehow two degrees below room temperature." LMFAO. That needs to be on a T-shirt.

Isn't every barrista in LA an actor? The point of leaving the cow-orker with the corpse was as payback for that person's treatment of her.

It's not perfect, just a clean story with an internal conflict, character development, and a point.

Do you want negative examples?
http://badstudentfilms.tumblr.com/

Watching a character grow and change is pure drama, which is hard. The characters have to be engaging, sympathetic, and relatable; they have to have chemistry together; and the story has to be either funny or moving or both. And it still needs some kind of conflict to get resolved.

The point of your particular story needs to be something like the character achieving fulfillment or independence or redemption or something and doing that thru growing and changing. Then you can say "this person grows and changes and, as a result, finds his place in life" or whatever. If your explanation doesn't have "as a result", then it doesn't have a point because it's not resolving a conflict, and you might as well be filming ants looking for food.

Check out a short film called Double Shot, where a character who seems to deserve no sympathy achieves redemption. The protagonist is conflicted about the direction of her life and gains hope and opportunity thru that character's act.

As usual, I'm away from home this week, and I don't have pictures of my (dull, Midwestern, small town) neighborhood, so I offer this for now to show where I am....

EDIT:
It just occurred to me that I DO have a photo of my neighborhood, which I took at 11,000 feet when a return flight actually allowed me to say, "I can see my house from here!"

Leave Teague alone! He's the sensitive one!

Terrific analysis. Batman is the only superhero whose villains are as interesting as he is.

Nope. Siding with Dean. The film doesn't have to show Batman becoming his villains. It only needs to show directions he could have gone. The film's not a masterpiece (the Batmobile hack being a good example), but it stands among the better superhero movies.

Okay.

That quote is hilarious until you think that Kinski would have been playing the Nazi officer, and being a reckless German maniac really was the same tired old shit for Kinski. 

I think it's best when an enthusiastic producer or someone sits in and kind of interviews the director. Because, yeah, unless the director is excited about talking about the film, he won't have much to say about it.

But I also think that commentaries aren't so much for now but for ages hence, when the director and others are senile or dead. Imagine how great it would be to watch North by Northwest with a real commentary by Hitch and Cary Grant.