Grosse Pointe Bank
John Cusack and a hand-picked band of experts plan a sophisticated break-in at a local branch bank in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, as a practice run for a much bigger heist. But there, he runs into bank teller Minnie Driver, with whom he had a brief relationship 15 years earlier that left her with a child (Selina Gomez) that he never knew about and now tries to reconcile with. Music by Jonathan Coulton.

Pushing In
John Cusack is a Hollywood director bereft of ideas and desperate for a hit who falls for international assassin Angelina Jolie, who drags him along on a wild, globe-hopping murder spree while he films her with a Red on a Steadicam. Music by Randy Newman and Hans Zimmer.

Better Off Dad
John Cusack reprises his role as Lane Meyer, who has just been thru a messy, childless divorce and returns home to visit his parents, where he falls for a woman (Elizabeth Berkley) with two small children fathered by the Meyers’ former paperboy (Rick Schroder), who pursues him relentlessly to get back his two toddlers. Music by the cast of Glee covering songs of the '80s.

That sounds great. I don't hear any hiss during the talk. But the process sounds like a lot of trouble. I think your earlier stuff sounds fine but would be better louder. Judging from the couple I looked at, you're not using the full dynamic range anyway. Just max the volume using Normalize or whatever.

Sofa Dogs is great but not very similar to Down in Front in style or format. Plus, lately, he's done a number of commentaries with that Tysto guy, and jeez....

Levelator is great, but I agree that the fact that it snottily won't take MP3s is annoying. (The developers say on their site that it could but they just don't want people to do that because it degrades the audio.) I frequently pull other people's commentaries into Audacity and crush them with the compressor. (That function used to be crappy, but I find it quite good now, as long as the voices are at consistent levels; if not, Levelator is the only resort.) Since a lot of commentators post 128 kbps files, it would be soooo much more convenient if I could just drop that on Levelator and get an 80 kbps MP3 back....

Yeah, Slate ran an article a while back about the new release of Fletch about how Fletch himself was kind of an asshole, apparently missing the point.

It's a matter of taste, to be sure, But check out Zarban's House of Commentaries and sample some. Down in Front is the gold standard, but I find MMM Commentaries, DVDCommentaries.co.uk, Speakeasy, and some others both entertaining and insightful. Others may be interesting but dry or funny but not insightful and so may still appeal on some level.

I review all the ones I listen to, and I listen to at least one from just about everybody, so you usually have at least one data point for about any (non-iRiffs) commentator. An awful lot of them are just dudes sittin' around drinking and shooting the shit while they watch a movie. But, hey, even DIF wanders into that territory now and then, especially ever since Coach died, Trey jumped the shark pen, Teague took in Cousin Oliver, Brian slept with Maddie, and Michael was replaced by Ted McGinley.

True Git
Craig Ferguson is a Scottish bounty hunter and complete idiot who gets hired by a young but determined talking dog (Dakota Fanning) to hunt down the man who shot her paw.

/not letting this thread die, dammit

Yeah, story copyright is pretty broad, covering structure and character as well as actual words. Sergio Leone also lost a suit over A Fistful of Dollars being a little too homage-y of Yojimbo.

What astonishes me is that Ben Hecht and Alfred Hitchcock didn't get story credit on Mission: Impossible II. When I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant to remake Notorious with action trappings, but apparently Robert Towne thinks that notorious women who fall for spies, get recruited by them to be double-agent lovers of criminal masterminds, question their sincerity yet feed them information at a horse track, and get poisoned but are saved by their spy handler lovers are stock characters.

Well, at least it sets a precedent for my teen sex comedy My Dinner with Andrea.

That's really cool. I wondered how those came about.

The Hanover
The election to Bundestag of the heir to the House of Hanover (Michael Fassbender) is cause for a wild and crazy economic summit in Monte Carlo with his friend (James McAvoy) and his girlfriend's idiot brother (Russell Brand). There, they encounter a baby and its French prostitute mother (Eva Green), a hyena owned by Maria Sharapova (Maria Sharapova), and a naked high-roller gangster locked in their trunk (Silvio Berlusconi).

I think it should say "Live Hot Chat!" And then see what happens. Not just tonight, but in general.

I'll point out here that fair use has barely been litigated in the United States, probably because copyright holders are warned by their lawyers that it would likely harm their long-term interests. As long as fair use is murky, they are free to scare people with spurious cease-and-desist letters. But letting a court actually make a judgment would probably result in a much broader definition than is currently accepted. After all, it's been accepted forever that writers are free to quote other authors at length. If a court applied the same rule to music, movie soundtracks would suddenly be full of unpaid-for bits of pop songs, and rap music would suddenly quote (even more) liberally from the classics, and the Verve would suddenly get back the profits from "Bittersweet Symphony"....

Precedent for this sort of unintended consequence can be found in California v. Freeman, the 1980s case where the court said that pornography couldn't be prosecuted as prostitution. Suddenly, much of the porn industry packed up and moved the Cali, where the law had neatly clarified things.

It's got a good retro musical feel, like Hairspray or Grease. I would say that it's like Bye Bye Birdie, but I fuckin' hate Bye Bye Birdie.

/kids. what's the matter with these kids today?