If you like DIF's choices so far, any of the better-known stuff of the Coen Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, and Quentin Tarantino will probably interest you, at the very least. They're genre films that reward reflection and multiple viewings.

Also, think of a classic movie star and watch some of that person's stuff from their heyday—not their later, phone-it-in, maybe-I-can-make-a-comeback days. There is a really, really good reason why Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, James Cagney, Brigitte Bardot, and Ingrid Bergman were big stars: they were fucking awesome to watch.

Don't watch movies that are outside the genres you like just because they're considered great movies (unless you're really just trying to broaden your experience). You're not going to enjoy John Wayne's best western if you don't like horse opera or Astaire & Rogers' best musical if you don't like singing and dancing or Bette Davis' best bitch-out if you don't like melodrama.

I wish I had something more to say here than "Now I see what you mean, and I agree completely."

EDIT: Wait. I thought of something. Where was Qui-Gon's lazy ass at the beginning of New Hope? And at the end of Jedi? And did evil Darth Vader discover the secret of becoming a Force ghost as a Sith? Did he slice up Obi-Wan in New Hope and then sit meditating for several days before going "Oh crap! I know what he means now! Damn, I've got some work to do. Best not let the Emperor know I'm gonna practice some light-side post-death Force projection. Gotta keep all my options open."

Of course maybe it's not just a light-side thing. But you know the emperor would have been all over it if it had been an option for him. And it would have been hilarious if, at the end of Jedi, the Emperor gets tossed down the well shouting "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you ever imagiiiiiiiiiiiiined!"

I think you're restricting the concept of the magic beans too much, tho. You're almost conflating it with a Macguffin, actually (altho a Macguffin typically doesn't actually do anything in the story; people just want it for its potential or value). The magic beans fill in the blank in the trailer opening "In a world where __", and that should make you want to visit that world. Sometimes it's one fairly simple thing (robots and people from the future can travel back in time to change history), but sometimes it's a whole crazy world of magic and fantasy creatures.

I think we should think of some examples of where the writer introduces too many magic beans or introduces them too late and then talk about them specifically. In the SW prequels, I think we can all agree that things like retroactively giving R2 rockets and introducing midi-chlorians (why is that not in the spell-checker?!) are examples of Lucas changing the rules of his characters/universe after they have been well established, and that causes many viewers to stop willingly suspending their disbelief.

For me—and I know this must seem weird—X-Files did the same thing when they actually confirmed the existence of real aliens. I was totally on board with weird earth-bound biology and so on, but Roswellian space aliens made me kind of groan. I kept watching, but I was in it for the creepy monster-of-the-week eps and not for the alien conspiracy arc.

The audience has to know what the magic beans do (create giant beanstalks that reach up to a cloud-land where a giant lives) but it is not necessary to explain how (Shakespeare waves off Hamlet's father's ghost with: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy").

What makes the magic beans magic beans is that the audience implicitly knows that they must accept them without question and willingly suspend their disbelief or else the rest of the story isn't going to be any fun, whether that's magic beans, light sabers, or talking animals.

It's when you add a second, unrelated or contrary type of magic bean that audiences become upset because you have effectively changed the rules of your story's universe. For me, that's adding the bizarre, religio-deterministic prophecy of "the one" to the science fiction of The Matrix. Alice in Wonderland actually does not do that, and therefore "Wonderland" a poor choice of examples of "magic bean proliferation". AiW works because it has just one central conceit (the literary term for "magic beans"): a bizarre land of Victorian pop culture characters exists that can be accessed via a rabbit hole.

A TV series is inherently different from a film, tho, because in a series, you expect the universe of the story to be expanded as it goes. Star Trek: TOS is a good example of that; crazy new shit happening all the time underscores the central conceit that we are exploring places (ludicrously far apart and populated by creatures often ridiculously similar to ourselves) where no man has gone before.

Of course, there is the danger, as seems to have happened in Lost for a lot of people (I wasn't a viewer), that you will unveil a new wrinkle in the fabric of your universe too late in the story or simply too silly and turn people off. (R2 has rockets?! Supergirl has a super-horse?!)

Not to be a word Nazi, but I think you mean "prolaby a comcussion or two". Have you been checked for brain damage? It supposably tends to show up first as a qualming of the vocabumary.

My Penis certainly has legs, but—a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—my college roommate joked that he wanted to call his band the Penises, so they could be introduced on stage as "the up-and-coming Penises". To be fair, tho, I suspect that Ben Franklin, Lord Byron, and Geoffrey Chaucer all also previously thought of it.

1. New York City is everything it's cracked up to be, good and bad.

2. Washington, DC. It's hard to believe we didn't fuck up the architecture and we've managed to build great museums. Never went outside the historic city center....

3. Las Vegas is surprisingly great.

4. The Netherlands seem like a small town and big city everywhere you go. Extremely nice people; graffiti everywhere. (Only place in Europe I've visited)

5. Disneyworld was pretty damn amazing when I was a kid.

Honorable mention: Cincinnati and Chicago. Great towns. Pittsburgh is surprisingly good too, but Pittsburgh drivers will run your ass over even if you're in the crosswalk with the walk signal.

Dishonorable mentions: Newark is a shithole and Milwaukee stinks of beer. Hawaii wasn't great, but Christmas is the wrong time of year.

Question....

Top five historical heroes....

Well that was very entertaining, but of course not really the same as a regular commentary. A good first run, for sure. It was tough to stay in sync, given the video drift and lag. Matt figured out how to fix the audio once he realized it was so bad people were bailing; that's cool. And once we got into a rhythm of non-time-code sync cues, that was helpful.

Uh, what else? We can't really see your facial expressions, and there's a good bit of blurring in fast motion moments. Just something to be aware of... MST3K did pretty well, and they were just silhouettes...

There must be, because the White House is heated by steam pipes from a boiler in another building. But the steam pipe trunk would be a huge cast iron pipe with multiple branches. I don't see any steam pipes at all in that office.

I think that scene is supposed to be in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door (the offices of the White House staff, rather than the White House proper). But the WW TV show really played fast and loose with the geography (I have a page on its version). There's no such place as the Mural Room; there haven't been bullpens on the main floor since 1935; the Press Briefing Room is in totally the wrong place...

<sigh> Yes. My nerdery knows no bounds. Commenting on my own commentaries... Documenting the White House sub-basements.... Keeping a spreadsheet of the 60000 most common English words and their spelling irregularities....

...Now I've said too much.

That's be awesome. That means these sync issues will go away fairly soon, as people switch to Blu-ray and online formats.

As you know, I listen to a lot of fan commentaries. UK PAL runs a little less than 4% faster than US NTSC (at least according to Windows Media Player's incremental playback speed settings). I haven't noticed that that's any different with Blu-Ray vs DVD, but that's comparing them to PAL and not each other.

Now, I also do commentaries myself via Skype with the Doctor from Speakeasy Commentaries. He's in the UK and feeds me the video in the US. Even so, we somehow remain in perfect sync whether I'm watching an NTSC DVD or Blu-Ray. Maybe his video ripping software converts his PAL DVDs to 24 fps or something.