This week, Zarban is played by Confused Matthew.

Hm, the reason i read this thread is that I came across this site only because of Confused Matthew mentioning you folks.

I did a little bit of studying arts and media at my crap university, and the funny thing I got out of that is, that if you want to include any artefact of art (also of the realm of moving pictures) into any analysis you almost always have to narrow down your focus to the aspects you examine, because you never have enough room to compare every single aspect of the item. This is way easier and totally legit in an approach, as long as you indicate it properly.

To me CM makes it clear enough where his point of interest is situated, and his reviews primarily were triggered by a feeling of personal disappointment, because a movie failed to work in the aspects that are most dear to him. As is made clear enough in his 2001 commentary, he will not even try to appreciate other virtues of a movie, that fails to accomodate him in the aspects he seeks in movies.

For me, as the rules are clearly stated, i wont bother consulting him on any movie i know he will not appreciate in the first place. But he has a place in my bookmarks for his thoughts on movies I think are in his playing field.

And as it is the internet after all, I`m fine with people rejecting things I personally hold dear, even if they are not the least bit polite about it.

The thing is, before I bumped into friends in your head, I had to be cherry picking in every format I encountered, because noone really offered me the holelistic approach I was searching for. There is red letter media, and I still watch almost everything they put online, but what makes you guys special in my eyes is the constructive attitude you put into your crap-movie-experience, the speculations around what would have made this bad movie better.

To go back to the start of my post: surprise, there are people out there, who don´t need to narrow down their focus so much they wear blinders on what might be outside of it
Though to be fair you have both the advantages of bouncing opinions of each other and the longer format. I know it probably isn´t going to happen, but I think I really would enjoy CM as a guest on some episode