Harmsway

I don't get the grief over Community being cancelled. If this was after season three, I'd understand. But the show has hardly been at the top of its game for the past two seasons.

I suspect that he's very ambivalent about the kinds of films Hollywood wants to finance these days. Spielberg was very public about his frustration regarding the difficulties of getting Lincoln financed. Coupled with his recent statement that he's bored with action filmmaking, it's not hard to imagine that he's struggling to find something that can get simultaneously get financial support and capture his interest. I wish his Moses film had gotten off the ground. Instead, we'll have to suffer through Ridley Scott's version.

And the best bits of Aliens and Terminator 2, though both are infected by Cameron's tendency to blockbusterize every film he makes.

James Cameron is at his best when he's mimicking John Carpenter.

Nope, and I probably won't. It looks like a whole lot of stupid.

Hannibal's latest episode, while not one of the more riveting entries of the season, again establishes that the show has a better grasp on the cinematic vocabulary of horror than just about anything else around (or anything that has been around for many years).

Taxi Driver and Fight Club are both fascinated by a misanthropic, pseudo-fascistic worldview that they vaguely attempt to reject but never adequately critique. The ending of Taxi Driver may be, to an extent, a rejection of Bickle's point of view, but it is also so resoundingly cynical that it never successfully alleviates it (Jonathan Rosenbaum once mused whether or not Taxi Driver would be as beloved if it had ended with Bickle going to jail, correctly suggesting, I think, that Taxi Driver's moral ambivalence might be absolutely essential to its appeal). The charismatic character at the center of Fight Club is clearly Tyler Durden, who clearly owns the film beyond that of Norton's unnamed protagonist (even after his "demise," Durden rears his head in the form of the brief provocative flash-frame at the end of the film). I don't disagree. The contrasting voices of Taxi Driver's primary creators--Schrader, Scorsese, De Niro, and Herrmann--result in something deeply fascinating. I just think it's problematic, as well.

Cheers. Endlessly watchable.

There's nothing to take from it and nothing to "understand" except the convenient script-serving (and...stupid) rules of the dream world.I'm not sure that's entirely true; as awkward as Inception is, there's a wonderful Borgesian love story buried underneath all the exposition. Imagine what Wong Kar-Wai might have made of the same material.

Say wha?Please elaborate. You can draw a clear line between Taxi Driver and Fight Club. I don't mean to equate the two films, exactly; Taxi Driver is undeniably superior to Fight Club in practically every way, and is not plagued by the latter's smugness. But Taxi Driver, like Fight Club, is nevertheless so fixated on a charismatic, misanthropic figure and so immersed in his muddled worldview that it struggles to extricate itself.

Haven't seen True Detective yet, but I'm hesitant to put in the effort since the ending was widely regarded as something of a letdown.

We've been over this before, but Vertigo belongs in the same tier as those films.It belongs to the same tier as THE RED SHOES, and other examples of bourgeois thanato-erotic self-indulgence.I love it when you call something "bourgeois." It makes me giggle. With the exception of TAXI DRIVER (which is pretty deserving of its reputation), I agree. Throw in CASINO too.Taxi Driver is confused in deeply problematic ways, even though it's undeniably potent. I'm not sure if Casino really belongs in the "overrated" category; it's always seemed to me that it's widely regarded as Goodfellas' less desirable cousin. I like the way it ends, if not much else.

He's supposedly working on his Jesus film.

Total Recall is pretty great. Wish we had more films like it.

We've been over this before, but Vertigo belongs in the same tier as those films.While The Departed is pretty lame, there are many other Scorsese films more deserving of placement on the list (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas).

The Counselor (2013, dir. Ridley Scott, the extended cut) For the most part, I dig McCarthy's script here--he's written an abstract, absurdist neo-noir--but Scott's woefully incoherent, insufficient direction makes a serious muddle of things.

Criticism is not a science and never could be, so there will always be matters of taste when it comes to art. There's something to be said for connoisseurship in addition to pure academic study. But to simply write off the possibility of a judgment that amounts to something other than purely subjective response is limited, too. Aesthetic standards and judgment comes with a lot of personal and cultural baggage (art cannot exist in a vacuum, just as we do not exist in a vacuum), but that's not to say everything is equal and attempting to distinguish between crap and gold is a useless endeavor. That said, I think Borstlap is off-base. His dismissive attitude overwhelms any legitimate sentiments he may have. There are some valid complaints to be made regarding the insularity and cliches of contemporary classical music, but such complaints need to be made with care.

Depends on what you mean by "their kind." Alain Resnais, my favorite of the New Wave directors, was ahead of them by a few years.

Happy to be here. Oh, that'll be quite a ride.

A.I.'s finale is drenched in ambiguity. Note the way the camera holds on zombie-Monica's disoriented face just long enough for her state to begin to register, or the final shot that recalls the end of Solaris.

The Fisher King (1991, dir. Terry Gilliam) I'm starting to sour on Gilliam.

The first thing you should know about us is we have people everywhere.

Hannibal is a network TV show ... Then it's sh!t. You're dead wrong about that, but I don't fault you for your assumption. Hannibal was an experiment by NBC, an attempt to create a thirteen-episode series that follows the cable model. It succeeded on those terms. It's developed a devoted, niche audience and has delivered ratings that are commensurate with that of a cable network television series. But it's proven too idiosyncratic to catch on and deliver the ratings expected of a network TV show (though the lackluster marketing, which continually tries to pitch it as something like The Following, misses the mark; Hannibal doesn't fit in that mold). If it had debuted on AMC or Showtime or even Netflix, this show would be thriving. There are rumors that, if NBC cancels it, Amazon is waiting in the wings to snatch it up for its streaming service (Amazon Prime already has exclusive streaming rights to Hannibal). I hope so. No other television series has ever been so consistently impressive on a formal level. To cut it down in its prime would be a tragic mistake. Well, I like Kubrick a lot, too.

Yep.

I haven't seen enough of it to offer any sort of definitive verdict, but I'm not crazy about what I have seen.