– Collateral. Oh God. Can we please just agree that it’s time for the existential hit-man character to get two in the back of the head in a quiet Italian restaurant? Wised-up, amoral people don’t decide to become hit-men because they don’t see anything better to do, they become lawyers or lobbyists and make twice as much money without having to run from the police. Being a hit-man is necessarily an unpleasant and short life, and people who go into contract killing generally don’t have a lot of other options, so let’s just stop it with these Mephisto characters. And if you are going to use one, please don’t have him be Tom Cruise talking about jazz.

– Eisenstein’s October has been known to induce epileptic seizures in small children. They’re the lucky ones.

– State and Main. OK, it’s Vermont–get a couple old actors who’ve never been east of the Valley, put them in flannel shirts and rocking chairs and give them some really. stupid. lines. The part of this which was a send up of Hollywood types was funny, but the “real down home America” part was worse than painful and insulting. And I hate that ingenue with the squinty eyes, Julia Stiles.

– Rear Window. A man fears he may be a witness to a murder. Everyone else tells him he’s nuts. They’re wrong. That’s a plot? Everything Jimmy Stewart’s character thinks is happening IS happening. Not a single twist,

As of yesterday, “Atelier de Cannes,” a 1958 crayon drawing by Pablo Picasso, was still on sale at www.costco.com. Price: $129,999.99. You’ll find it listed under “Gadgets, Gifts & Art,” along with art prints by the likes of Chagall, Dufy, Mir

THE EVER POPULAR

CAPITAL-S SACRED

Citizen Kane

The Third Man

Rear Window

Nashville

I RESPECTFULLY PROTEST!

Rushmore

Barcelona

Last Picture Show

Goodfellas

I HEARTILY CONCUR

A FEW PAIRINGS

Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful

Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ

2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

THE CRUISE FACTOR

Vanilla Sky

Magnolia

Collateral

WHO EXACTLY IS GENUFLECTING?

Cheaper by the Dozen

Independence Day

Cabin Boy

Troy

…AND THE REST

Ordinary People, Primary Colors, The Vanishing, The English Patient, The Crying Game, Talented Mr. Ripley, Million Dollar Baby, A Letter to Three Wives, Reds, Short Cuts,
Forrest Gump, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happy Endings, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Goodbye Girl, Talk to Her, State and Main, Andrei Rublev, Gandhi, Z, Dersu Uzala, October,
Mississippi Burning, Dead Man, Everything Quentin Tarantino Has Ever Done, A Clockwork Orange, The Piano, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

– Robert Birnbaum interviews Camille Paglia:

CP: I’m on a crusade–it’s to say to the poets and the artists, “Stop talking to each other. Stop talking to coteries. I despise coteries in any form. You are speaking to a coterie, OK. Stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn’t vote with you in the last election.” This is big. Because we have all separated again. After 9/11, everyone was united. We are separated again thanks to what has happened in politics. People in the art world are full of [a] sanctimonious sense of superiority to most of America. But they must address America, learn to address America. Yes, have your friends, have the people who support what you are doing in the art world, but you have to recover a sense of the general audience and the same thing I am saying to the far right, get over the sneering at art, the stereotyping–

RB: They started it.

CP: Wait a minute. The far right wouldn’t have any opinions about art if it weren’t for those big incidents in the late ’80s to the ’90s when some stupid work was committing sacrilege.

RB: You’re referring to Andr

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,904.77

(Source: Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon)

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (quoted in Louis Kaufman, A Fiddler’s Tale)