BruceH

You mean you like High and Low more than The Seven Samurai?

Same here.

There was a time in my life when I virtually made a career out of seeing Eraserhead as many times as possible. But now I haven't seen it for a long time and I'm not sure I need a DVD of it. Maybe.

I figured he was trying to warn the guy that there was a CIA hit out on him. A little late on that, as it turned out.

I'll keep this in mind.

That's quite a thought!

Seems to me I used to own a copy of Shades. Wonder who has it now... Many's the time I wished I'd hung on to it. Oh well, that's the way the jazz album crumbles.

It really was a remarkable year for vault issues, wasn't it?

Second that.

I forgot it, great performance too, at least for the middle Quartets, that I owned long time ago. Not to offend anyone, but I never really liked the Alban Berg Quartet, too mannered to my ears. No offense taken at all. One's reaction to a particular interpretation of a classical composition is a very subjective and personal thing. Besides, the Beethovan string quartet cycle is notoriously hard to pin down.

The Takacs is great! They did amazing renditions of some of Haydn's quartets.

Just learned that the first Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott western, Seven Men From Now, is finally available on DVD. In a word, hurray! Hope all the others come out too, particularly The Tall T and Ride Lonesome.

That's a great one! I also like the cycle by the Alban Berg Quartet.

What's wrong with Winchester?

Indeed!

I'd say give yourself a couple of days, but it's too late for that.

Some sort of chicken.

Same goes for Thurston Howell III.

What a coincidence; I saw Syriana last Sunday. It struck me as a good movie, easy to like, hard to love. Very earnest, but interesting to see the various players go through their paces. Many of the characters don't meet, but the actions of one will affect another, and their reaction will affect someone else, and so on. They sure used a heck of a lot of recognizable character actors and stars. In this way it reminded me of Soderburgh in general, particularly with the movie Traffic. I hear that the writer of Traffic was the writer and director of Syriana. In some ways I thought it was tighter than Traffic, no longer than it needed to be. The thing about Clooney as an actor is that he's so recognizable now that his presence can distract from a character despite the fact that his acting has, if anything, improved over time. This is probably ONE of the reasons that he bulked-up and grew a beard for this role. He did a good job here, but as my wife said, you don't forget that he's George Clooney. But that didn't matter so much, since in this ensemble film he's just one cog in the works. I initially found it very distracting that one of the princes (the smart one) was played by Alexander Sidig, the actor who played Dr. Bashir on Deep Space Nine. I was wishing they had gotten someone else, because I couldn't get Bashir out of my mind, but after a while he started looking different to me. That has to be some sort of compliment to the acting, directing, or something. I was expecting the torture scene with Clooney to by worse, after hearing about it for so long. I was wondering if Bob (the character) was going to be tortured for days, but it was over quickly. They may have cut a lot out, from this and other scenes, and if so, I think that cutting was probably a good idea. Alexander----Out of Sight is my favorite Clooney film too, by quite a margin. And I tend to agree with you that Clooney has that "Old Hollywood" star chemistry. It's just too bad that they don't make Old Hollywood movies anymore. The most interesting character, for me, was the black investigator, the one whose job it is to sift through tons of oil company documents and find something. He was the most isolated character in the film, I thought, living with his drunken father, kind of low on the corporate food-chain, not part of the in-crowd, having to prove himself, and censore himself. I found myself wishing for more time with him. There's a moment when he and his boss are in a fine restaraunt and Plumber's character, Whiting, comes in. He says hello to the two, and the black guy automatically offers his hand and Whiting just refuses to take it! He just keeps his hands to himself, leaving the guy hanging, and says "How are ya?" The guy is just sort of stunned or nonplussed for a moment, and just sort of swallows it, as he has to. You wondered how many little humiliations like that he had to put up with in the average week.

Fascinating.

Hey! That was my line.

....But what about the liner notes?????

I'd agree with that. Best comedy film ever on a luaghs-per-minute basis. "...and it's deep, too!" as was the majority of his comedy. Yes indeed. RIP Richard.

This thing looks freaking great! I've asked for it for Christmas, which means I'll be buying it for myself in January.

That sounds intriguing... Yeah, Nicholson's quite enjoyable. I first read him because I had seen a short interview with him where he talked about stealing from Berger. He's not as deep as Berger at his best, nor as fine a prose stylist, but he reminds me of later Berger in particular, in the way he'll take an odd premise and really run with it. At the very least, his books are among the most intelligent entertainments being written today. You'll dig him too, BruceH for the attention he pays to architecture, which figures more prominently in his books than most any other author I can think of. I've enjoyed all the books I've read by him and I plan to get around to all of them at some point. Maybe I'll check out Nicholson after the holidays....