• Joss Whedon wants the Terminator franchise
• This is a brilliant idea for a Halloween costume
• If someone doesn’t make these for me right now, I’m totally going to throw a tantrum
• Warren Ellis has a new book out, but you can’t buy it in stores — only here

• Clinically Depressed Poodle Mauls Former French President Chirac
• Raccoon bites off rapist’s penis

What’s going on???

Well I have a new one to add to the list. My cousin Brian told me about these last Labor Day and at New Years, he promised to send them to everyone in the family. Two of these arrived in yesterday’s mail…

Emily refused to even try it, despite loving both milk chocolate and bacon. I tried it and it’s as advertised. It’s rather like the first time I ever had a Hawaiian pizza — I’d never thought of combining pineapple and bacon and pizza before, but once I tried it, I understood the appeal.

Found here via a Chuck Olsen Tweet.

Basically, you look at the list of films by the various famous directors and pick which film you think is the best from each director. We may all agree that these are great filmmakers, but do we agree on what their greatest works are?

From the original blog entry:

It’s not strange to disagree about movies that are wildly different, and there are surely a few random movies that are very polarizing. What I find most interesting is which movie people consider the best movie from a particular director, as it is usually very telling and polarizing in a different way, so to this point I will propose a new personality test where you reblog your favorite movie from each of these directors:

1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc

Gerry added a few more…

6. Stanley Kubrick: 2001, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, etc.
7. P.T. Anderson: Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia.
8. Errol Morris: The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven, etc.

And I’ll stick a few in too…

9. Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, The Birds, Psycho, Spellbound, Notorious, etc.
10. Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, After Hours, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, The Departed, etc.
11. Hal Hartley: The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, Amateur, Henry Fool, etc.
12. Jim Jarmusch: Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, Mystery Train, Dead Man, Ghost Dog, Broken Flowers, etc.

And because these lists are woefully in need of some women…

13. Sofia Coppola: The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, etc.

Here’s me: No Country, Rushmore, Harold and Maude, Chasing Amy, Reservoir Dogs, Paths of Glory, There Will be Blood, Fog of War, Notorious, After Hours, Henry Fool, Ghost Dog, Lost in Translation.

Stylistically, it shares some of the pacing and mood of Paul Greengrass’ Bourne films, but amped up another notch and with cleaner, not-so-confusingly-choreographed action set-pieces.

Most interesting though, are the ways in which Daniel Craig’s Bond differs from earlier iterations of the character, and I think these differences make him the best Bond yet — if not the most faithful to Ian Fleming’s secret agent.

Gerry Canavan linked to two QoS reviews that talk about the new era of Bond from a couple of interesting angles. Here is Zunguzungu on Craig’s Bond and his relationships with women…

Bond’s character arc within the film is therefore a progression from a position of hatred towards the woman he loved and who betrayed him towards a position of what the movie narrates as understanding, catharsis, and transcendence. At the start of the movie, he is a homicidal maniac who has displaced his rage onto the a series of similarly different bad guys — making every kill an expression of sexualized rage. By the end of the film, however, his choice not to kill the man who is most directly responsible, at the same time as he “forgives” the woman that this bad guy is in the act of seducing out of her duty, is an indication of narrative closure. Perhaps more importantly, a classic Bond movie ending involves having sex with the good Bond girl while headquarters tries (in vain) to locate him, yet this movie ends with Craig and Kurylenko having parted ways, and with (something like) this exchange between M and Bond:

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Dench as M: “I need you back”

Craig as Bond: “I never left”

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If the classic Bond ending emphasizes the simultaneity of sexual power and duty — and even subordinateds the latter to the former — then Quantum explicitly places sex in opposition to duty, and Craig sacrifices the former for the latter. And while so much of the Bond movie is a touristic fantasy of never-ending summer vacation in exotica, Quantum’s Bond chooses to “come home,” and go back to work.

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It’s worth noting, then, that the ending is made possible by this willingness to be brought home, by M’s decision to trust him, and finally by his proving to be worthy of that trust. M is a mother figure — it even sounds like “mum” — and while his earlier response a threat on her life had been psychotic homicidal rage, the ending is a “happy” one only because his response has changed: instead of expressing the problem of attachment to a female by displacing it onto an object of violence, he embraces her. In this sense, M is by far the most important Bond girl in this film, or she would be if it were possible to call Dame Judi Dench a “girl,” which it is not. And this is the thing I dig most about the film: the most important female character in the film, occupying the space where the Bond girl usually goes, is a person who really explodes the series’ most cherished fantasy. While the Bond girl represents guilt-free sex, power, the fantasy of freedom from attachment, and an infantilizing femininity, Judi Dench’s de-sexualized M voices his guilty conscience as a powerful (and deeply respected) maternal figure he cannot disavow, and he denies ever trying to do so. What makes the Bond franchise most questionable, in my mind, is the thing this movie works the hardest to stand on its head. Yet, all that said, where is home? Who is M really?

I wanted to quote more from the review but you can just go read it for yourself here.

Now here is Juan Cole talking about the decidedly anti-imperialist politics in QoS…

Forster presents us with a new phenomenon in the James Bond films, a Bond at odds with the United States, who risks his career to save Evo Morales’s leftist regime in Bolivia from being overthrown by a General Medrano, who is helped by the CIA and a private mercenary organization called Quantum. In short, this Bond is more Michael Moore than Roger Moore.

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The plot of the film was developed by producer Michael G. Wilson during the filming of “Casino Royale.” New York-born Wilson is from a show-business family (his father, Lewis Wilson, was the first actor to play Batman on screen, and his step-father, Albert Broccoli, was long the producer of the Bond films). But Wilson did a law degree at Stanford in the 1960s and worked for a while at a firm specializing in international law. Outrage at offenses against international law are as much at the heart of this film as the more personal vendettas of Bond and Camille (Olga Kurylenko).

via Dear S

Amüsierst du dich, Huhnficker?

10 points to the first reader who correctly guesses the activity the man was engaged in at the time.

1. I moved 14 times in my first 15 years of life.
2. I competed at and won state-wide recognition in my high school’s speech/forensics club in the category of “radio announcing.”
3. Despite being a filmmaker and kind of film snob, I secretly love dumb romantic comedies.
4. My middle name is “Sanford.”
5. I was raised in a vaguely fundamentalist non-denominational Protestant Christian faith and am now an atheist.
6. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000.

As is the tradition with these sorts of things, I must now tap some other bloggers for the meme.  Gahlord tapped four people, but I’m going for five.  I am hereby calling out Alex Woolfson, Eva Sollberger, Scott Wild, Undead Molly and Gerry Canavan. Impress me with your personal trivia.

Tomorrow my dear friend Carolyn is getting married in Portland, Oregon.  Emily and I really want to be there but it didn’t work out.  Here’s a picture of her at our wedding…

Mazel tov, Carolyn!  Send me lots of pictures!