▶ The Dusty Towne Sexy Holiday Special - YouTube

It is cute, it is true and very, very funny.

Man of Steel (2013) *

Leaden and ponderous "reboot" of the Superman comic book flicks. The only good that can come from this, aside from providing work for the luminous Ms. Lane, is that maybe this most overblown of films will finally kill this idea of treating comic book/action movies as Serious Art. One can dream anyway.

Being John Malkovich (1999) ****

Terrific, original, chock full of ideas, brilliant art direction, top notch and quirky cast who turn in stellar performances and the best puppetry ever in a Hollywood picture.

Scholarship and Politics - The Case of Noam Chomsky - NYTimes.com

"It’s just that while language is powerful and creative, its power and creativity have limits; and since language is thought rather than an addition to or clothing of thought, the limits of language are the limits of what we can fruitfully think about. Nor, Chomsky declared, are those limits capable of being enlarged or transcended in time. This is as good as it gets. There is 'no evolution in our capacity for language.'”

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Martin Scorsese says he only has a couple more movies left in him / The Dissolve

“'I have the desire to make many films, but as of now I’m 71 and there’s only a couple more left if I get to make them,'” he told film school students in Marrakech, where he was serving as jury head of the city’s film festival. 'I miss the time when I had the desire to experiment and try different kinds of films, I miss that time, but that’s done, it’s over. There is obligation as you get older, you have family. I’ve been very lucky in the last 10 years or so, to have found projects that combine the desire, the subject matter—from The Aviator to now—with, as best I can, fulfilling the obligation to my family and the financiers.'”

Very, very sad. Inevitable, but that doesn't make it any better.

The Cheerleader Effect: Scientific American

"All of these visual illusions demonstrate that what we 'see' is not always a simple or direct reflection of what is right in front of us. Instead, what we see depends on both the physical stimulus coded by our visual systems (what cognitive scientists refer to as bottom up processing), and a blend of contextual information, expectations, and prior knowledge (known as top down processing)."

So much for "seeing is believing".

via Arts & Letters Daily

Boogie Woogie (2009) **

Spectacular cast (Heather Graham needs to be in more movies!) in a so-so satire (I think?) of London's art world. Thankfully it's brief.

Hard Eight (1996) **

Another flick that seems to be missing something. It's got style and a terrific Gwyneth Paltrow performance but it's not enough to fill in all the blanks.

Stoker (2013) **

Stylish and visually appealing, but one struggles to find some sort of point to it all. Something is missing.

Tristana (1970) *

Maybe this was supposed to be a black comedy. Either way I didn't get it.

Ball of Fire (1941) *

Interminable and insufferable "comedy" hopelessly mines the eggheads vs. regular Joe trope to disastrous effect. The leads are miscast and the whole thing goes on way too long. Embarrassing.

Looking for Richard (1996) **

Director Al Pacino hedges his bets and backs off a full fledged version of Shakespeare's Richard III for a combination "making of" and "Cliff Notes to". It works some of the time, especially in the last third of the film, but Al, please, next time lose the baseball cap huh?

Paris Review – C. S. Lewis Reviews The Hobbit, 1937, C.s. Lewis

"For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic."