Honestly, his name just crept to mind when I was flailing for a director whose work has been vaunted in the past but his later stuff isn’t so much (clearly I could’ve picked a better example). My apologies, but you do remind me that I need to get around to seeing TWBB (I am very deficient on keeping up with Oscar winners over the past decade, I only saw Slumdog when it came out on DVD after the awards and ditto Frost/Nixon). I think the last year I caught all five nominated best pictures was 1999/2000 (whenever “Life is Beautiful” made the Holocaust funny, I guess).

@Gab – Anytime an ad says “featuring Oscar-winner insert-name-here”, I always think “but not for this movie!” Nine times out of ten, it seems like an Oscar winner’s immediate follow-up project fails to reach the same heights either critically or commercially.

I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to say. Clearly, a LOT of people get excited for PTA’s work – I promise you that whatever he decides to make next, there will be a lot of buzz around it, and healthy crowds (for an indie movie). And if you’re arguing that There Will Be Blood’s success was all Daniel Day-Lewis, let me point out that Daniel’s previous film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, didn’t even break a million at the box office.

I like the discussion of who makea a film, producers or directors. In the truest collaberative art of all time, it’s interesting how much stock is placed in who’s in a movie or who directed it. I think Truffaut lived to regret his statements that “the director is the author” of his particular film, if only because the reality is so often less definitive. Directors like Kubrick, Godard, and Tarantino might be “name directors,” but they can’t make the film on their own. Conversely, though, their names are on the line with each new film they release (well, except Kubrick, who’s been dead for a while, but you get my point). When was the last time anyone got excited for a Paul Thomas Anderson film, for example? Movie stars and directors can live or die by what the public gets to see. Producers, so far as I can tell, do sometimes experience a similar exit from the main stage of fame, but no one ever walks out of a movie either praising or damning the producer.

I’m looking forward to the start of the fall TV season, because the summer one looks like a post-apocalyptic nightmare of creative bankruptcy.

Shows I’m interested in next season: NBC’s _Community_, Fox’s _Brothers_, and ABC’s _Flash Forward_ and _The Deep End_. Probably too many to actually follow, but we’ll see.

Stuff others may be interested in: M.I.A. was on Bill Maher’s show this week.

The Credit Card Holder’s Bill of Rights was signed.

_King of the Hill_ will end this fall.

A California Supreme Court is going to rule on Prop 8 on Tuesday morning.

Re: _Terminator_: I’m a little surprised he’d say _Jurassic Park_ and _Forrest Gump_ were bad movies, too, so I’m more than a little skeptical about this Wallace’s tastes and (p)references. _LotR_ may have proven his little formula wrong, but _King Kong_ sticks to it, so I think Peter Jackson gets sort of nullified there. But I think enough good (or at least not TERRIBLE) movies with big special effects budgets have come out in the past couple years to prove his theory obsolete.

Lazy, DFW. Lazy.

By his reasoning, there’s also no difference between hard-core porn and opera, because it has a bunch of songs in it and the overarching structure strings them together.

As for the Inverse Cost and Quality law –

In this article, he says Jurassic Park, Independence Day and Forrest Gump are obvious examples of movies that are shitty except for the special effects. I’m kind of flabbergasted by that.

It is fitting that the article was written when Titanic had just come out – it seems to represent a potential branching point for an alternate timeline in which Titanic were a shitty movie that nobody connected with personally except for the special effects. That world is probably interesting.

Also, if the Inverse Cost and Quality Law were alive, it sure is dead now. The Lord of the Rings movies straight murdered it.

Wallace, who committed suicide last September, is generally thought of as the eggheaded author of the daunting dense “Infinite Jest.” And indeed he was. But he also was a pop culture fan, and a bit of a geek. Honestly, this essay reads a lot like Overthinking It on steroids.

His argument is that while The Terminator is an all-around brilliant film, T2 puts an inordinate emphasis on the “F/X Porn,” to the detriment of everything else. I don’t necessarily agree with him. However, I will admit that the entire second act of T2 (after they break Sarah out of the asylum and before they decide to blow up Cyberdyne) is sort of a blur to me. And yup, I hate Sarah’s final voiceover. HATE it.