Friday, November 02, 2007

NaNoWriMo-ing

So I've decided to take the plunge and participate in NaNoWriMo this November. That little bit of shorthand stands for National Novel Writing Month, 30 days in which a bunch of random strangers take a not-particularly-serious oath to complete a 50,000 word novel. (50,000 counts as a novel, I suppose, and not a novella, but just barely. It's about 175 pages.)

The site asks you to choose a "genre" for your profile, which was the first point at which it occurred to me that, here it is, November 2nd, and I don't even know what I'm going to write about. I'm sure I'll come up with something (I already have a few ideas), but just to lock myself in, I selected "Horror & Thriller" as my genre. So this should be interesting...

Anyone who has a lot of time on his or her hands and wants to take part in this thing should sign up as my buddy here!

Boys Becoming Men...Men Becoming Wolves...

Werewolf Bar Mitzvah, a one-off joke from an October episode of the fall-down funny "30 Rock," is now a bonafide cultural meme, and I couldn't be more pleased. No, really! Gawker informs me that WBM provided the theme for a New York hipster Halloween party. And if providing the theme for a New York hipster Halloween party doesn't make you a cultural meme...well, then I don't really know what the term "meme" means. And I'm fairly certain that I do. Let's say, 65% so.

Tracy Morgan has graciously now recorded a full version of the song, and College Humor has appropriately made a little photo-montage video to mark the occasion. Enjoy.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Greatness Skips a Generation...or Eight...

Mike Reagan is the son of Former President Ronald Reagan, seen here in this file photo dreaming about Phil Collins.



Mike has some amusing insights he'd like to share with you about the candidacy of HilRod Clinton. It comes in the form of "advice" Mike's handing out to Democrats. Why would any Democrats possibly take advice from a guy who spasms with glee at the very passing mention of a Republican victory in 2008? No particular reason. He just likes seeing his name in print.

Listen Barack Obama, John Edwards and all you other soon-to-be also-rans, lay off Hillary. She's well on her way to winning the nomination and we don't want anything to stand in her way, especially attacks on her character and integrity that might sidetrack her on the way to being your party's standard bearer.

So leave her alone, let her cruise her way to the nomination so we Republicans can have the pleasure of dissecting her in the general election campaign.


Reagan's column reads exactly like one of those comic Onion faux editorials, in which a joke is set up and then repeated/embellished for several paragraphs. In this case, the "joke" is that Republicans secretly (but not so secretly) hope for a Clinton victory in the Democratic primaries because they think they can destroy her in a general election, and Reagan will go ahead and essentially rephrase this point over and over again until he mercifully meets his mandatory minimum word count, so he can go back outside and finish building that fort or playing that game of freeze tag or whatever the hell he was doing before he started banging away hopelessly at his keyboard in an ultimately futile attempt to formulate a coherent argument. (Run-on sentences...they're fantastic!)

And she is about as dissectible as a politician can get, starting with her health care reform fiasco, her sleazy involvement in the White House travel office firings, her use of private detectives to smear and harass the women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct, and her most recent campaign finance shenanigans.

I'm genuinely curious...is anyone still swayed by this stuff? Any American over 25 is going to remember the last time a Clinton was in charge and Republicans were screeching over Travelgate and Whitewater and a whole bunch of other bullshit that no one really bothered to take in or understand. (The only thing anyone actually got upset about was the BJ, and even then no one gave a shit except Lucianne Goldberg, Ken Starr and Jay Leno.) I sincerely hope this is the Grand Republican Plan for 2008, Mikey.

Step 1: Get Clinton the nomination
Step 2: Bring up extremely uninteresting, incomprehensible, decades-old scandals
Step 3: Profit?

She'll most likely be running against Giuliani, a cousin-marrying New Yorker who's just wild about abortions and teh ghey. Maybe Mike should be more worried about his side's prospects than smearing Hillary. Who, lets face it, is not exactly a stranger to being smeared and is still around.

Want a sample of her negatives? Here's a bit from Ana Marie Cox's blog a year ago last August: "The Boston Herald reports on what 'ordinary, grass-roots Democrats' think about Hillary Clinton: 'Lying B**** . . . Shrew . . . Machiavellian . . . Evil, power-mad witch . . . The ultimate self-serving politician. . . Criminal . . . Megalomaniac . . . Fraud . . . Dangerous . . . Devil incarnate . . . Satanic . . . Power freak.'"

I'll be honest...There's a few of those perspectives on Hillary with which I agree. (Anyone who seeking political power with HilRod's drive and ferocity for this long would have to be a self-serving Machiavellian power freak. ALL ADJECTIVES, by the way, that apply to every major Republican candidate.) Were Mike a more insightful, less hacky writer, he might stop and consider how wretchedly disgraceful his own party must be for Democrats to consider voting for a satanic, evil, power-mad witch opponent. But naturally, he doesn't go there.

I know you Democrats don't want to do us Republicans any favors, but just this once let us have our way. Give us the opportunity to give the Republican attack machine another shot at Hillary Clinton. Let her coast to victory in the primaries. Then we'll take it from there.

Andrew Sullivan, always one to jump on the Hillary Hatred bandwagon, chimes in approvingly in a post titled "A Message to the Dems," as if Mike's misogynist diatribe were actually intended to provide genuine, non-ironic advice. It's fairly obvious from Mike's seething hatred of all things Clintonian and Sullivan's constant harping on her candidacy that they're afraid she's going to win. If you really thought your party could destroy Clinton in a general election, you'd shut up about it and make Democrats think she was unbeatable. A-duh. (In Sullivan's case, he just seems to loathe Clinton to an unnatural degree, somewhat similarly to the way I loathe Zach Braff. Of course, I cop to my irrational hatreds; Sullivan wants his to guide geopolitical events for the next eight years.

I think, dead-eyed stupidity aside, what bothers me most about Mike's column is its assumption that politics is and can only be about smearing ones opponents and playing dirty tricks. This election is about nothing NOTHING NOTHING for him other than winning. He doesn't even pretend to give a shit about the troops or the war or the economy or the education system or Social Security or even abortion and prayer in school! There is no agenda, only his team and the other team, and the goal is to drive them into the ground. To ELIMINATE them, really.

Which brings me, finally, to this post from right-wing haven Wizbang. Blogger Kim Priestap makes a very silly point in response to an experiment over at Democratic Underground, in which two liberal bloggers tested out waterboarding one another to gain perspective on the ongoing debate about the practice. Kimmy argues that, if these guys were voluntarily waterboarding themselves, it can't be torture, as if people being tortured had the option of stopping when it got too unpleasant.

Like I said, just silly. Not worth a blog post, really. I bring it up only because of the comments from Wizbang readers.

Scrapiron, the FIRST TO COMMENT, says this:

"Let me bring a half inch hammer drill and some bits and show them what torture is. Bet they won't want a do over."

He's fantasizing here, just to summarize, about drilling bits into his political opponents to prove a silly point.

Anon Y. Mous says:

"I'd like to prove that electric shock is torture. First, I'll need a few volunteers from the DU."

Yeah! That'd show 'em! That...um...torture is good? Bad? That two things that have nothing to do with one another can't both be torture? I don't even know any more...

Here's commenter Mike's torture fantasy:

"Maybe next time, in an effort to illustrate the "we're no better than they are" moral equivalence argument, they'll decide to try burning the skin off each other's back with a blowtorch, or gouging each other's eyeballs out with a rusty screwdriver. Or at least the tried-and-true car battery to the genitals. I wonder how many times they would subject themselves to that one."

Ouch. He's been listening to some Method Man lyrics.

Seriously, unless you're Bret Easton Ellis, you have no business even writing a sentence like that. Who are these sadistic fucks and is there a way I can guarantee that I never run into them outside of the Internet? I mean, aside from staying out of Alabama and Texas.

Here's a comment that isn't isolationist but just...I mean...read it for yourself...

god, foreigners are envious.

PJ O'Rourke did a riff explaining why foreigners acted like jerks in a desperate attempt to be noticed by americans: he compared it to the wild longings of a 13-year-old boy frantic to get the attention of a magnificent 24-year-old babe.

not a bad analogy. foreigners will of course angrily deny this. "we're GLEDD we don't hevv as much money and powwair as you stupid americans! we LAHK being impotent and ignored!"

Foreigners? This guy's making SWEEPING GENERALIZATIONS about the entire world population that doesn't come from the USA. (And you just know he pronounces it "furr-ners".) It would be hilarious if I didn't sense that 80-some percent of my countrymen felt the same way.

Criss Angel Disproves Shit You Already Knew Was False

So, apparently NBC has this show, "Phenomenon," that's like "American Idol" for magicians, and one of the two judges is that Criss Angel "Mindfreak" guy who pretended to have sex with Britney a little while back. Now, I would never watch this show, because I'm generally not a huge fan of magic, but this clip is HI-larious.

One of the contestants is this immense goober Jim Callahan, who claims that he can physically contact the spirit world. He has Raven-Symoné choose a mystery object at random and put it in a box filled with salt, then allows a spirit to actually use his body to write out the box's contents live on stage. (She chooses a toy truck, which is so Raven!)

Honestly, it's one of the silliest performances I've ever seen. He jerks around and makes noises and rolls his eyes into the back of his head - he even has the host caution the audience that his gyrations may be disturbing beforehand. Whoopi Goldberg doesn't take her performance this far in the film Ghost, and she's playing the scene for laughs.

Anyway, Callahan correctly "guesses" that the object in the box is metal and has four wheels. He's being coached by a ghost and he still can't come up with the word "truck"? What, does this ghost only speak in puzzles? Is it the ghost of Frank Gorshin? We're supposed to find this impressive somehow? I mean, seriously, this is such an old, tired line of bullshit...Fake mentalists used to pull this routine all the time, sending assistants into the audience to find random objects which the performer would then identify using code words. (For example, the assistant would say, "Can you tell me what I hold in my hands?," and this meant it was a pocket watch, whereas "What is the object I'm holding now?," would mean cigarette lighter. I'm sure Callahan's act is based on something similar.)

Criss Angel is having none of it, and just completely faces this Callahan guy on national television by holding up two more mystery envelopes and demanding to know what's inside. The ensuing tantrum, with Callahan calling Angel an "ideological bigot" (for not believing in magic!), may be one of the year's TV highlights:



That video was actually posted to YouTube BY Callahan, who seems to think that Angel's a hypocrite for not believing in spiritual possession. I'm not actually sure whether or not Angel has ever insisted that his magic is real and not just entertainment-themed illusion, so I can't speak to the claim of hypocrisy, but I do know that the term "ideological bigot" is really stupid and that Jim Callahan is a massive, ridiculous fraud. And not just a fraud, but an angry, insecure fraud. Which is funny.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

October is the Cruellest Month

Happy Halloween, everyone!



[H/t Sample the Web]

Apache Boy

Watch this. It's pretty much the greatest music video of all time...



In my face...

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Daily Show...Well, A Daily Show. Maybe not THE Daily Show.

Mahalo Daily, our site's new podcast starring the incomparable Veronica Belmont, launches next week. So they've put up the trailer!



The Daily (as I like to call it) will cover what Mahalo covers, which basically means everything. I've seen some of the future episodes, and I think this is going to be a lot of fun. (We're even landing some big guests and other assorted insider-y goodness! Stay tuned...)

You know, when we were first starting the company, we had all kinds of ideas for podcasts. I even starred in some early variations. I think we're better off getting Veronica Belmont in front of the camera, all in all. Scoble and Ask a Ninja have already kind of cornered the market on Fat Nerd Podcasting. (Okay, I'm just kidding...You can never have enough Fat Nerds.) It's been really interesting to see this whole thing come together from just a concept into a full-blown show over the past few months.

At the very least, I promise The Daily's going to be more interesting than that Boing Boing podcast, which is kind of like having a boring guy tell you all about the Boing Boing posts from the previous day that he only half-remembers.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Movie Review Archive

Normally, the archive won't be on the front page like this. It'll be linked over there on the sidebar. But it took me a while to compile, so I thought I'd leave it up here at least for now.

6 categories, from best to worst, each sub-ordered by release year. Enjoy.



CLASSICS

There Will Be Blood (2007, Anderson)
No Country for Old Men (2007, Coen)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Dominik)
Children of Men (2006, Cuaron)
INLAND EMPIRE (2006, Lynch)
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006, Charles)
The Departed (2006, Scorsese)
Munich (2005, Spielberg)
The New World (2005, Malick)
Grizzly Man (2005, Herzog)
Batman Begins (2005, Nolan)
Bob Dylan: No Direction Home (2005, Scorsese)
Match Point (2005, Allen)
Head-On/Lost Honor of Katherina Blum (2004, Akin/1975, Schlondorff)
Oldboy (2003, C. Park)
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance/Pickpocket/Forbidden Games (2002, C. Park/1959, Bresson/1952, Clement)
Minority Report (2002, Spielberg)
The Double Life of Veronique (1991, Kieslowski)
Withnail & I (1987, Robinson)
Cross of Iron (1977, Peckinpah)
Network/Kind Hearts and Coronets (1976, Lumet/1949, Hamer)
The Passenger (1975, Antonioni)
F for Fake (1974, Welles)
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974, Peckinpah)
Charley Varrick (1973, Siegel)
Army of Shadows (1969, Melville)
Goyokin/Three Outlaw Samurai (1969/1967, Gosha/Gosha)
Petulia (1968, Lester)
Point Blank (1967, Boorman)
Le Samourai/Wizard of Oz (1967, Melville/1939, Fleming)
Weekend (1967, Godard)
Masculine Feminine (1966, Godard)
The Professionals (1966, R. Brooks)
Sword of Doom (1966, Okamoto)
Fists in the Pocket (1965, Bellocchio)
Hound of the Baskervilles (1959, Fisher)
The Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Mackendrick)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955, Ray)
Pickup on South Street (1953, Fuller)
Night and the City (1950, Dassin)
Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston)
Where the Sidewalk Ends/Kiss of Death/The Dark Corner (1950, Preminger/1947, Hathaway/1946, Hathaway)
Unfaithfully Yours/Palm Beach Story (1948, Sturges/1942, Sturges)
The Killers (1946, Siodmak)
Laura (1944, Preminger)
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell and Pressburger)
Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, Ford)
King Kong (1933, Cooper and Schoedsack)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Juno (2007, J. Reitman)
The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Anderson)
Eastern Promises (2007, Cronenberg)
Rocket Science (2007, Blitz)
The Simpsons Movie (2007, Silverman)
Live Free or Die Hard (2007, Wiseman)
Rescue Dawn (2007, Herzog)
Knocked Up (2007, Apatow)
Hot Fuzz (2007, Wright)
Grindhouse (2007, Rodriguez and Tarantino)
Zodiac (2007, Fincher)
Black Book (2006, Verhoeven)
The Lives of Others (2006, Henckel von Donnersmarck)
The Queen (2006, Frears)
Marie Antoinette (2006, S. Coppolla)
Casino Royale (2006, Campbell)
A Scanner Darkly (2006, Russell)
The Proposition (2006, Hillcoat)
V for Vendetta (2006, McTeigue)
Find Me Guilty (2006, Lumet)
The Road to Guantanamo (2006, Winterbottom)
Hostel (2006, Roth)
Caché (2005, Haneke)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005, Black)
13 (Tzameti) (2005, Babluani)
Brokeback Mountain (2005, Lee)
Good Night, and Good Luck.(2005, Clooney)
A History of Violence (2005, Cronenberg)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, Gibney)
Broken Flowers (2005, Jarmusch)
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005, Greenwald)
The King (2005, Marsh)
Sin City (2005, Rodriguez)
Star Wars: Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (2005, Lucas)
Howl's Moving Castle (2004, Miyazaki)
The Aviator (2004, Scorsese)
Undertow (2004, D. Green)
Bad Education (2004, Almoldovar)
Survive Style 5+ (2004, Sekiguchi)
Sideways (2004, Payne)
Closer (2004, Nichols)
A Very Long Engagement (2004, Jeunet)
I Heart Huckabees (2004, Russell)
Friday Night Lights (2004, Berg)
Cafe Lumiere (2003, Hou)
Fear and Trembling (2003, Corneau)
Memories of Murder (2003, Bong)
The Man Who Copied (2003, Furtado)
I'm Not Scared (2003, Salvatores)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring (2003, K. Kim)
Overnight (2003, Montana and Smith)
Funny Ha Ha (2002, Bujalski)
Donnie Darko: Director's Cut (2001, Kelly)
The Isle (2000, K. Kim)
Fresh Bait (1995, Tavernier)
Cemetary Man (1994, Saovi)
Cronos (1993, Del Toro)
Trauma (1993, Argento)
My Own Private Idaho (1991, Van Sant)
Naked Lunch (1991, Cronenberg)
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990, Stoppard)
Metropolitan (1990, Stillman)
Rumble Fish (1983, F. F. Coppola)
Southern Comfort (1981, Hill)
Cutter's Way (1981, Passer)
Thief (1981, Mann)
Bad Timing (1980, Roeg)
The Driver (1978, Hill)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, Roeg)
The Laughing Policeman (1973, Rosenberg)
Sisters (1973, De Palma)
Prime Cut (1972, Ritchie)
Winter Soldier (1972)
Hunger (1966, Carlsen)
Jigoku (1960, Nakagawa)
Elevator to the Gallows (1958, Malle)
House of Bamboo/The Street With No Name (1955, Fuller/1948, Keighley)
Clash by Night (1952, Lang)
The Man in the White Suit (1951, Mackendrick)
Born to Kill (1947, Wise)
Lifeboat (1944, Hitchcock)
Fury (1936, Lang)
Hands Across the Table (1935, Leisen)
I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932, LeRoy)

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Superbad (2007, Mottola)
3:10 to Yuma (2007, Mangold)
1408 (2007, Håfström)
Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007, Story)
Blades of Glory (2007, Gordon and Speck)
Little Children (2006, Field)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006, Del Toro)
Babel (2006, Innaritu)
The Prestige (2006, Nolan)
The Black Dahlia (2006, De Palma)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Dayton and Farris)
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006, McKay)
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006, Verbinski)
An Inconvenient Truth (2006, Guggenheim)
Accepted (2006, Pink)
The Break-Up (2006, Reed)
Running Scared (2006, Kramer)
Underworld: Evolution (2006, Wiseman)
Slither (2006, Gunn)
Inside Man/CSA (2006, Lee/2004, Willmott)
Lemming (2005, Moll)
Edmond (2005, Gordon)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005, Burton)
The Matador/The Libertine (2005, Shepard/2004, Dunmore)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005, Jones)
Capote (2005, Miller)
The Squid and the Whale (2005, Baumbach)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005, Newell)
Pride and Prejudice (2005, Wright)
Walk the Line (2005, Mangold)
The Aristocrats (2005, Jilette and Provenza)
Thumbsucker (2005, Mills)
Junebug (2005, Morrison)
Hustle & Flow (2005, Brewer)
Red Eye (2005, Craven)
The Wedding Crashers (2005, Dobkin)
War of the Worlds (2005, Spielberg)
Lady Vengeance (2005, C. Park)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005, July)
Devil's Rejects (2005, Zombie)
Land of the Dead (2005, Romero)
Constantine (2005, Lawrence)
Palindromes (2005, Solondz)
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic (2005, Lynch)
The Descent/Let's Scare Jessica to Death (2005, N. Marshall/1971, Hancock)
The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005, Apatow)
2046 (2004, Wong)
Downfall (2004, Hirschbiegel)
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004, Silberling)
Steamboy (2004, Otomo)
Creep (2004, C. Smith)
Izo/Quintet/Demon Seed (2004/1979/1977, Miike/Altman/Cannell)
Hotel Rwanda (2004, George)
The Woodsman (2004, Kassell)
Primer (2004, Carruth)
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004, Conran)
Ocean's Twelve (2004, Soderbergh)
Saw (2004, Wan)
Vera Drake (2004, Leigh)
The Brown Bunny (2003, Gallo)
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, J. Kim)
Rounders (1998, Dahl)
The Eel (1997, Imamura)
The Frighteners: Director's Cut (1996, Jackson)
Bugsy (1991, Levinson)
Cape Fear (1991, Scorsese)
Casualties of War (1989, De Palma)
Year of the Dragon (1985, Cimino)
The Big Red One (1981, Fuller)
Three Days of the Condor (1975, Pollack)
Viva Maria (1965, Malle)
Warlock (1959, Dmytryk)
Seven Men From Now (1956, Boetticher)
Panic in the Streets (1950, Kazan)
Call Northside 777 (1948, Hathaway)
Possessed (1947, Bernhardt)

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007, Greengrass)
The Science of Sleep (2006, Gondry)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend (2006, I. Reitman)
World Trade Center (2006, Stone)
The Devil Wears Prada (2006, Frankel)
Idlewild (2006, Barber)
Miami Vice (2006, Mann)
Mission: Impossible III (2006, Abrams)
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006, Ratner)
16 Blocks (2006, Donner)
Silent Hill (2006, Gans)
Tsotsi (2005, Hood)
Syriana (2005, Gaghan)
The Notorious Bettie Page (2005, Harron)
Hard Candy (2005, Slade)
Aeon Flux (2005, Kusama)
Ellie Parker/Pray (2005, Coffey/2005, Sato)
Wolf Creek (2005, McLean)
King Kong (2005, Jackson)
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, R. Marshall)
Jarhead (2005, Mendes)
The Ice Harvest (2005, Ramis)
North Country (2005, Caro)
Separate Lies (2005, Fellowes)
The Weather Man (2005, Verbinski)
Wallace and Gromit in Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005, N. Park)
Oliver Twist (2005, Polanski)
The Island (2005, Bay)
The Constant Gardener (2005, Meirelles)
Inside Deep Throat (2005, Bailey and Barbato)
Bubble (2005, Soderbergh)
Kingdom of Heaven (2005, R. Scott)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005, Jennings)
Melinda and Melinda (2004, Allen)
The Machinist (2004, B. Anderson)
Kung Fu Hustle (2004, Chow)
Team America: World Police (2004, Parker)
Kinsey (2004, Condon)
National Treasure (2004, Turteltaub)
Enduring Love (2004, Michell)
Meet the Fockers (2004, Roach)
Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004, Kang)
The Last Shot (2004, Nathanson)
The Life Aquatic (2004, W. Anderson)
Million Dollar Baby (2004, Eastwood)
Modern Romance (1981, A. Brooks)
Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972, Gibson)
The Cincinnati Kid (1965, Jewison)
High Sierra (1941, Walsh)
Gunga Din (1939, Stevens)

PROCEED WITH EXTREME CAUTION

Michael Clayton (2007, Gilroy)
The Kingdom (2007, Berg)
Stardust (2007, Vaughn)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007, Verbinski)
Spider-Man 3 (2007, Raimi)
All the King's Men (2006, Zaillian)
Tideland (2006, Gilliam)
Clerks II (2006, K. Smith)
The Da Vinci Code (2006, Howard)
Cars (2006, Lasseter)
The Omen/Feast (2006, Moore/2005, Gulager)
The Hills Have Eyes (2006, Aja)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006, Lin)
An American Haunting (2005, Solomon)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (2005, Adamson)
Brick(2005, R. Johnson)
Derailed (2005, Hafstrom)
Mirrormask (2005, McKean)
The Brothers Grimm (2005, Gilliam)
Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005, Burton and Johnson)
The Bad News Bears (2005, Linklater)
Pretty Persuasion (2005, Siega)
Fantastic Four (2005, Story)
Havoc (2005, Kopple)
March of the Penguins (2005, Jacquet)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005, Liman)
Bewitched (2005, Ephron)
Kicking and Screaming (2005, Dylan)
The Amityville Horror (2005, Douglas)
Sahara (2005, Eisner)
The Ring Two (2005, Nakata)
The Great New Wonderful (2005, Leiner)
The Interpreter (2005, Pollack)
Hostage (2005, Siri)
Cursed (2005, Craven)
The Jacket (2005, Maybury)
White Noise (2005, Sax)
In Good Company (2004, Weitz)
Beyond the Sea (2004, Spacey)
Eros (2004; Wong, Soderbergh and Antonioni)
Layer Cake (2004, Vaughn)
Spanglish (2004, J. Brooks)
The Toolbox Murders (2004, Hooper)
Alien vs. Predator (2004, P. W. S. Anderson)
The Forgotten (2004, Ruben)
Alexander: Director's Cut (2004, Stone)
Dark Water (2002, Nakata)
Wise Guys (1986, De Palma)
Equinox (1970, Muren and Woods)

BRAFFSTERPIECES

Southland Tales (2007, Kelly)
Transformers (2007, Bay)
300 (2007, Snyder)
Lady in the Water (2006, Shyamalan)
Superman Returns (2006, Singer)
Scoop (2006, Allen)
Thank You For Smoking(2006, J. Reitman)
Lucky Number Slevin(2006, McGuigan)
Basic Instinct 2(2006, Caton-Jones)
United 93(2006, Greengrass)
Friends With Money(2006, Holofcener)
Nacho Libre (2006, Hess)
The Wicker Man (2006, LaBute)
The Sentinel(2006, C. Johnson)
Freedomland/Date Movie (2006, Roth/2006, Seltzer)
Poseidon(2006, Peterson)
When a Stranger Calls/The Ringer (2006, West/2005, Blaustein)
A Sound of Thunder (2005, Hyams)
Serenity (2005, Whedon)
Beowulf and Grendel (2005, Gunnarsson)
XXX: State of the Union (2005, Tamahori)
Daltry Calhoun (2005, Bronson)
Elizabethtown (2005, Crowe)
Flightplan (2005, Schwentke)
Rumor Has It (2005, Reiner)
Cinderella Man (2005, Howard)
Lord of War (2005, Niccol)
Domino (2005, T. Scott)
Crash (2005, Haggis)
Bloodrayne (2005, Boll)
The Producers (2005, Stroman)
The Polar Express (2004, Zemeckis)
Mindhunters (2004, Harlin)
Exorcist: The Beginning (2004, Harlin)
Ray (2004, Hackford)
Finding Neverland (2004, Forster)
Blade: Trinity (2004, Goyer)
Suspect Zero (2004, Merhige)
High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story (2003, Vidmer)
The Duchess and The Dirtwater Fox (1976, Frank)
The Magus (1968, G. Green)