Anyway, we got to talking, and he said, "You know, a lot of folks consider the Dude a Zen Master." I said, "What are you talking about? Zen?" He said quite a few people had approached him wanting to chat about the Dude's Zen wisdom. I'd never heard of that.

I never thought of the Coen Brothers as Zen guys. They never talked about it. I don't think the word Zen was ever mentioned, or Buddhism, or Judaism, for that matter.

I don't think of the Dude as a fancy spiritualist or anything like that. But I can see what these folks are talking about. There's enough room in the movie that a lot can be read into it.

For me, the Dude has a certain type of wisdom. I like to call it the "Wisdom of Fingernails": the wisdom that gives you the ability to make your hair and fingernails grow, your heart beat, your bowels move.

These are things that we know how to do, but we don't necessarily know how we know how to do them, yet still we do them very well. And that to me is very Dude.   more »

Opening with a salvo of blow jobs, critics previewing ITV's Belle de Jour adaptation, The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, noted that if the first ten minutes of the show were anything to go by, Billie Piper would be performing fellatio every 3.3 minutes.

The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is one of several shows this year (alongside David Duchovny's Californication) to amp up the frequency of sex scenes in TV drama, but in most cases critics and audiences haven't observed anything more than a jokey or resigned concession to titillation.

And although the sex in Secret Diary ... is probably closer to Benny Hill than Baise Moi, you have to wonder if this is emblematic of an increasing acceptance of sex on TV, paralleling the "new liberalism" in the depiction of sex in art-house and mainstream films.   more »

It's difficult to convey the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office.

Watching him campaign it's pretty clear that the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn't the same as running a national foreign policy.

The people he's coalescing around himself as his foreign policy advisors are the ones who are going to help him learn as he goes.

And they are simply the most dangerous, deranged and deluded folks you can find in American political and foreign policy circles today.

It's really not an exaggeration. Scrape the bottom of the "Global War on Terror" Islamo-fascist nut-basket and you find they've pretty much all signed on as Rudy advisors.   more »

It's an inspired collage, lasting over nine minutes,

composed of tiny movie-clips, with fragments of dialogue,

quoting every number in countdown from 100 to 1

A mind-blowing effort of archive research,

both trivial and monumental at the same time

   more »

Keywords: movie, clip, youtube

The Brave One is far grittier than a standard revenge fantasy with a femme twist, because its subtext is one of the suppression and subsequent explosion of female anger.

It can be read as an analysis of what happens when women refuse to accept fear and take on the idea of fighting actively against deliberate macho intimidation.

Remarkable, too, is the film's insight into what happens to a woman's perception of the world when she has to live with fear every day.

Having been brought by force into an understanding of violence, Foster's character sees New York transformed into a dingy sewer crawling with bad men who always get away with it.   more »