So much football to discuss but...it's April, so what the hell...

One of the funniest regular person reviews of a movie I ever read was on a thread about Gigli. The dude whose eyes had been violated by that project advised us poor vulnerable souls that "if you had been chased into a movie theater by two cops and beaten with night sticks about the head and body for two hours you still would have had a better time than anyone who paid to watch this piece of crap." This comes very close to summing up my attitude for the last ten years towards seeing movies in theaters: given a chance to escape from two cops with night sticks by ducking into a movie theater, I would choose to take my beating in the street every time.

I do, however, live very close to two movie environments that are among the very best in the world: the 8-story tall iMax on Broadway, and the Walter Reade theaters at Lincoln Center. The first is the most overwhelming total immersion machine I've ever encountered, and the second is a pair of the most immaculately clean, comfortable and perfectly designed movie emporia anywhere that show great, unusual films and best of all, the theaters are usually half full at best.

So I do still go out to see movies now and then, only they happen to be mostly documentaries about deep space or ocean exploration or unfinished dramedies about housing projects in Romania or Chile. This accounts for maybe five or six movies a year.

And as you know, I severed my subscription to cable tv a few weeks ago too.

What I do instead now, reminds me of what I used to do when I was 14 or 15 years old and didn't want to go straight home after school: I would wander into the local public library, which luckily happened to be an extraordinarily progressive one, and grab random books off the shelf that caught my fancy. Nowadays I do the same thing on the internet, whether it's a relatively well-known site like Hulu or one of the many video-streaming addresses I discovered when traveling in Europe and Asia a few years ago. For the most part I don't rely on mainstream reviews or lists to guide me, instead I trust my instincts, as I used to do when I first borrowed books by Turgenev, Brophy or William Carlos Williams oh so many years ago.

I do occasionally watch current releases online, out of curiosity, but the three movies we've discussed here, GT, I have seen in private screenings for audiences of around 20 to 30 people, as a result of my current peculiar work situation. Oh and before I forget again, I wanted to mention that another movie I saw recently in this setting and really enjoyed is Side Effects. As a few reviewers have said, it's the closest thing to a classic Hitchock thriller we've seen in a long time.

But for what it's worth, I thought it might be time to share another couple of half-baked top-ten lists of my recent favorite movies and tv shows, based on the online explorations referred to above. So, here are the titles of some movies I have been watching more than once lately:

Adam's Apples
Kitchen Stories
The Band Trip
The Wind Will Carry Us
The Return (one of the greatest Russian films I've ever seen)
Calamari Union
The Shoe
Der Knockenmann (The Bone Man)
Withnail and I
Do Des Ka Den
Trainspotting

And here are some titles of recent British comedy series, and a couple of US ones, that I have wasted many hours watching online over the last few years. Highly recommended, and you can find many of these on YouTube and TubePlus.me

Pulling
The Thick of It
The Green Wing
Nighty Night
Ideal
Smack the Pony
Weeds
The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman

If it hadn't been for these shows, I would probably have molested a lot more flight attendants than I actually have over the last decade.

Last Edited By: Win80 04/05/13 02:41 AM. Edited 1 times.