For your consideration — "Olives for the martini" edition

Jim Emerson rebuts the premise behind Slate's Hollywood Career-O-Matic.

filmlinc: The Coen Brothers with Noah Baumbauch: Where and How to Begin a Film?

A.O. Scott: Ushering In Golden Age for Fans of Film — "And yet if we take off our rose-colored glasses and look around at the city and its screens, a different picture emerges, with startling vividness. The golden age of New York moviegoing is now."

streamingcriterions.com: Streaming Criterions is a self-updating list of all the Criterion films that are available to view via Netflix Instant Streaming. The site updates itself to reflect any recent changes made by Netflix, and also reflect any new movies being added to the Criterion Collection.

/Film: 70 Years Later, 'Citizen Kane' Coming to Blu-ray — "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: The Frame Within the Frame series

The New Yorker: Show the Monster — Guillermo del Toro’s quest to get amazing creatures onscreen

Brandon Watson at Sirius: Paradox of Fiction — "We human beings read, watch, and listen to a lot of fiction. We know that it is fiction. But we have emotional responses and attachments to the characters. So, according to Colin Radford, who first put it forward, this shows that there's something incoherent in our emotional responses: we feel for things we know don't exist."

J.L. Wall furthers that discussion: "We empathize with fictional beings not despite their unreality, but because of their possible reality."

Michael Caine Talks Like This

audible.com: Samuel L. Jackson reads Adam Mansbach's Go the Fuck to Sleep — As indicated by his intro before the reading, Jackson delivers it with the élan of a father who's been exactly there. Currently it's a free download. It's also up on YouTube here. Also also, via indiewire: Werner Herzog Tells Kids to "Go the F**k to Sleep" Tonight at New York Public Library New York Public Library, which likewise got YouTubed here.

Blastr: How the Thor movie REALLY should have ended

UCLA Film & Television Archive: Laurel & Hardy preservation effort and Another Fine Mess: Laurel & Hardy's Legacy

tumblr: Rory Williams is the new Chuck Norris. More at Reddit. — Doctor Who high neepery. (Spoilers.)

Jewcy.com: Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, nominates a moment when America got hip to the Jews: it's when M.A.S.H director Robert Altman cast Elliott Gould (with Jewfro and handlebar mustache) as Trapper John (a football hero from Dartmouth):

You read the coverage of Gould at the time—it’s all about how he's a Brooklynite, how he’s a street kid—but that’s not what the movies are telling you. The movies are telling you that in the better America we are now inhabiting—and in which we get to rewrite the history of the Korean war and redo Raymond Chandler—Elliott Gould is an American. Brooklyn born, but American. That America is, in its coolest and freest and most aristocratic stratum, maybe partly or secretly Jewish.

It all comes together in that first scene where Elliott Gould reaches into his army parka, pulls out an olive jar, and drops two olives into his martini. What’s that line? "A man can't really savor his martini without an olive."  Those olives put the mix back in mixology. They're miscegenating olives. In interviews Altman liked to pretend that he himself was "half-Jewish." He was a philo-semi-Semite.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Via The New Yorker