I’m look­ing for­ward to James Cameron’s Avatar just like every­one else. But when I saw this photo on a Drudge Report head­line about the film, I got a lit­tle upset. Photo by John Shearer, Getty Images, 2009 Is that per­son in the aisle seat of the sec­ond row video­tap­ing the movie off the screen? Am I the only one who sees this? Never ever ever video­tape a movie in the the­ater. That’s called steal­ing, and it’s wrong. Never ever ever encour­age this kind of behav­ior by down­load­ing movies off the Inter­net. That’s steal­ing too, and just as wrong. As for the guy with the pizza, I’m going to assume [ . . . ]

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Spoil­ers. I did take time out of my absurd sched­ule to go see Harry Pot­ter & the Half-​​​​Blood Prince at mid­night on Wednes­day. Which reminds me how irri­tat­ing it is when I go buy a ticket for “12:00am Tues­day” for a 12:00am Wednes­day show­ing. That peo­ple and movie the­atres can­not fig­ure out the mid­night thing con­fuses and infu­ri­ates me. I know movie the­atres count mid­night show­ings as part of the busi­ness day pre­ced­ing, but one would think that in today’s glo­ri­ous age of fancy com­put­ers tick­et­ing and rev­enue soft­ware could be pro­grammed to han­dle this crap in a more sen­si­ble way. The movie. Hm. Look­ing for [ . . . ]

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Spoil­ers, as usual. The sum and sub­stance of my Indy IV expe­ri­ence con­sisted of me repeat­edly chant­ing at the screen: Please don’t let it be aliens! Please don’t let it be aliens! Please don’t let it be aliens! Guess what? It was aliens. Each of the first three films had a super­nat­ural element–The Ark melted Belloq’s face, the Shankara Stones burned through Indy’s WWII Mark VII British gas mask bag, and the Holy Grail healed Dr. Jones, Sr.‘s gun­shot wound. But these were all ambigu­ous. There was a lit­tle bit of magic, but it wasn’t explained. It was almost an after­thought, added to [ . . . ]

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Some movies just aren’t avail­able in any other for­mat. I once had a room­mate who had a large col­lec­tion of movies on laserdisc that were either unavail­able on DVD or were oth­er­wise greatly supe­rior to the DVD ver­sions. Among them was The Cheap Detec­tive, writ­ten by Neil Simon and star­ring Peter Falk, Made­line Kahn, Eileen Bren­nan, Stockard Chan­ning, Sid Ceasar, Dom DeLuise, Abe Vigoda, and a half-​​​​score of oth­ers in a WWII detec­tive spoof. It is one of those come­dies, for which Simon had a pen­chant, that was able to pull off absur­dity with­out devolv­ing into farce. I actu­ally like it bet­ter than its more-​​​​popular pre­de­ces­sor, Mur­der [ . . . ]

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