It's bad enough that the first team to lock a spot in the playoffs is the freaking Yankees. I mean, with news like that, what else could go wrong? Oh, how about a seventieth anniversary rerelease of The Wizard of Oz, in theaters for one night only and I didn't know about it until it was too late for me to go. I don't know that I've ever been quite as sad about anything as I am about this missed chance for big-screen Ozzy goodness. Ozzy goodness?I really wish showing old movies in theaters was a standard practice. Yeah, I realize what with the home video market and the fact that nobody except me watches old movies anymore anyway, there probably isn't a lot of profit in running regular revivals down at the multiplex. But I don't care! This is about me, and I want to see movies in the theater, dammit! Who doesn't want to see Gregg Toland's breathtaking cinematography for Citizen Kane up on a giant screen where it belongs? Who wouldn't want to get lost in the lush Technicolor glory of the dances in Singin' in the Rain? Come on, people! That stuff would be friggin' great! But I'm not exactly ...

In the documentary that comes with the Jaws DVD, Steven Spielberg tells a story about the construction of the scene where the shark first pops out of the water. He wanted to first have the audience laughing, so they'd be totally off their guard when the scare came. Thus, Roy Scheider as Chief Brody delivers those immortal words: "I can go slow ahead. Why don't you come down here and chum some of this shit?" Then, KAPOW, shark. As Spielberg explains, in the more innocent cinematic times of the mid 1970s, saying "shit" was an easy laugh. Nowadays, alas, with our anything goes ways, shit doesn't even make us crack a smile. But I don't think that's quite true. Even today, shit's an underused word. Sure, we say basically anything we want in movies now, but as a result we tend to go right for the Big Bad Word, blowing straight past Shit Towne in our headlong rush to Fuck City. Sure, using it like in Jaws, in the context of "some of this shit," may not make us laugh anymore. But let's look at some other examples from Spielberg's other work. Take Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That was almost ten years after ...

This may seem odd coming from someone who ostensibly writes a website about movies (though I manage pretty handily to never actually talk about movies), but I don't even like movies anymore. I mean, have you seen some of the movies out there? They suck! Every trailer you see is for a picture full of loud noises and no shots that last longer than 2.8 seconds and unconvincing digital effects and even, saints preserve us, Will Ferrell. Okay, you see about two trailers a year for movies that aren't like that, but those movies are always about self-consciously quirky characters trying desperately hard to convince you how ironic and hip they are and have long titles like Millie and Gaspar and the Blue Ocean Rhumba and ugly posters that look like they were drawn by fifth grade girls who got bored during social studies. They cost millions of dollars and spend every last one making it look like they didn't spend any, which raises the question: if you wanted to make it look like you didn't spend any money, why didn't you just not make a movie. I do that all the time, and it doesn't cost me a dime! My favorite ...

I wouldn't like it to be said that I, as fifty percent of the staff here at Melted Reel, don't care about protecting the environment. I don't, of course, but I wouldn't like it to be said. Lots of times I hear environmentalists talking about deforestation, and what a terrible thing it is. But I just can't understand what they're getting at. See for yourself: He's awesome, Jim How could anything that increases the supply of Deforest Kelley be bad?