Hmmm, farrow is really not the same thing as furrow, which is what I was trying for. However, I think I'll let it stand for now....

I've not been into the premium channel thread, but I figured they both knew it was there, therefore reminding isn't exactly the word.

Topic drift. Happens. All the time here. If it's going to start being a problem, the landscape is definitely shifting.

plowing the same tired old farrow

Mia Farrow. On topic! (ding ding ding)

Go Raq!

Anyone else looking forward to Hollywoodland? I am a sucker for Old Hollywood stuff. I hope it is good, I have been avoiding reviews, since I knew I was seeing it no matter what.

What I'd like is to see a movie dealing with the William Desmond Taylor murder in 1922. Early Hollywood, successful director murdered, studio coverup--it just screams Good Cinema!

I'm looking forward to it, Raq. I want to see Black Dahlia too, but it's not something to get me running to the theater at the moment.

Yeah, that's a great story. Also Paul Bern's suicide would make a terrific film.

Anyone else looking forward to Hollywoodland?

I am, in the sense that I think it'll be very interesting and I hope I make it out to the theater to see it but I'll probably have to Netflix it. I suck.

I put The Matrix on the other night while I was tidying up (does anyone else do that? Put movies on instead of music?), and I was struck by how outmoded the technology looks in the first shot of Neo. Beige CRT monitor (instead of a black flatscreen), stacks of CDs (instead of a mp3 player or earbuds going into the computer), minidiscs, the search engine on his machine.... I know not everyone has a flatscreen or mp3, but I remember how very now everything was when it was released. Which was the point - 1999 as Golden Age. But I couldn't help mentally substituting things in. Not much of a point, except to note cyberpunk's limitation in trying to portray cutting-edge and futuretech - it always gets outstripped.

does anyone else do that? Put movies on instead of music?

One of my favorite things to do when I get my full-on-must-clean-everything-now!-mode is to pop in my dvd of Branagh's Henry V, recite the opening monologue along with Derek Jacobi ("O for a muse of fire / that would ascend / the brightest heaven of invention..."), and then start cleaning.

I was just looking up the Taylor murder info over at the Crime Library, and saw this wonderful summation of why it would make such a great movie:

The case has all of the elements of the unreal world of Hollywood. It has a famous director of silent films shot in the back. It has, among the suspects, a dope-possessed movie star, several sex-crazed female movie stars, a young up-and-coming screen goddess with an insatiable lust for the director, the starlet's monster of a stage mother, hitmen, drug pushers, and the victim's brother. If this were not enough, there's an embezzling chauffeur, a gay housekeeper, charges of gay and bisexual escapades, hysterical and dishonest movie executives, and a district attorney who seemed to want to produce a cover-up.

Place all of these characters in the context of 1920s movie scandals, prohibition, and the raffish characters that made up the movie industry at that time, and you have a story of passion, greed, and, most of all, a very mysterious murder.