BBC: “Actress Shilpa Shetty has defended Richard Gere after the Hollywood actor sparked protests by kissing her at an Aids awareness rally in New Delhi. Public displays of affection are still largely taboo in India, and protestors in Mumbai (Bombay) set fire to effigies of Gere following the incident.”

The Mumbai protesters have an interesting idea, but they’re doing this for the wrong reason. They should be setting fire to Gere effigies for American Gigolo, Autumn in New York, Pretty Woman, and the remakes of Shall We Dance, Breathless and The Jackal.

Wikipedia’s Worst Films Ever. (via Papa Rory)

Films I’d include: Monsignor (which I caught on a plane last year and which absolutely baffled me in its badness), Urban Legend (the only film that I have walked out on in fury, not owing to audience conditions, during the past ten years), Buz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (the worst Shakespearean adaptation ever made), Hook (the most sentimental of all Spielberg movies), Toys, The Story of Us, Eye of the Beholder (the incomprehensible 1999 Ashley Judd film), and anything from Uwe Boll.

Terrene Rafferty: “But what Altman does in ‘The Long Goodbye’ goes way beyond simply stating the idea that the private eye’s day was over. Instead of trying to correct, or ignore, the creeping vagueness of the landscape in which his lonely hero is a figure, he actually emphasizes those qualities. The images captured by his cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, are as un-noirish as they can be: sun-bleached, unstable, heat-shimmery as mirages. And the camera moves constantly, always slowly, and just enough to keep every shot from settling into anything fixed or too easily readable.” (via Sarah)

I’ve always thought The Long Goodbye to be the most underrated of Altman’s films. Even more so than 3 Women.

Huckabees snafu staged. (via Film Ick)