http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/19/film-taylor.php
The LA Weekly’s review of Sin City. It touches on many of the points we’ve been discussing of late.

i can’t tell if this show is getting more or less ridiculous, but i am compelled to watch.

apparently the west was not the jolly barrel of laughs it was portrayed as being in films such as “paint your wagon” and “blazing saddles”. season 1 established that a lot of people swore then/there, and thanks to season 2 i know that doctors did not use much anaesthesia. but where exactly is all the laundry being done? the people on this show are done up better than on masterpiece theater. perhaps season 3 will clear this up.

did you lot read this article in the ny times about the new hollywood comedy power brokers?

Mr. Ferrell, Mr. Apatow and Ben Stiller are among the club’s kingpins. Mr. McKay, Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Vince Vaughn and Jack Black belong, as do Nick Stevens, a United Talent agent who represents Mr. Carrey and Mr. Stiller, and Mr. Gold and Mr. Miller, who have much of the group in their stable.

The funnymen appear in one another’s movies, from “Dodgeball” to “Anchorman” to “Elf” to “Zoolander,” creating a wheel-of-comedy effect that can leave viewers wondering just whose movie they’re watching. What’s more, the stars and their representatives live, work and play in a continuum that has virtually shut the studios out of the development process. By coming up with their own concepts, finding screenwriters and then offering the whole package for production - script, director and cast, take it or leave it - this group is reshaping screen humor to their liking.

whatever happened to janeane garofalo and sarah silverman?

Under the Scorsese post, I was going to bring up Richard Price (who wrote the “NY Stories” segment directed by Marty, whom I call Marty). Price is a helluva novelist and an equally strong screenwriter, although the stuff he’s done tends toward the better B-movie genres and thus gets too little acclaim. (”Ransom,” for instance, despite workaday direction by little Ronnie Howard, gives Delroy Lindo and Gary Sinise and even Mel Gibson some great gristly chatter.)

There are a couple screenwriters or scripts which get the nod–they get bandied about in the trades, ballyhooed on awards show; it’s conceivable that they, too, are for better or worse celebrities in the star machine. Kaufman, the delightfully execrable Joe Eszterhas, etc.

But who are the unsung heroes of film writing? One of the reasons I love “After Hours” is its astonishingly precise and pitch-perfect script, by Joseph Minion. (I actually do searches trying to see what he’s done since–and it’s pretty hit or miss. Although the most recent flick he wrote, “On the Run,” has two great performances by Michael Imperioli and, especially, John Ventimiglia, who plays Artie Bucco on “The Sopranos.”) UNSUNG, now–don’t say John Sayles or Preston Sturges.

And speaking of unsung, I should add Delroy Lindo to my post on presences, or just give him his own heading. He is particularly astonishing in “Crooklyn,” “Clockers,” and even salvages some of “A Life Less Ordinary.”

i’ll say for the last time: i don’t dislike “after hours”; i would just put these films above it:

“king of comedy”–my favorite scorcese
“taxi driver”
“raging bull”
“mean streets”
“gangs of new york”–pete, sunhee and i saw this together and we all loved it.