- a few "dishonest "clips (as Jeff Wells calls them) of a nude Natalie Portman being tortured  in Milos Forman's Goya's Ghost. Not my cup of tea but if you...I know, I know, it's exactly my cup of tea.

- Matt Zoller Seitz has an excellent piece on Lionel Rogosin's 1956 movie On the Bowery. The drinking life has never looked so beautiful: This isn't documentary filmmaking; it's closer to the jaggedly dynamic, high contrast black-and-white dramas that would later become di rigeur in the mid-1960s -- films such as John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages and Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker, which were equally influenced by the French New Wave films, live TV dramas and theatrical newsreels.

- on a political note, I am thrilled to death with the Edwards family and their beyond brave candicacy for the Presidency. God bless you!