2 + 2 = 5

1) Fellini's 8 1/2

Don't ask me how I made it through film school and 20-odd years as an avid film watcher and had never seen 8 1/2. I don't get it. But this past Sunday I finally saw it and... well, it didn't disappoint. At all. I think the biggest (and pleasant surprise) was Fellini's perverse glee in blurring the line between reality and imagination and the past and the imagined past. And that opening--Guido stuck in traffic, then floating away like a kite--was literally jaw-dropping.

2) Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts by M83.
Mute just released a domestic version of this much-hyped record and I'm totally consumed by it. These Frenchies make huge, expansive pieces of gorgeous music that sound like an amalgam of My Bloody Valentine, Brian Eno, Sigur Ros, Kraftwerk and Walter Murch's sound design for THX-1138. Easily the best album I've heard all year.

3) Robyn Hitchcock in The Manchurian Candidate (2004).
I know I've already blogged about Robyn's role, but I felt like giving the guy props again. Were it not for this weirdo, I probably would have slept through the film.

4) The Team America trailer.
Bring it.

5) The "some people say" montage in Outfoxed.
I found most of Outfoxed pretty redundant (Fox News is right wing? Really? Rupert Murdoch is trippin'? For real?) and kind of shoddy (director Robert Greenwald must have been editing this shit on his Apple IIe), but things really get cooking when the doc brings up Fox News' penchant for throwing in "some people say" into newscasts. It goes like this: Brit Hume wants us all to know that he thinks John Kerry is a flaming French douche bag. But he can't just say that. So he throws the vague qualifier "some people say" into the mix. For example: "That's interesting, Ms. Dowd. But some people say that John Kerry only eats brie cheese and pisses sitting down. Care to comment?" Greenwald finds dozens of these "some people say" moments and strings them together back to back to back. It's simultaneously really sad, funny, and scary.