Reads

Countdown: The 25 best L.A. films of the last quarter-century. These lists are always kind of arbitrary, and typically lazy, but readers online and off seem to love them. Two questions: Where's 1983's Blue Thunder, with its terrific aerial views of the city, or 1984's Body Double (pictured) or 1990's The Grifters, L.A. as low as it can go? How about the fantastic (if admittedly little seen) documentary L.A. Plays Itself? And doesn't the L.A. Times have a better still library at its disposal or did its publisher get rid of that, too?

Another one, what the hell, on shameless product plugs in movies. Hey, who knew Cracked was still around?

"Thunder Throat" is silenced. I liked his style (if not as much as Adolph Caesar's) and his self-parodying Geico ads, but the studios leaned on his increasingly lazy writing too much, making movie trailers enervating to sit through.

Turner Classic Movies gets out the vote this month with a nice caucus of politically oriented pictures airing Wednesday nights. Tonight: Spencer Tracy in The Last Hurrah, Lee Tracy in The Best Man, and The Candidate and Nashville, too.

Here's something I can relate to (and have blogged about in the past): DVD Savant deals with the attack of the ever-expanding collection. My seven-year-old cabinets are groaning.