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Popdose presents "Our Favorite Singles of the Last 50 Years". Well, no one asked the movie guy for his picks, but they did let me comment on two, which have generated a little commentary of their own. A diverting list for holidays consumption.

Another list: Cahiers du Cinema's Top 100 films. It's in French, but you'll get the gist. No. 1 is pictured.

Everything you wanted to know about the director of 1959's Teenagers from Outer Space, including, "What was Teenagers from Outer Space?" Tom Graeff was a compelling personality beyond his toehold in cultdom.

Science fiction into science fact: Ray guns debut in Iraq. But it's not really a ray gun unless it melts your face.

Michael Crichton rolls over in his grave. Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park?

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Olivia de Havilland, Stan Lee, and the Sherman Brothers are medalists. The 92-year-old de Havilland adds to her two Oscars.

(No honors for this blogger as he cranks out his 501st post, by the way--which sounds impressive, till I add that my blogging friends turn out 500 communiques before breakfast.)

Bond breaks records, Cashill sits it out. Sorry, James--baby (not babe) to take care of. We'll catch up over Thanksgiving.

Something I'll likely just read about: A Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute to the late critic Manny Farber, ongoing through Nov. 26. Still time to see I Walked with a Zombie, His Girl Friday, and other Farber faves.

The French thriller Tell No One is the biggest foreign-language hit of 2008. Too bad it took two years to cross the pond, and the take is on the low side. But it does show that there's market for genre pictures from other countries, not just prestige titles.

Crummy two-composer score rejected by Academy. Not for reasons of taste or quality, though I would've voted on those grounds. Two + hours of electronic droning equals double trouble. I had the same beef with Batman Begins.

(Reversal of fortune: It's in contention again.)

What I'm screening at my next movie group meeting.

Sneak preview of The Furies:

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The Henry Hewes Design Awards nominees for New York theater have been announced. A good excuse to run another photo from Lincoln Center's glorious South Pacific revival.

Who goes to the New York Film Festival? Not a lot of young folks, though I dispute the author's contention that it's only the rep house mainstays (about which an indie filmmaker recently said, "When I started going to revival screenings, I was 20, and the rest of the audience was 60. When I go now, 20 years later, the rest of the audience is 80"). For one thing, the recently graduated writer has only been going for two years, to a lot of press screenings; it's a different, more age-diverse constituency at the actual audience screenings (I know: I started going at 29, when I was new to New York, and have attended ever since). For another, the rep house bluehairs stick to that much different turf; when this year's entrants turn up at Film Forum in 2028, rouse them. It's nice that he carries the torch but his generation grew up on home video; moviegoing just isn't as ingrained as a habit or a necessity, and certainly not at NYFF prices. The NYFF has always been small and exclusive, its weakness (not every favored auteur should be showcased year in, year out, an issue the committee seems to recognize) and its strength. Unlike Tribeca or other more shapeless gatherings It has its own wavelength and you have to get on it.

The trouble with movie titles. Gigli is a bad title; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, bloody good.

Red and blue: "Red-band" trailers take off at R-rated movies. My virgin ears were burning at the red-band Step Brothers preview before Wanted, my eyes more dismayed at the sea of toddlers whose parents had taken them there.

Negative buzz on Howard Shore's opera of The Fly, directed by David Cronenberg and with a libretto by M. Butterfly's David Henry Hwang, but my antennae are still up about it.

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I agree with Armond White that David Lean, the subject of a retrospective at Film Forum starting this Friday, is underrated. I disagree that it's because Michael Powell is more highly valued by critics (a typical White tactic, slamming one filmmaker while saluting another), and I don't think Lean's films with wife Ann Todd were all that terrific (they didn't bring out the best in one another). It's that the big films on his resume, from River Kwai on, overshadow the more modest ones and have become overly familiar, and the smaller accomplishments are finally getting more of their turn to shine.

A history of wishful New York destruction scenarios, timed for the real-life tragedy commemorated tomorrow.

What's "Filming in Brooklyn"? Just click. Muppets in Park Slope!

Rain Man on the West End with Josh Hartnett (no foolin'), and more screen-to-stage adaptations in London, including Lean's Brief Encounter. Can a Lawrence of Arabia musical be far off?

Baltimore and Philadelphia feud over Edgar Allan Poe's bodily remains and artistic legacy. I can say that the Poe House in Charm City is in a neighborhood that's kind of scary.

Obama didn't say it, but I'll say it: John McCain tapping Sarah Palin as his VP pick is like putting lipstick on a pig.

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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.

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National Lampoon's Animal House turned 30 three weeks ago, and I missed it. (Must be another attack of CRAFT--Can't Remember a Fucking Thing--Syndrome.) It was the first R-rated movie I saw. Dad took me. I subsequently watched it roughly 800 times on HBO.

Bigfoot remains a mystery. And that is how it should be; no one should really "solve" UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, etc. We need strange magic in the world. (Anyway, no actual Bigfoot could live up to my memory of the creature from The Six Million Dollar Man, where Andre the Giant and Ted Cassidy stepped into his shoes in separate episodes.)

I'm humbled to admit I've read more about the late critic Manny Farber than I've actually read him. These reminiscences encourage me to get up to speed.

Always nice to hear from Robin Wood, Canadian critic and author of one of my favorite volumes, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, which changed my thinking on pariah films like Heaven's Gate, Cruising, and the more obscure Eyes of a Stranger, a movie maybe after Farber's heart. Here he picks his fave Criterion DVDs.

And a happy third anniversary today that thank God I did not forget.

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Announcing the full lineup of the New York Film Festival. I've seen Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, with the radiant Sally Hawkins as an ever-chipper schoolteacher (pictured).

As the summer movie season winds down Salon is a little late with an essay on "blockbuster fatigue". Like, maybe 15 years late, as relentless torrents of CGI replaced wit, emotion, and simple imagination in would-be crowdpleasers.

An uncut Psycho is found abroad. Will Gus Vant Sant have to redo his, too?

The misadventures of a subtitler in Europe are recounted. Porn is involved.

Are you a dyed-in-the-wool cinephile? If so, you probably have to catch a screening and have no time to read this.