AICN’s Harry Knowles, whose favorite movie of 2008 is Let the Right One In -- a Swedish film – thinks that the rules for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award are broken (and I agree):

[B]ecause its country of origin didn’t offer it up as the film representing its country, it will not even be considered for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, which at the very least… it is. This is why that award in the Academy Awards is broken. When you depend upon a host nation to offer up a film for consideration for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, you are forced to consider only the films that the nation in question feels artistically represent their country. As a result, films critical of their current country’s policies and politics - won’t be offered up.

I haven’t seen LTROI yet, but I’ve heard excellent things.

AICN’s Harry Knowles, whose favorite movie of 2008 is Let the Right One In – a Swedish film – thinks that the rules for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award are broken (and I agree):

[B]ecause its country of origin didn’t offer it up as the film representing its country, it will not even be considered for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, which at the very least… it is. This is why that award in the Academy Awards is broken. When you depend upon a host nation to offer up a film for consideration for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM, you are forced to consider only the films that the nation in question feels artistically represent their country. As a result, films critical of their current country’s policies and politics - won’t be offered up.

I haven’t seen LTROI yet, but I’ve heard excellent things.

If you were jumping over a highway median while smoking a cigarette and brandishing a handgun towards a bunch of cops, following an armed robbery and a high-speed car chase, I’m pretty sure you couldn’t look more badass than this. Of course, you’d also get shot and arrested. (via reddit)

This came up during a recent game of Trivial Pursuit (from memory): “How many of the 14 lines of David Shulman’s sonnet ‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ are anagrams of the title?” The answer? 14. Yes, it’s a “14-line rhyming sonnet in which every line is an anagram of the title.” Even Douglas Hofstadter is impressed.

This New Yorker profile on Will Oldham AKA Bonnie “Prince” Billy (who made my #4 album of last year) is an interesting read, and not just because I learned that he played the father of Baby Jessica in the TV movie about her fall into a well. (I had already seen him in John Sayle’s Matewan anyway.) (via @Schenkenberg)

It was very cruel of Kottke to release his Best Links of 2008 feature at the beginning of the first full work week after the Holidays.

Before I’ve had a chance to make a significant dent in 2008’s film offerings, Wired has posted a movie guide to “wild” (read: sci-fi, superhero, and fantasy) upcoming movies in 2009. Some things I’ve read little about before now: Land of the Lost (Brendan Fraser), The Wolfman (Benicio Del Toro), Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.), and G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (Brendan Fraser).

Barack Obama, the 19-year-old model.

The New York Times Magazine has an article that attempts to explain, in layman’s terms, David Foster Wallace’s philosophy thesis from his senior year at Amherst.

A highly specialized, 76-page work of semantics and metaphysics, it is not for the philosophically faint of heart. Brace yourself for a sample sentence: “Let Φ (a physical possibility structure) be a set of distinct but intersecting paths ji–jn, each of which is a set of functions, L’s, on ordered pairs (), such that for any Ln, Lm in some ji, Ln R Lm, where R is a primitive accessibility relation corresponding to physical possibility understood in terms of diachronic physical compatibility.” There are reasons that he’s better known for an essay about a boat.

Until his recent death (but not because of it), the thesis was generally unavailable to the public until this past September.

You’ve likely already seen it, but here’s the Hulu link to Jizz in My Pants. It’s all about the high-quality music production.

The “Green Sahara”:

The Neolithic Subpluvial… was an extended period (from about 7,000 BC to about 3,000 BC) of wet and rainy conditions in the climate history of northern Africa. It was both preceded and followed by much drier periods. The Neolithic Subpluvial was the most recent of a number of periods of “Wet Sahara” or “Green Sahara” during which the region was much moister and supported a richer biota and human population than the present-day desert.

The Big Picture just posted an excellent series of photos of an archeological dig in this area. The giraffe petroglyph is awesome.

Roger Ebert lists his top 20 films and 5 documentaries for 2008, but for the first time (as far as I know) refuses to rank them. I love this line of his regarding Synecdoche, NY :

[A] film that should never be seen unless you’ve already seen it at least once.

Implicit in this statement: The first viewing of this movie is very unpleasant – and it indeed was for me. But now I have an explicit recommendation to see it again.

Roger Ebert lists his top 20 films and 5 documentaries for 2008, but for the first time (as far as I know) refuses to rank them. I love this line of his regarding Synecdoche, NY:

[A] film that should never be seen unless you’ve already seen it at least once.

Implicit in this statement: The first viewing of this movie is very unpleasant – and it indeed was for me. But now I have an explicit recommendation to see it again.

Merely an unusually few years after the publication of his last book, the hefty Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon will be releasing a 421-page new novel in the summer of 2009. It’s titled Inherent Vice and looks sort of like a detective-story spin on The Crying of Lot 49 :

It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

(thx, david h.)

Prop 8 - The Musical, starring Jack Black, Allison Janney, John C. Reilly, and many more. This is quite literally the definition of “singing to the converted” but it’s actually quite succinct.

A video demonstrating what I can only describe as “electronic face dancing.”

A police video camera caught a large meteoroid falling over Edmonton, Canada. Awesome.

Update: News article on the event.