Stepped out of the game for what was going to be a minute and turned into four months - four months in which I never visited the Lightbox, rarely went to the movies at all, and sat on the sidelines while the whole world flipped on its back like a drunken sea turtle. And then I went to New Zealand, and had one of the best moviegoing experiences of my whole life. And then I came back, and then the Substream died and then Ebert died, and absent an outlet or even a clear sense of what I’m doing, I’m a writer sorely in need of a content strategy; until then, though, there’s always the blog, and Watched, and here we are.

Matt Price drops by the Lightbox to drop some learnin’ on ya about the career of John Williams, up for the Oscar for Best Original Score for LINCOLN. He’s a Very Important Dude In Film History.

I saw The Birds the week before last, and had Hitchcock bearing down on me, so I figured I’d better hunker down and watch The Girl – though now, more than anything, I just want to watch Marnie, and am kicking myself for not seeing it at the Lightbox last year. (Though: really, Lightbox: why not a return engagement, given Bond fever? Seems like a missed opportunity.) The Girl isn’t a particularly great film, as can be generally expected whenever the brief is to make a Hitchcockian biopic about a Hitchcock subject. (Wait’ll someone gets it into his head to do the definitive Steven Spielberg biopic.) I’m also not a huge fan of Sienna Miller, who plays Tippi Hedren, though I must admit the film develops a lurid sense of grotty pleasure as it goes along – the best word I could use to describe The Girl is “unseemly.” It’s hardly high suspense, but decent trash, perverse enough to stick. “The gulls are the people, you see,” Toby Jones’ Hitchcock says with exactly the right congestion of wattle-flesh in his frog-like purr, “and she is the bird.” The film does an able job of presenting HItchcock as a loathsome creature, and then wondering what it would feel like to have sexual desires peering out from within his blubberous bulk. Cheap shot, but marginally effective.

My lady is off circling the globe in search of documentaries for YOU fine people, so I’ve taken it upon myself to try to drive to the bottom of the slushpile - that inevitable stack of DVDs that accumulates over time, which one has purchased, but not yet watched. I started with Harold & Maude, which I’ve seen once before but wanted to revisit immediately, and was released by Criterion earlier this year. It’s the film that Wes Anderson has been patiently trying to make throughout his entire career, and it is one of the rare films that is downright painful to watch – because each and every scene so completely overachieves what you expect of it at the outset that the film as a whole makes one feel quite completely incompetent, creatively speaking. I can’t imagine a better-written script; but then, I can’t imagine a better-exploited script, either, with every supporting performance arriving note-perfectly, and each visual gag, from the very large (Harold’s death scenes) to the abjectly trivial provoking a large-scale guffaw. The… tentativeness… with which Harold puts his head into the giant wooden vagina! How does one even conceive that?!

I somehow neglected to steal the golden gun. #designing007

They were a weak 2-egg benny two years ago; what the hell happened? I get a heaping plate of surprise when I pop back to the Canteen this week!

The Skyfall countdown continues as the TIFF Bell Lightbox opens Bond up in a big way, and half of Mamo reports on the outcome of the six-film Bond vs. Blofeld overnight marathon – a conversation which transitions surprisingly easy into our thoughts on the release of Cloud Atlas, and the battle lines thereto – currently forming in moviegoing circles around the globe.

In which a heartily tired Matt Brown and Matt Price return to the Lightbox four days after TIFF, and try to sort their shit out. BOBA FETT HOODIE.

Now playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Turn Me On Goddammit is a Norwegian flick about a supremely horny girl. My review has just been posted to The Substream.