SNAKES. I HATE SNAKES: One of the most interesting things about EW's annual Oscar issue is the blow-by-blow recap of the Oscars of 25 years earlier. 1982's was particularly noteworthy for the good (Henry Fonda finally wins his Oscar, the makeup category is instituted) and the bizarre ("Academy Award Nominee Dudley Moore?," "Arthur's Theme" beating out "For Your Eyes Only" and "Endless Love" as "original song"). Most significantly, though, in a year in which Chariots of Fire won Best Picture, with Reds and On Golden Pond being considered the critical and sentimental favorites, respectively, is there any question that Raiders of the Lost Ark (nominated for Picture, Director, and six other Oscars, tying Chariots of Fire by winning four (Sound, Editing, Set Design, and Visual Effects, plus a special award for Sound Effects Editing, not yet a category at that time), is the most enduring film of the year? Spielberg lost to Warren Beatty for Reds, John Williams' score lost to Vangelis' for Chariots of Fire, and the cinematography lost to Reds. In retrospect, shouldn't at least a couple of those have gone to Raiders?

DON'T EVER ARGUE WITH THE BIG DOG, BECAUSE THE BIG DOG IS ALWAYS RIGHT: Watching big chunks of The Fugitive and Say Anything on cable today made me realize that these two very different films have two things in common:

• Both feature something that's fairly unique in films -- antagonists who aren't villains. Both The Fugitive's Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) and Say Anything's James Court (John Mahoney) exist to thwart the protagonist's ambition, but neither is intending to do evil to them. They believe their heart's in the right place, and (with the obvious exception of Court's business improprieties) are acting in a way that, objectively, seems sensible as a method of protecting the country/the daughter. And both performances are pretty awesome. (Add as a third in this category, if you want, Tom Hanks' role in Catch Me If You Can, which I mention because it's on ABC as I type this.)
• Both are intensely Chicago movies. I don't need to make the case for The Fugitive on that count, but Say Anything is full of Chicago actors -- John Cusack, obvs, from Evanston, and his Evanston buddy Jeremy Piven as one of the boys outside the Gas and Sip. John Mahoney's a Steppenwolf Theater Company member, and Lili Taylor's a Glencoe native who went to New Trier High School. It's uncanny.

This thread is open for all discussions of films you end up watching whenever they show up on cable.

I WOULD BE DOING THIS ENTIRE MOVIE A DISSERVICE: Even though Smokin' Aces is a muddled mess of a movie, it (along with the fact that Blue Oyster Cult was playing at the club next door to the theatre) reminds me that America has a fever, and the only cure is more Bateman. Seriously, since about 2004, Bateman's been on a huge roll, not just with Arrested Development, but in scene-stealing cameo bits in Dodgeball and The Break-Up, and here, he winds up being the only truly original thing in the movie. Fortunately, we're getting a lot of Bateman this year, with this project looking particularly interesting (Bateman! Garner! Cooper! Foxx! Piven! A substantial portion of the cast of Friday Night Lights!).

NEW ADVENTURES IN MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY: If Marcel had concocted a way to bake donuts and bagels with the caffeine of 1-2 cups of coffee built-in, I'd hand him the Top Chef crown right now.

BREAKING THE MATZO: Lexus let Calvin Trillin test a new car that parallel parks itself:

I didn’t actually need what Lexus calls an Advanced Parking Guidance System to help me park. On the other hand, even though I consider myself pretty good at washing pots and pans, I wouldn’t hesitate to hand that chore over to an advanced scullery system. So I told the Lexus man to bring the car around to my house. I said that I’d stand on the sidewalk nearby, say “Park!” in a commanding tone, and watch the Lexus LS 460 L do its stuff. He told me that wasn’t how the Advanced Parking Guidance System worked. I told him to bring the Lexus LS 460 L around to my house anyway: I had already alerted the neighbors.

However, the technology's not quite there yet: "The Advanced Parking Guidance System works only if the spot is six and a half feet longer than the car — the sort of spot, in other words, that the average Manhattan parker comes upon about once every 14 or 15 years."

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN SELL BOOKS: The book-selling power of Jon Stewart and Oprah has been well-chronicled, but today's Times observes a less-powerful, but still significant, force on book sales--apparently, in order to fully understand Tom Stoppard's much acclaimed new trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, there's a reading list, and the books on that reading list are increasingly difficult to find.

AT ONCE RUTHLESSLY SADISTIC AND CLOYINGLY SACCHARINE: Interested in a provocative essay on Steven Spielberg, Hollywood, and the war on terror? Yes, it throws around a lot of big words for a Friday morning, but this piece by J. Hoberman is worth your time:

As a manipulator of the medium, Spielberg ranks with the greatest — king of cute Walt Disney and master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. In a sense, Spielberg synthesizes Disney and Hitchcock. Astoundingly attuned to mass-audience psychology, he is at once ruthlessly sadistic and cloyingly saccharine, a filmmaker who opened his first blockbuster by implicating the audience in an aquatic sex-murder committed by a giant serial-killer shark, and the only filmmaker since Disney who might sincerely employ “When You Wish Upon a Star” (the original closing music for Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Naturally privileging sentiment above reason, Spielberg’s movies are shamelessly dependent on such cues. But music is hardly his only means of persuasion. Jaws amply demonstrated Spielberg’s willingness to inflict pain upon the spectator.

Different as Disney’s Snow White or Hitchcock’s Psycho might be, each film exhibits a rage for control readily attributable to its maker. And yet, one doubts Disney ever questioned the purity of his intentions or Hitchcock lost sleep pondering the psychological implications of his films; as the world’s preeminent maker of entertainments for children, the former was a priori virtuous while, as the professionally ghoulish virtuoso of on-screen murder, the latter had no need to demonstrate his moral virtue. Spielberg, however, is the representative of the aging “movie generation”—and thus acutely self-conscious, if not downright anxious to do the right thing.

There is a sense in which Spielberg’s oeuvre is divided against itself, characterized by the Good Steven’s feel-good movies and the more hostile entertainments devised by his evil twin. . . .

Via The House Next Door, where Matt Zoller Seitz thinks Hoberman's political claims are completely daft, and the resulting conversation is fascinating.