"A LOT OF PEOPLE DON'T REALIZE YOU CAN GO INTO BEST BUY AND ASK THEM FOR A LOWER PRICE": My father, among others, will be thrilled to learn that haggling is now common in America's big box stores.

QUANDO? QUANDO? QUANDO?: I was rewatching Fargo the other night and while I adore this film, I have never understood the whole Mike Yanagita subplot. Not that there are not very strange moments in life like that, but what was it doing in that movie? I do not have a theory of my own, but sure would appreciate your thoughts.

WELL, THAT'S YOUR NAME, ISN'T IT? CALVIN KLEIN? IT'S WRITTEN ALL OVER YOUR UNDERWEAR: For the second straight year at right around this time, I just read an intriguing analysis of Back to the Future, and I'm going to force you to read it share it now:

Back To The Future is both undeniably timeless (its place in pop culture is beyond question) and incredibly dated (it's very much a product of its time). Interestingly, it's a period piece made in 1985 that depicts 1985 as an era as distant-seeming as its version of 1955. Of course, when Back To The Future was first released, 1985 just looked like "now." It's entirely possible that director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale referenced Ronald Reagan and Eddie Van Halen and dressed Fox's Marty McFly up in a denim jacket and Calvin Klein underwear because they wanted Back To The Future to exist in the same universe as The Breakfast Club, Girls Just Want To Have Fun, and other teen films from 1985. But I'm going to give them way more credit than they probably deserve. I think Zemeckis and Gale knew all the timely accoutrements signifying "the present" in Back To The Future would inevitably look like 1985 within just a couple of years; in fact, they were banking on it. Zemeckis and Gale were trying to create an archetypical representation of 1985 just like they did for 1955, with its soda fountains, social repression, and subjugated black people. In this way, Back To The Future only gets better the further we get from the '80s. Everything that defines Marty McFly -- how he walks, talks, acts, and dresses -- acts as instantly recognizable shorthand for the year he comes from.

That said, the piece is mostly about how well "Power of Love" works as a song in the movie, and I will leave you with this excerpt, which I imagine may provoke a reaction from some here: "If you weren't alive at the time, it may be tough to imagine how a band called Huey Lewis And The News not only got on Top 40 radio, but helped define its era of pop-rock music. But by any standard of popular success, Huey Lewis was a defining rock 'n' roller of 1985. In 1983 and '84, he scored five Top 20 hits from the album Sports, which went platinum seven times. (This was back when people idiotically paid for their music.) In 1986, Huey and his band of News released Fore!, which spawned five Top 10 hits (including two No. 1s) and sold three million copies. A few years after that, the band was handed a one-way ticket to the county-fair-and-corporate-gig circuit, but in 1985, Huey was still safely ensconced in a protective shell at the center of American pop culture. Yes, I'm sure there were plenty of people who thought Huey Lewis was the epitome of soulless corporate rock in '85, and history might have proven those people right. But at the time, I didn't know any of those people. To me, Huey Lewis was the height of coolness and awesomeness. Of course, I was only 7, which means I was really, really dumb. But it wasn't just 7-year-olds who bought all those copies of Sports. There must have been at least a few grown-ups on the same page I was."

KATE, YOU'RE NOT MY TYPE: On the "episodes that raise new questions" versus "episodes that provide answers" continuum, tonight's final pre-break Lost was decidedly towards the former camp, perhaps surprisingly given how much was devoted to flashback. Whole lot of "why?", and a whole lot of "how?" to mull over. So meet me in the comments -- we're the good guys, after all.

P.S. Michael Dawson's favorite former track-star-slash-football-player? Willie GAAAUUULT!

SOON, HE WILL BE INVINCI--WAIT FOR IT--BLE: Neil Patrick Harris as "a low-rent supervillain" named Dr. Horrible and Nathan Fillion as Captain Hammer, "the hero who keeps beating him up" in a 30 minute web video musical co-written and directed by Joss Whedon (and entitled Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog)? Yes, please.

OH NO, MRS. ROBINSON, I THINK, I THINK YOU'RE THE MOST ATTRACTIVE OF ALL MY PARENTS' FRIENDS: Just finished reading Mark Harris' book Pictures at a Revolution, his survey of the five films nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1967, and I strong recommend it for anyone who's a fan of similar works like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls or Rebels on the Backlot. It has been exceedingly well-reviewed, and with good reason -- Harris picked a moment at which Hollywood was pivoting from the studio system towards auteurs, from censorship and codes to freedom, and from having only one black leading man in Hollywood to ... okay, that took about another two decades or so.

But, oh, that leading man: Harris' portrait of Sidney Poitier is a compelling and rich one, detailing the difficult course he had to navigate as wanting to be a good role model on screen but weary of playing the Magical Negro, wanting his films to better reflect the society in which he lived but recognizing such progress might only be made inch-by-inch. Poitier appeared in two of the five nominated films of that year -- Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, both of which inched the ball forward on racial issues on screen, and was briefly cast in a third, the old-school big-budget Doctor Doolittle, for which Harris' descriptions of the fiasco-ridden production are worth the price of the book alone. (There's an injury to a giraffe in particular worth noting, and Rex Harrison does not come off well at all.)

And then there's the other two films: The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, both which utterly changed the way Hollywood viewed its audience as well as the kind of content that films could present -- thematically, visually and sonically. Warren Beatty's personal role in the revolution is something that I don't think my generation will ever quite fully comprehend (myself included) -- because to us, he's that now-married-ladies'-man who did Dick Tracy, Bugsy and Bulworth, and the idea of the notorious playboy traveling from town to town to make sure the projectionists have the right bulb and volume settings for a film he produced ... well, that's hard to square.

Here's an excerpt (from a longer excerpt):

When he had decided to make The Graduate three and a half years earlier, [Mike] Nichols thought he knew exactly what his satirical targets were. ''I said some fairly pretentious things about capitalism and material objects, about the boy drowning in material things and saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness,'' he recalls. But the deeper he got into the shoot and the more intensely he pushed [Dustin] Hoffman past what the actor thought he could withstand, the more Nichols realized that something painful and personal was at stake, and always had been, in his attraction to the story. ''My unconscious was making this movie,'' he says. ''It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along — that I had been turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn't get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, 'Mom, how come I'm Jewish and you and Dad aren't?' And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious.''

Nichols — the immigrant, the observer, the displaced boy — finally understood why it had taken him years to settle on an actor to play Benjamin. ''Without any knowledge of what I was doing,'' he said, ''I had found myself in this story.'' And in Hoffman, he had found an on-screen alter ego — someone he could admonish for his failings, challenge to dig deeper, punish for his weaknesses, praise to bolster his confidence, and exhort to prove every day that he was the right man for the role.

So, which of those five films have you seen, and which is your favorite? And, of course, tell us what you're reading these days.

IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHICH END OF THE DOG SHE IS FACING: Regular commenter Bill just saw Bob Mould on tour, and since I'm a big fan of the former-Husker, former-WCW-scriptwriter who recently visited the Sound Opinions show, he files this report:

Bob Mould Band
March 18, 2008
Variety Playhouse, Atlanta

The third of four shows I'm seeing this month at the Variety Playhouse. Previously, there's been Har Mar Superstar/Sia (average demographics being under 25 and female) and They Might Be Giants family show (subtract the parents and the average age was eight). Bob Mould brought in a male audience approaching 40; though I'm not sure how the preschooler wearing noise-canceling headphones skews the demographics (seriously, no joke). Halou opened and they put on a good show.

Isn't Bob Mould beginning to look like a beefier Pete Townshend? And would it be fair to compare them, musically?

I'm a fan of the solo Bob Mould and of Sugar, but wasn't sure what to expect for this show. I'd heard he'd gone completely into electronica, but what the hell, he's a legend. I'll go and see what happens. Loud, fast, unapologetically entertaining, Bob wasted no time with crowd interaction or announcing songs. Did I mention loud? He hardly paused to bask in the applause, instead focusing on careening from one song to the next. Bob plays with such force I kept expecting the guitar to explode in his hands. Unable to contain himself during solos, he bounded about the stage like a balloon flying across the room. There were a few bits of electronica thrown in, though these just added layers to the sonic assault and assured no molecules were left unscathed.

He played a few tracks from his new District Line CD -- excellent by the way and only $10 at the show -- and old Bob Mould is generously represented. He even dipped back into the Husker Du catalog. At the time, I was never into Husker Du. Believe me, I had more than ample exposure. Working at a pizza kitchen in South Minneapolis in the mid 80s, the manager would run through their entire collection during Saturday dinner rushes (he was also an excellent drag queen, though even for me this seems like a pointless digression). After Tuesday, I feel the need to reevaluate my position and will be acquiring a few Husker Du CDs.

I should also mention the bassist Jason Narducy who comfortably shared the stage with Mould. One of the best concerts I've seen and other than this short review, one I've been incapable of describing without using expletives. Bob Mould rules the stage, rules the guitar, and owns all the sound. Your speakers go to eleven? Don't bring that weak ass Playskool shit up in here.

Filmmaker Ben Byer has a lovely story about Jason Narducy that also includes some new Bob Mould Band concert footage.

I've seen Mould twice -- on the Black Sheets of Rain tour in 90/91 in a small venue in Northampton, MA, and with Sugar at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago in 94/95, one or two shows before the live concert captured on Besides. I've never attended louder shows, and my goodness that man can rawk.