There are movies you’ll enjoy for any number of reasons and movies you may not “enjoy” but which you really need to see and will always feel grateful for having done so. Lasting, nutritious, not conventionally entertaining but a wallop all the same, good for your soul, essential viewing. These used to be known (and perhaps still are known in in some circles) as broccoli movies. I don’t feel 12 Years A Slave is a broccoli movie as much a stunning, flat-out masterpiece, but I know some people do. Anyway I’m posting because I’m looking a list of the greatest broccoli movies of all time. Naahh, let’s say the last 43 years (i.e., beginning with 1970). Movies you were maybe a little reluctant to see at first and perhaps had to be dragged to, but once you saw them you were totally sold and you’ve been glad ever since. The other question is how many times has the Academy given its Best Picture Oscar to a broccoli movie? The answer, of course, is that broccoli movies don’t win Best Picture Oscars, unless you want to count Schindler’s List or The English Patient or A Man For All Seasons. I’ve never seen The English Patient more than once, but the other two I own and have watched several times. Well, a few.

Last June I posted a couple of shots taken during my brief stint as a mediocre drummer. Okay, a fair drummer but no Ginger Baker. Anyway, the original photographer (i.e., an old friend) sent me another shot today.

Deadline‘s Pete Hammond likes to wait until mid-November to start picking his Best Picture Oscar faves (i.e., most likely to win). So I was excited yesterday when I saw he’d finally posted a 2013 Best Picture handicap piece. My pulse quickened when I read his observation that 2013 has been a high-quality year…yeah. And that the leaders of the pack right now are Gravity, 12 Years A Slave and Captain Phillips. And that the last two not-yet-seen contenders, American Hustle (which screens in Los Angeles this evening) and Wolf of Wall Street, could re-order the situation. He also said that the recent tendency to give Best Picture Oscars to softball audience movies (The King’s Speech, The Artist, Argo) over critical favorites could help mainstream feel-gooders like Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks, the Weinstein Co.’s Philomena or Paramount’s Nebraska (which could turn out to be, Hammond believes, “the little engine that could for Paramount”). I’m not saying Hammond is wrong about this stuff, but I was hoping he’d stick his neck out like Variety‘s Tim Gray recently did when he declared that Peter Berg‘s Lone Survivor is looking like a big Best Picture breakout. Or something like that.

After filing this morning (which was agony due to spotty wifi) we drove out to the Cu Chi tunnels, an underground hideout and staging area that was used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. On the shooting range I put on a pair of earmuffs and fired ten rounds out of an AK-47 — they charge you about $1.50 a round. I don’t know if I hit the target but firing this legendary weapon in rural Vietnam made my day. Tonight’s activity includes a dinner at Camargue and then a drop-by at Apocalypse Now, a bar that’s been going since ’91. The plane for Seoul leaves at midnight. I’ll have a few hours of filing time in Seoul before my Los Angeles flight leaves in the late afternoon. Back on Monday morning.

“The studios are not in the movie business anymore,” director-producer John Landis recently said during the Mar del Plata Film Festival, which I attended a few years ago. “Some of us were very lucky. I started to make movies for the studios in the ’70s. They were dying, but at least they were still studios. There are no original ideas. What there is — and this is something no one understands — is that it is never about the idea, it is about the execution of the idea.” Exactly. The monster-on-the-loose idea behind Landis’s Schlock (’72) was nothing special, but Landis used an exploitation concept to deliver dry social satire. It was as amusing in its way as Attack The Block (which made hilarious use of blatantly fake-looking aliens) was in its own.