Day: August 20, 2025

Posted on 9.7.21:

You’re sitting down and interviewing (or simply speaking with) a somewhat older and certainly more famous fellow than yourself, and as the conversation is winding down he affectionately, quickly, semi-aggressively grips your knee.

That’s a gesture of courtly approval — it means that you’ve passed inspection.

I don’t know how many times this has happened to me personally, but I’d say a few. I’m thinking in particular of a 1999 Toronto Film Festival party for The Limey, and hanging for a half-hour or so with the great Terence Stamp. As the party was ending and we were all starting to disengage, Stamp gave me a nice fatherly knee-grab — not too gentle, not too aggressive, right in the middle.

I can’t honestly say I’ve ever knee-gripped some younger guy. I tend to prefer shoulder grips or upper back pats.

Slight Woody Allen correction: Dracula slept in a coffin on a bed of damp earth, not “in” damp earth, as Woody put it.

(a) What artist wrote the following? Plus name the song and the album.

“Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor….I’ll piss on ‘em. That’s what the Statue of Bigotry says.”

(b) What famous actor said this to what famous director?

“You can write this shit, [name], but you can’t say it.”

In and of itself, the commercial failure of Stephen Frears’ The Hit (‘84) amply illustrates the validity of the below illustration and caption:

Reid Rosefelt on Facebook:

What film, which character said it, who played this character, what was the context, and who wrote the script?

If you don’t answer all five, you’re disqualified.

“Whatever piece of ass you get in this world you’re gonna have to pay for, one way or the other.”

That feeling of hopelessness and bottomless malaise that pours into the souls of trapped highway drivers on a daily basis in the major urban corridors…all I can say is that the gloomy authors and philosophers of yesteryear never knew this kind of anguish…they never knew they had it so good.

Industrial asphalt downerism became an American “thing” in the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower‘s vast interstate highway system began construction.

One of the first cinematic depictions of this stifling nationwide depression happens in the first minutes of Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (‘62), a mostly middling family comedy with James Stewart and Maureen O’Hara in the leads. Stewart, playing a banker, is trapped in his sedan during a highway commute, and a truck just ahead belches out a cloud of brown exhaust.

But it wasn’t the exhaust and smog that so weighed on drivers. It was the sheer number, the tens of thousands of other commuters.