We drove home in silence. The first thing I can remember saying was “Well … it looked cool.” The droid army was absolutely intimidating. Yoda didn’t look like a pile of spoiled lunchmeat. And it certainly wasn’t weird that Samuel L. Jackson was on the Jedi council … at all. I had developed Stockholm Syndrome — I’d become a full-fledged Lucas apologist. “No, that was just bad. Really bad.” Kate paused, “And you’re not allowed to pick out any movies anymore.”

Some wounds take longer to heal.

Ben Gazzara died this afternoon, on the anniversary of the death of John Cassavetes on February 3, 1989.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 29, 2012
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from “The Shining.” The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat.

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

Yes, of course.

(via @coudal)

Jessica Yu directed this short film about Jack Sim, aka Mr. Toilet:

For those without access to a simple toilet, poop can be poison. Businessman-turned-sanitation-superhero Jack Sim fights this oft-neglected crisis affecting 2.6 billion people.

(via stellar)

I referenced this in the quotes out of context below, but the trailer for Wim Wenders 3-D tribute to choreographer Pina Bausch deserves its own post.

I simply let go of my feelings and cried unrestrainedly.

The trailer for Matt Lenski’s Meaning of Robots:

The benevolent Mike Sullivan, age 65, has been shooting an epic stop-motion robot sex film in his apartment for the last 10 years. Obsessed with constructing the miniature robot porn stars, his apartment now overflows with thousands of them.

(thanks, Sarah)

It’s a Girl! is a documentary about the systematic killing and suppression of girls in South Asia and around the world.

In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.

Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.

The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.

Speechless.

(via kottke)