Kottke links to Ben Tesch's film personality test.

1. Joel Coen: No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller's Crossing, Raising Arizona, etc
2. Wes Anderson: The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tennenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket, etc
3. Hal Ashby: Being There, Shampoo, Harold and Maude, etc
4. Kevin Smith: Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Dogma, Chasing Amy, Mallrats, Clerks, etc
5. Quentin Tarantino: Grindhouse, Kill Bill, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, etc

I would also personally throw in:

6. Stanley Kubrick: 2001, The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, etc.
7. P.T. Anderson: Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia.
8. Errol Morris: The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Gates of Heaven, etc.

I play this game all the time, but never in such an academically rigorous environment. On this scale I'm a Lebowskite with strong Hudsucker tendencies, Rushmore-loving pan-Andersonist with slightly fond memories of the one time I saw Chasing Amy, a Pulp Fictionist with Kill Bill sympathies (or maybe the other way around) Strangelovian TWBBloody FCaOoCer.

No good reason for this post except that I saw kottke's post on the trailer for Dr. Strangelove and it reminded me of the red phone scene from the movie, surely the greatest one-way phone conversation in film history...



Hello? Hello, Dimitri? Listen, I can't hear too well, do you suppose you could turn the music down just a little? Oh, that's much better. Yes. Fine, I can hear you now, Dimitri. Clear and plain and coming through fine. I'm coming through fine too, eh? Good, then. Well then as you say we're both coming through fine. Good. Well it's good that you're fine and I'm fine. I agree with you. It's great to be fine. laughs Now then Dimitri. You know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb. The bomb, Dimitri. The hydrogen bomb. Well now what happened is, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of, well he went a little funny in the head. You know. Just a little... funny. And uh, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes... to attack your country. Well let me finish, Dimitri. Let me finish, Dimitri. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, Dimitri? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. Not now, but any time, Dimitri. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call. Of course it's a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn't friendly, ... you probably wouldn't have even got it. They will not reach their targets for at least another hour. I am... I am positive, Dimitri. Listen, I've been all over this with your ambassador. It is not a trick. Well I'll tell you. We'd like to give your air staff a complete run down on the targets, the flight plans, and the defensive systems of the planes. Yes! I mean, if we're unable to recall the planes, then I'd say that, uh, well, we're just going to have to help you destroy them, Dimitri. I know they're our boys. Alright, well, listen... who should we call? Who should we call, Dimitri? The people...? Sorry, you faded away there. The People's Central Air Defense Headquarters. Where is that, Dimitri? In Omsk. Right. Yes. Oh, you'll call them first, will you? Uh huh. Listen, do you happen to have the phone number on you, Dimitri? What? I see, just ask for Omsk Information. I'm sorry too, Dimitri. I'm very sorry. Alright! You're sorrier than I am! But I am sorry as well. I am as sorry as you are, Dimitri. Don't say that you are more sorry than I am, because I am capable of being just as sorry as you are. So we're both sorry, alright? Alright. Yes he's right here. Yes, he wants to talk to you. Just a second.

Forty years of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There's a lot of links at the site, including Kubrick at the premiere and One: A Lego Odyssey.

Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Arthur C. Clarke has died.

Things I'm guaranteed to fall for:

* Video-game theme songs for the string quartet.

* Teller, after the apocalypse.

* Oil paintings inspired by video games and Internet memes.

* Articles titled "Welcome to the Post-Carbon World," with sci-fi subtitles like "Why do some planets survive their carbon crises and others don’t? A plan for how ours could."

* Stanley Kubrick.

This New York Times pan of Doomsday Men: The Real Dr. Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon winds up being a pretty interesting profile of Leo Szilard, the man who came up with the idea for the hypothetical cobalt bomb Kubrick used in Dr. Strangelove. Meanwhile, Posthuman Blues's best of 2007 post has allowed me (and now you) to catch up on a very interesting blog I only just started reading, including (just for example) this YouTube clip on catastrophism in the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

Random links for a Friday evening:

Poet Steve Kuusisto, who gave us an essay way back for Backwards City #1, has a blog, Planet of the Blind.

The coolest thing ever: scans from Jack Kirby's comics adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Via MeFi.

There's a new version out of Desktop Tower Defense.

Amazing LEGO creations.

And, most importantly, production on Indiana Jones 4 began today.

Making the Shining: a one-two-three-four-part documentary about the making of the film, shot by Vivian Kubrick. Via Kottke. God bless YouTube.