Greetings! Savant's new reviews today are

Here's something fun: Tom Sutpen of the fascinating website If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats has a great selection of 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention pictures up, on the entry dated August 25). Then, if you scroll back up to August 26, (easier than it sounds), you'll find a link (the non-highlighted word "post") to a terrific speech given by critic Pauline Kael in 1968, on Tom Sutpen's equally incisive blog called Illusion Travels by Streetcar. Kael fires off a mounting crescendo of broadsides on the subjects of The Underground Cinema, Arthur Penn and what Sutpen pegs as "the institutional imperatives of mass-market film criticism." Kael's tough and opinionated (she's pretty unkind to some actors) but certainly knows her own mind. She's convinced that the Western is finished as a viable film genre -- in 1968!

Over at Film.com this week I attempt a breakdown of what I like and dislike about DVD menuing practices, entitled When DVD Menus Attack. I'm forming a vigilante committee and handing out torches to track down the guy who invented the anti-piracy ads that mar our discs and theater screenings! Thanks for reading, Glenn Erickson.