Hero worship (Patreon)

For the moment, at least, it'll have to be an honor just for The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh to be nominated. Heads-up, it got pretty soundly defeated, 57%-43%, by Bill Forsyth's Local Hero, a film I haven't seen since sometime around 1990–91. (This makes two consecutive wins for Matthew Lingo, I believe—pretty sure Local Hero replaced Scattered Clouds.) I wouldn't have thought that would be selected before Housekeeping, which I will helpfully note is one week shy of the four that would get it in the monthly random drawing. Also I've never seen Comfort and Joy at all. So many options available! Anyway, Local Hero doesn't seem to be on the Criterion Channel at present, despite being part of the Collection (I have the Blu-ray), but you can rent it from all the usual places. 

(Speaking of the Criterion Channel, I really wish they'd have the integrity to post source information for their transfers. Started to watch Lang's Clash by Night and was quite surprised to find it looking very standard-def, especially given that Warner Archive recently put out a Blu-ray. I understand that they want their curated retros to be as comprehensive as possible, but a service marketed to cinephiles should be up-front about image quality, in the same way that NYC rep houses generally tell you that it's the best print they could get. There, now more than the 16 of you on Bluesky have seen this rant.)

In other news, I'm once again completely caught up on requests that auto-qualified after a year in the trenches (and on the randomly drawn ones, too). Seven Days in May was the last of those. Couple more films will hit that milestone pretty soon, though.

I'm quite retroactively impressed by this one, as it's another response to Bilge Ebiri and I realized after a moment that Big-El is in fact an anagram for Bilge. My dumb jokes are carefully crafted.