As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).
This week we’re taking movies with fans, colleagues, and friends. An e-mail from a listener gets us thinking critically about our love for post-apocalyptic movies, and watching the amazing 1962 French short, La Jetée (pictured above). Kevin talks with David Chen and Devindra Hardawar from /Filmcast about podcasting, Roman Polanski, and really good cartoons. Later we check in with Karina Longworth, where she tells us about overlooked Japanese classic When A Woman Ascends the Stairs and a whimsical WWI quasi-musical, La France.
0:00 - Intro, post-apocalyptic movies, La Jetée
8:00 - /Filmcast’s David Chen and Devindra Hardawar
19:50 - Karina’s Media Diet
(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)
I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of 
