1. Start watching “The Wire.” I’ve got a boxed set of Season 4 somewhere in the house, courtesy of being on some mailing list I probably shouldn’t be on, but I think I might just have to start with Season 5, supposedly shaped around the death of journalism, a story I expect to hit tragically close to home. Anyway, I’ve been inspired by the seemingly dozens of stories everywhere about how fantastic a show it is, but the one that pushed me over the edge is this New Yorker piece by Margaret Talbot from back in October. It’s a profile of showrunner David Simon and well worth the temporary paralysis to my right index finger brought on by scrolling through its massive length.
2. Stop reading anything related to Britney Spears. I know she’s an idiot, but what the media and the gossip hounds on the Internet are doing to her is disgusting. I’d rather watch seagulls tear apart one of their wounded brethren.
3. To whit, it is time to turn away from Perez Hilton. I’m pretty sure I fried 8 percent of my brain looking at his site this year. Instead I plan to limit my revolting consumption of Internet trash to reading dlisted.com, because the guy that writes that is actually funny and smart.
4. I’m going to listen to the commentaries on all my DVDs. I watched a batch while sick over the holidays. Some observations: 1. A team of three participants watching the Coen brothers “making of” piece on The Big Lebowski agreed that the brothers HAD to be stoned while making the commentary. 2. All celebrities should be forced to watch the DVD BEFORE they do their commentary. I’ve over-dosed on “My So-Called Life” the boxed set, and while it is fabulous, I found it completely annoying that Claire Danes had clearly not seen her own show in at least ten years. I knew more about the episode that she did! 3. Is the true definition of getting old when you realize that Jordan Catalano is a complete dope and that the true object of lust on the show is, oh, the horror, Angela’s Dad???? How I long to visit the restaurant he never got a chance to open, due to cancellation.
5. Continue to support the striking writers, even though I really want my Oscar fix.

Happy Monday,

I promised a bit more information on “The Dead Girl” in my story last week about the Best Movies From 2007 You Haven’t Seen. But we changed our blogging system and I was too lazy to figure it out until now. Belatedly, here’s an excerpt from a long interview I did last month with Josh Brolin for “No Country for Old Men,” in which Brolin talks about his small part in “The Dead Girl” and Sean Penn’s reaction to it.

Brolin: Then two days later [after landing his part in the Coen Bros. No Country for Old Men] I got into a massive motorcyle wreck and snapped my collarbone.
Q: When was filming due to start?
JB: Two weeks. And the collarbone didn’t heal until the end of the movie.
Q: So did the Coens just say good, it will make you look more weathered?
JB: First of all I didn’t tell them and then my lawyer said, you have to tell them, because you are liable if you don’t. And I went, well that sucks, because I just wanted to grit through it. I was doing another movie at that time that I almost pulled out of, it was three days after the accident that I did this thing called ‘The Dead Girl.’
Q: Oh, I loved ‘The Dead Girl.’ That’s directed by Karen Moncrieff, who also did “Blue Car,” another wonderful movie.
JBA Oh, she’s so great. I just saw Sean Penn in Toronto and he comes up to me and goes ‘Brolin, Brolin, Brolin, [expletive] Brolin, man, ‘The Dead Girl’ was unbelievable.’ And he started to go off on this very specialized tangent on ‘The Dead Girl’ and Karen Moncrieff and her characters. He loved it. Loved it, loved it.
Anyway, I did it in a brace, and I thought okay, if I can do ‘The Dead Girl’ within three days, there is absolutely no reason why I can’t do [the movie] with the Coen brothers.

I’m reading Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile in anticipation of seeing the movie next week. It stars Tom Hanks as Wilson, the Texas congressman who helped fund the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviets. Having read “Kite Runner” and Rory Stewart’s “The Places In Between,” recently I guess I’ve been on something of an Afghanistan kick, so CWW fit right in.

The movie looks alluring, between Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman (playing a bad-ass CIA agent) and Mike Nichols at the helm, but as someone who spends most of her reading time consuming fiction, I didn’t expect to be that into the book. But I can’t put it down. Yesterday I looked up on BART and realized I’d gone all the way to San Leandro because I was that absorbed. A good sign for the movie.

Speaking of upcoming movies, this Vanity Fair piece by Bruce Handy on Francis Ford Coppola’s new film “Youth Without Youth” is worth a read.

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So I’m rattling on about there not being any decent family movies to take my little boy too, and meanwhile, some mother from Oakland is coping with losing her son after a fatal shooting at the Metreon Sunday night. Talk about perspective. According to news reports, an 18 year-old died shortly after 7 pm after being shot multiple times in the lobby in front of the main ticket booth at the Metreon. He’d supposedly been part of a loud argument between a group of youths. They arrested a suspect a block away — the place happened to be swarming with cops because of the big Oracle shindig happening on Howard — but haven’t released many details. So here’s the point where we all freak out and start saying things like “Are our multiplexes safe?”

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Writing in Slate this week, Boston Globe critic Wesley Morris makes a compelling argument for Lionsgate to start screening Tyler Perry’s movies for critics again. The studio stopped after “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” which Perry wrote and starred in, got lambasted by everyone from Ebert to Morris himself (“Blows to the head are delivered with more subtlety” he wrote of the film’s message in his 2005 review). In his Slate piece, Morris calls the no-screening process discriminatory and unfair to Perry himself. “Keeping Perry away from the press reinforces the notion among critics that he doesn’t matter,” he writes.

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I get a lot of questions from readers about how I do my job. So here are the nuts and bolts of movie criticism in the Bay Area.

Q: When and how do you see a movie?
A: Three different ways. Many of them I see at daytime screenings for critics, either at a screening in one of the city’s main theaters (the Metreon, the AMC 1000, the new City Centre or the Kabuki) or at the Variety Club, which is a small, private screening room. Others I see at advance screenings — often hosted by a local radio station — that are technically for members of the public who’ve obtained invites, but that also serve as a convenient way for critics to see the movie. Those screenings are all at night, usually on Mondays or Tuesdays. Some movies, mainly documentaries or foreign films, I might watch at home on a DVD screener supplied to me by the distributor.

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