Few living filmmakers have proven as able to spin their obsessions into cinematic gold as Quentin Tarantino.

Alfred Hitchcock made so many timeless films, but Spellbound, alas, hasn’t held up quite so comfortably. Most of the problem has to do with its theme: psychoanalysis, which enjoyed a trendy moment in the mid-forties and may have attained enough relevance at the time to drive a plot, but now seems a rather weak engine.

To some fans of his not-exactly-a-sitcom Louie, Louis C.K. simply appeared a few years ago, fully formed and acclaimed by his peers as perhaps the most skilled, dedicated comedic craftsmen working today.

Since time immemorial — or, in any case, since the mid-twentieth century — adolescents have looked to rock stars for life lessons. This works out better with some rock stars than others, of course, and in bygone days kids would have to infer these lessons from song lyrics and the occasional Rolling Stone interview.

We have here a page out of Stanley Kubrick’s notebook, which Lists of Note—the sister site of Letters of Note, always a favorite of ours here at Open Culture—posted as a collection of alternative titles for Dr. Strangelove. The list includes Dr. Doomsday, The Doomsday Machine, Dr.

Despite having no experience with schools of its stature beyond what I’ve gleaned from Take Ivy, I do know that Harvard University cultivates minds to discuss the next big ideas.

With 1994′s Clerks, Kevin Smith opened up the floodgates for independently produced, micro-budget, dialogue-intensive, cursing-intensive movies by, for, and about a certain stripe of feckless Generation-X twentysomething.

I went through childhood listening to Tom Lehrer’s “New Math“. The 1965 song, performed in part like standard spoken-word comedy, made me laugh every time.

Non-philosophers sometimes charge philosophers with talking and writing voluminously to no particular end, getting nothing done, solving no problems. But Slavoj Žižek, clown prince of academic superstardom, has a response: “Philosophy does not solve problems,” he claims in the clip above.

If you’ve made a film, you’ll remember when you realized that editing, more than any other stage of production, determines the audience’s final experience.  “The first films ever made were shot in one take,” wrote the late, always editing-conscious Roger Ebert, reviewing Mike Figgis’ Time Code.