Okay... remind me not to laugh the next time someone talks about how mad they are about their internet outage.  Thanks to some sort of digital bottleneck in my area, I'm just now able to get online and post my "Lost" recap for this week.  As a result of that and my schedule this afternoon (I have to rehearse a pitch with my manager and then head out for a screening of "Last House On The Left"), today's Morning Read may be a little terse. But there are some things worth getting to, so let's jump right in.

The debate's been ramping up as people have linked to this think piece, but I'm not sure I buy that Pixar deserved to be singled out for this problem.  It's a much larger issue, and a real one.  Women's roles are underwritten industry-wide, and I'm as guilty of it as anyone.  And to be honest, I'm not sure how to fix it.  I don't think the answer is as simple as "more women writers and directors," because I've seen plenty of films by female filmmakers that had the exact same sorts of problem.

[more after the jump]

You know, Jeff Wells may have a crazy hate boner for "Watchmen" right now, but I'll give him points today for pointing out the upcoming Kubrick's "Napoleon" book that Taschen is publishing. This is a Kubrick fan's fetish dream come true, and if it's half as great as their Kubrick archives book from a few years back, it'll be heaven.

Have you seen the gobsmacking stills from "Splice" that Bloody-Disgusting just published?  You should.  I'm a little disturbed to learn that Senator is distributing the film.  I don't have a lot of faith in them to actually get the film in front of people, and it looks like this one could be sort of awesome, so I wish it were in the hands of a distributor I thought was really going to treat it right.  We'll see...

I'm going to write my own gushing love letter to the new "Raging Bull" BluRay soon enough, but for today, check out Glenn Kenny's thoughts.  I'm glad to see he addresses the Kael review, because I've always thought it was a film she missed out on, big-time.

This is pretty entertaining, a list (with video) of the 20 weirdest TV interviews of all time.

It's been fifteen years since Bill Hicks died.  Remind yourself today just why that's a tragedy that left a smoking crater when it happened.  And if you're in marketing... as a special tribute to Bill today... kill yourself.

Vern has finally written a review for "Double Team."  We can all breathe easy again.

Ebert writes today about the value and purpose of snark, something worth contemplating right now.

And like I said... I have to bust out the door in just a few, so I'll leave you today with a special video tease for something we'll be doing all next week here at HitFix:

 

 

Cool, eh?

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