Tom asks the question that all intellectuals have sought the answer to for generations.

I recently switched out the style on my incentive sketches so that they actually looked more like sketches. Novel idea, I know. But things were starting to get a little too polished. Plus, I had a few requests in the THorum to leave the pencil lines in. Some people were curious as to my technique. Yup. Really pulling back the veil here. Check it out, if you’re interested.

I wanted today’s comic to be more of a commentary on the lack of any quality film this year akin to the message delivered last Wednesday. Instead it turned into a larger commentary on media at-large.

The monkey smoking on "tee-vee" was literally something I was watching as I drew the strip last night. Cami had America’s Funniest Home Videos on in the background (now in it’s 16th season!) I failed to see the humor in a many training a monkey to grip a cigarette and pursing it between its lips. Yet the canned laughter coming from the audience seemed to find it uproarious!

I dunno. Things are getting better. Cami and I are actually looking at the docket of films to be released this week and are excited again. In Her Shoes is very much at the top of our list. Waiting… and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit seem like fun matine diversions. Big weekend ahead. We’re both chomping at the bit to see Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown on the 14th.

We didn’t get a chance to see A History of Violence, which I am still pressing for. But both of us have our radar up for Capote, which I hear delivers a phenomenal performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Gotta see that before it slides out of the art houses.

I will claim a major victory this weekend in that I got Cami to watch Citizen Kane on Friday night. I know it was a successful initiative when she was talking about it two days later. She even brought it up to her parents when we had lunch with them today!

I know it sounds like hyperbole to categorize Citizen Kane as the best movie ever. Certainly enough critics have adorned it with that title. But if you haven’t seen it yet, you owe it to yourself. Admire the direction and how almost every movie since then has stolen from it. If you enjoy the film and dig deeper, it’s history is fascinating.

For example, most people know that Orson Welles was taking aim at media mogul William Randolph Hearst by mirroring his life as a scoundrel. Did you know that Hearst banned any review of the film in any of his papers and that blacklisting remained in effect until the 1970’s until finally the Los Angeles Times reviewed it?

Did you know at the time of its release in 1940, the film was a commercial and critical flop. Even when its name was read at that year’s Academy Awards, it was booed by the audience. It wasn’t until it was re-released 9 years later in 1950 that it began to gain critical acclaim.

Appreciate some of the finer nuances of the direction like how all the important characters are shot from low angles to give them a looming presence and how all the secondary characters are shot from up high to make them look diminished.

Also note the ceilings on most of the sets. This was totally unheard of in the 1940’s when most movies were filmed on sound stages. Or how Welles and cinematographer Gregg Toland pioneered "deep focus", a technique that keeps every object in the foreground, center, and background in simultaneous focus.

It’s a watershed film in every sense of the word. Go rent it. Hell – BUY it now.