Somewhere near 4am, I turned into an awful blowhard, didn't I? Congratulations, Josh:  You bring out the self-righteous, sanctimonious prig in me. (I bet you get that from all the girls.) It has, as ever, been an honor and a pleasure sparring with you. Win or lose – and let's not call this a landslide just yet; I'm about to mobilize the phone banks, maybe buy some airtime...plus there's that whole airport bathroom stall scandal I've been keeping in my back pocket – I look forward to shaking hands with you across the aisle at next week's Happy Hour. And then of course there's next weekend, when I'll be locking you in a room with me to watch 11 Hitchcock films in a row for our upcoming Halloween feature. Just you wait: Hitchcock will heal all our wounds.

That’s it. I can’t take it anymore. When somebody accuses me of being motivated by middle-class guilt first thing in the morning, that’s when I take my computer and go home. So I’m going to take my computer and go home. Metaphorically. I actually haven’t left my home in days. So, thanks to everyone who’s been reading. For those who've been voting, please continue to do. And for those who haven’t yet, please do. The polls will stay open until next Thursday, Oct. 23, at which time we invite you all to join us at SpiderHouse for the Austin Chronicle Film Fight happy hour, which begins at 7:30. We’ll have cheap drinks and cheaper conversation and the screening of a short film selected by whichever one of us has been declared the victor. And provided no one bothers to look into who exactly all those “voters” are, or why exactly the Austin Chronicle web server has been hacked into no fewer than four times over the past week, it looks like that victor may just be me. If elected, I promise to run a benevolent administration. And now, a little night music to wash away all the rancor:

If you saw the premiere of W as the Austin Film Festival got under way on Thursday--or even if you've just seen the film's trailer on television--you probably remember Jonna Juul-Hansen, who portrays Jan O'Neil, a real-life friend of Laura Bush who introduced Laura to George W. Bush back in the day. Juul-Hansen is--tell me if I'm wrong on this!--the only Austin actress with a speaking part in the film, which, naturally in this time of filming incentives, shot primarily in Louisiana. Her husband Lars offers the story of how she got the part: "Jonna drove from Austin to Shreveport in April for the audition and drove back two days later for the call back (with Oliver Stone). The casting director later told her that as soon as she had left the audition/interview Oliver Stone turned to the casting director and said 'I don't want to see anyone else for Jan O'Neil.' Of course it took almost 30 days after that call back to find out that she has booked the part. During that time she was on pins and needles. "Jonna started acting 20 years ago in San Francisco and moved to LA later. About 7 years ago we moved to Austin to raise our kids and she just got back into acting 2 years ago in Ben Taylor's Workshop. Her agent is Collier Talent and she's also going to be seen in Geoff Marsden's Mars playing the first lady opposite Kinky Friedman."

As if we needed any more evidence that the gloves were off but good, you attack my beloved This American Life? Christ, man, have you no shame? I’m not going to linger too long on this, for one, because this isn’t RADIO Fight (but wouldn’t Terry Gross versus Click and Clack make a delicious kind of death match?), but also because I’m not sure you’ve ever actually listened to the program, otherwise you wouldn’t have just knee-jerkedly confused its listenership – which I reckon probably is mostly middle-class and white – with its content, which is far-ranging and far more substantial than the musings of the occasional self-deprecating contributor. (And what’s so wrong with self-deprecation? David Rakoff and Jonathan Goldstein do a crackerjack job of it.) Quiet desperation isn’t limited to “the charmingly insecure chattering classes” – and I think This American Life does a fine job of limning desperation of all class, color, and creed – but neither should the desperation of those so-called chatterers be shunted aside as meaningless. Jaysus, we’re all in the gutter – if that isn’t cause for unification in commiseration, I don’t know what is. And yet, to go back (and read back to know exactly what Josh is talking about): “They're tiny little demons, but they'll eventually eat you alive with imperceptible bites.” I think that’s beautifully put, Josh, and it made me stop in my tracks. Which, embarrassingly, doesn’t happen all that often – the rising to the surface of a stirring idea, an elegantly worded thought, one that puts a temporary brake-stop to the constant consumption – thanks, Internet! – of words, facts, figures, images, polemics, parodies, and icanhascheezburger forwards. Let’s go back to movies, okay? I’m starting to worry we’re leaving bruises here.

Well, that makes two of us who think I have a dumb philosophy on life. But I've been on this planet 32 years now, and it's all I've managed to come up with, so I think I'll stick with it until something better (and even more displeasing to you) comes along. Then I'll have two philosophies on life I can choose from depending on which better serves my purposes under any given circumstance. In the words of the immortal Groucho Marx (who, I don't know if I've mentioned yet, I'm a great fan of): "These are my principles; if you don't like them, I have others." Here's the great thing about movies. Try as we might to write off our affection for them as simply matters of aesthetic whim or tonal affection or adrenal response, when it comes right down to it, the films we love are the films that speak to us on a fundamental, philosophical level. Whether they introduce us to new ways of looking at the world or simply back up the ways we've already stumbled upon, the movies that move us are the movies that provide us the greatest understanding of ourselves. Either the selves we are or the selves we want to be. And, of course, what we want to be says as much about who we are as who we are does. Or not. Who am I to say? The same goes for books, plays, songs, poems, paintings, and radio shows. For example, This American Life, with its clever, self-deprecating little tales of white, middle-class foibles and monotone nostalgia, drives me nuts. All those hushed voices and ironic asides, all that self-effacing charm and opinion-free observation, all that asexualized sweetness, all that liberal delicacy and self-conscious quirkiness - makes me wanna holler. The older I get, the less patience I'm able to muster for the quiet desperation of the charmingly insecure chattering classes. What's wrong with being grabbed by the throat, or grabbing others by the throat? With giving voice to the devils inside rather than trying to miniaturize them with literary allusion and dispassion disguised as ironic post-modern affectation? With shouting our opinions to the sky? With grabbing our measly little socially acceptable worries and insecurities and shaking them around until they grow into enormous untamable beasts. At least then they'll provide us with some energy, some fuel, something of substance that we can use. Climbing into the ring and jabbing at our regrets and disappointments for 15 rounds strikes me as a self-destructive waste of time. They're tiny little demons, but they'll eventually eat you alive with imperceptible bites. You won't even realize you're dead until you wake up one day to find yourself writing your own precious little obituary for McSweeney's.

I want to jog back to something Josh said late Tuesday night – something I meant to address yesterday, until I went to see Synecdoche, New York a second time and then lost the better part of my day to its lingering effects. (It's unfair to spend much time talking about it, since most of the world hasn't seen it yet, but, world, I'm really ready for you to catch up because I'm dying to talk about it. So I'll leave it at this: I am in love with this movie.) Right, so back to what you said on Tuesday, Josh: "The self-help gurus have it all wrong: We don’t become better, happier people by improving ourselves or working through our issues; we become better, happier people by giving in to all our competing, contradictory impulses – consecutively, contiguously, contemporaneously, convivially, cantankerously, consumptively, concurrently, or all at the same time." I'm almost reluctant to open up this particular line of argument, because we've been down this path before, Josh, and it's the kind of late-night conversation best accompanied by a couple of drinks, and not necessarily with the world wide web watching. Also, if I get into it too much, then I'm likely to get foot-stamping mad at you before it's even noon.

You’re absolutely right, Josh – television is a writers’ medium. And if you want your entertainment to be more than just entertaining – if you also want it to be intelligent, complex, uncompromising, risk-taking, all that, then TV’s a good place to go. Part of the reason, I think, is that television has a commitment to producing great drama in a way that Hollywood has almost completely abandoned. (It also typically allows these shows to build an audience -- something Hollywood doesn't with its idiotic "opening weekend or nothing" mentality.) In an effort to make as big a buck as possible, the major studios have diverted almost all of their attention and resources to making insanely large-budgeted blockbusters. The mid-range drama, once the bread and butter of Hollywood, is an endangered species, even more so now that studios are shuttering their specialty divisions, and huge chunks of the population – female viewers, African-American viewers, Latino viewers – have been marginalized as nothing more than niche markets. But hell, so long as those 14-year-old boys are satisfied… Granted, indie films have been picking up the slack for decades, but it’s an insanely uphill battle, trying to find a home for all those films. These are pretty exciting times in terms of nontraditional platforms – local filmmaker David Modigliani's Crawford, for example, just premiered online this week, and exploded its potential audience in the process. That said, I’m an old-fashioned gal who prefers to watch movies on the big screen. Am I happy to watch on my iPod an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on an airplane? Yep. Do I want to watch, say, the new film from Baz Luhrman – a guy who makes epic-sized movies – on such a tiny screen? Nope. Back to TV: I agree with a lot of the examples you tossed out of exemplary television. Watching tonight’s debate, I was reminded of another.

Cinema snob? Me? Please. I’m a huge fan of TV. (You’re the one who doesn’t even have his television plugged in.) In fact, I’m such a huge fan of TV that instead of crafting a thoughtful, elegant response to your last blog post, I’ve watched an hour of Bringing Up Baby on TCM. And now I’m gonna watch the debate. And then I’m gonna watch the Project Runway finale. But that’s not the kind of TV you meant, now is it? Watch this space. I’ll have something to say soon enough.

Not to draw an undue parallel between the national economic crisis and the local gaming industry but haven't we learned anything about the rabid dogs of capitalism during the Bush years of unbridled deregulation? Just as folks go transferring their funds from banks to safer investments like their mattresses, Austin gets a double dose of corporate behemoths snatching local office space and businesses.

First comes the news that local indie stalwart Gamecock Media (see our cover story "Betting the Farm" for some prescient journalism on that game publisher, if I do say so myself) is acquired by SouthPeak Games. There is a proper press release that tells you everything on the record. Mike Wilson of Gamecock said that it was merely a matter of trading their anonymous backers (tossed off by the bucking stock market no doubt) in Washington, D.C., for bigger backers in Virginia. What this means for their ability to put out cool but decidedly unsexy titles like Mushroom Men in the future? We'll have to wait and see.