@Oscillator Thanks for the tip, I don't own those but I know someone that does so I'm going to make a movie night of it and have my vote in by tomorrow night.

@NeoCweeny Is there any way I can get it from you? I hopped into the community right before the shutdown of GT, so it would be great to get a glimpse into what I missed out on. If it's easier, feel free to message me and I can give you my email or something.

@Ringedwithtile Yeah, I'm American. I'll keep looking and figure it out. Don't know why this one of all things is causing me so much trouble...

@michemagius This track is interesting to me because it's one of the few examples of a song that manages to bring together delicate RnB-style vocals with a heavily 90s dance-influenced synth and drum samples and have the result sound good. There's not a lot of buildup in the song, but it's still a good jam song. My biggest problem with it is the way that it ends, it feels abrupt because it cuts off in the middle of a repeated phrase and I wish they had just brought it to a solid conclusion. Overall, though, I found myself grooving to it almost immediately. 9/10.

Spent a lot of time trying to decide on a track worthy of sharing before I realized I was overthinking it. Here's a thing I like. It's called Let's Paint Our Teeth Green, and it's by Margot and the Nuclear So and So's.

@Ringedwithtile Has anyone found a way to watch X-Men? Been looking around but haven't found anything yet.

Got devoured by a combination of E3 and strep throat, sorry I haven't been around much. Fortunately, I'm healthy and back, and I intend to actually vote this round!

"Expert" is a pretty relative term because it's always defined in relation to the people you're around, but here are some things that I'm confident I know more about than anyone else on this forum:

• Postmodern philosophy (and its historical antecedents)
• Waacking and vogue dance movement, history, and culture
• The Scott Pilgrim vs. the World film
• High school policy-format debate
• Draft strategy in Magic: The Gathering
• LGBTQ+-inclusive sex education
• Performance art history, methods, piece construction, and execution

These are all pretty niche interests, but if anyone else is super knowledgeable in one of these categories I'd love to talk (or maybe have a showdown for supremacy could be fun? Who knows)!

@holy_angel_mx Round Two videos are for things that didn't make the final cut of the main series for people who have a bit more time to spare and want more. If the Best Of series is tier 1, Round Two is tier 1.5.

Grad school's picking up the pace but I plan to vote by the end of the weekend! This bracket is honestly so big that it's hard to remember to keep going, especially with so few players. If we do something in the future that's like this (maybe with musicians or something) we should consider starting with a smaller selection to speed up the process a little and hopefully keep people more engaged.

Honestly, when I built my lists, I did them on the assumption that more people would be voting than just the players. This skewed what movies I picked and in what order they went towards a mass audience, rather than specifically film nerds. I picked The Martian early because I felt like it was a good, recent Hollywood blockbuster that would be a stepping stone to introducing new people to Ridley Scott's older and sometimes weirder work, Rope wasn't on my list for Hitchcock because the cinematography is cool but the plot shows its age when it comes to clear cultural influences, and I didn't even think Cronenberg would make it past the first round despite being one of my all-time favorites. Part of me wishes I could have planned better for the audience I would be pitching my selections to, but part of me is happy to see things get shaken up a bit. (Though I don't get the North by Northwest hate! It's one of my favorite Hitchcock films because of its mix of the tense and the wildly improbable, plus it conveniently presents almost all of Hitchcock's quirks as a director in one movie as a good introduction to themes to watch out for.) If you were curious, here's what you didn't see:

Hitchcock:
The 39 Steps
North by Northwest
Rear Window
Vertigo
Psycho

Ridley Scott:
The Martian
Black Hawk Down
Thelma and Louise
Blade Runner
Alien

As you can see, there's a tendency to go with more accessible films early on and recognizable films towards the end. I was banking on that strategy to push my picks through, but oh well! Among all these greats, some have got to go. And now we're on the weird side of the bracket, so I'm looking forward to seeing new films and revisiting old ones. I'm hopeful that we'll see Blue Velvet out of Lynch, it's up there as one of my favorite films of all time.