Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

The old screenwriter rule that the size of the heavy is the size of the hero is the measure of any bad guy. As this list of 10 Movie Villains Whose Actions Were Totally Justified states it, “the bad guy actually has pretty good reasons for doing what he’s doing.”

It’s a fair list though I would have added Co. Hans Landa from Inglourius Bastards. Movie writing of villains is an art because we have to believe that someone’s motives are understandable, even if his or her actions are tragic. Col. Landa even takes the time to explain his motives, one of the best scenes in the film. And the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman is equally articulate about his reasons for revenge -something that was lost in the sequels when he became just another boring sadist.

The word villain derives from the latin term villanus. Someone who worked on a villa, or farm. Crude farmhands had no couth. So it is curious that the site , Online Degree, specializing in filtering college degree programs online ,should be interested in villains. Unless they are subtly saying that the way to avoid being a rough farmhand for the rest of your life is to earn a degree and be a hero.

Within the “Computers & IT” selections for “Find My Schools” the site lists just about everything except Search Engine Optimization. Since they are engaging in SEO by trolling for links with unrelated novelties like best movie villains, it seems they should boast about it as a speciality. After all, I’m writing about it, so they have succeeded in getting at least one small link that has nothing to do with  college degrees. But don’t they know the best movie makers all dropped out of school?

Reed Hastings’ email notice (Sept. 19) to all subscribers that Netflix is splitting into two companies has two overlooked components. The first is that Reed Hastings made the email his own. That suggest that either he, or Netflix, consider Reed such a well-known star that the customers follow his words as closely as Brad and Angelina. Maybe so.

The second component is that running a streaming video company is not the same as running a DVD rental company delivered over the the internet. Once Netflix is freed from DVDs, it is also freed from other people’s content and pricing models set from the rental business (so many per month, time limits, all you can eat).

Look forward a few years to tiered subscriptions offering premium content, special VOD offerings, original programming, advertising, and public affairs. Sounds a lot like a TV or cable network, doesn’t it? In fact the name “Netflix” may be just as anachronistic in five years as “HBO” is now. HBO, Home Box Office, started as a movie service to bring you films over cable. Now most people know it for original series and specials.

Martin Peers writes in the Wall Street Journal, “If anyone should pay attention, it is executives in big media companies that own cable-TV channels. These have become a license to print money, thanks to a business model that charges consumers for a package of channels whether they watch them or not.”

This is the real story. Any executive reading the Netflix announcement should take a new look at Hulu. Hulu is for sale and could become the rival to Netflix in the new world of multiple platforms, instant entertainment, and consumer friendly pricing.

The dowdy aunt is cable TV. Too expensive, two restrictive, too controlled. An industry that celebrates the iPad only as a new TV remote that can do what their set top boxes can’t is missing the bigger picture.

Beating the odds on Google search has become a complex pastime calling for expert help creating questionable content. From time to time MovieWithMe receives an email from some underpaid internet field hand asking for a post or a link to a blog article they feel is relevant to our users. I’m tempted to reply in Hindi (using Google translator, of course) since I suspect many of the names like Tim or Mary are actually nom d’internet chosen by Mugdha or Gupta.

The latest asks for us to post “14 Movies Every French Major Must See.” The choices are what you might expect of anyone who has leafed through an issue of Cahiers du Cinemas. But I was heartened they included Taxi and La Femme Nikita among the classics. They also squeezed in Le Placard; a perfectly mediocre movie.

The site that has this profound interest in the language skills of French majors is called BestCollegesOnline.com. It provides a way to scan through college sand courses. They also offer “14 Movies Every Journalism Major Must See,” ” 8 Acclaimed Screenplays that were born on College Campuses,”  and “Ten Incredibly Beautiful High Schools that put yours to Shame.”

All of this is useful information for someone, though I’m not sure it makes much difference if you are looking for college credit online. My fourteen movies for French majors would probably concentrate not on classic titles but on pronunciation. Most French movies use too much slang and mumbling that students can not understand. Who knows that shpa really means je ne sais quoi or that un bur is and Arab from North Africa. Few contemporary French films use the classic language, but those few are the ones students should see and hear.

Meanwhile I hope Gupta enjoys this post in case he ever plans to learn French.

Palindromes (USA 2004, 100 min. dir: Todd Solondz, cast: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur. Matthew Fabur).

Locked away in some dusty attic is the small dollhouse in which Todd Solondz played out his childhood fantasies. There are droll dolls, pervert dolls, and dead dolls. No wonder his first film was Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995).

The meaning of Palindromes is frozen among cobwebs in one of the dusty doll rooms; as if it were a single cell in the director’s mind. This is to say you can’t understand a Todd Solondz movie unless you know the inside of that dollhouse, and nobody has been there or ever will be except for Todd.

The best the rest of us can do is sniff at the scent of genius and an order of depravity as we watch movies like Palindromes. But we must always remember that the whole is not the some of its parts, the whole is a hole. The parts are all. Some are delightful, some confounding, some are stupid.

The theme of Palindromes is a pubescent high school girl played by various actresses who wants desperately to get pregnant. You can read the rest of the plot at Wikipedia.

Cousin Mark (Matthew Faber, my favorite character in the film) says that life is like a palindrome where everything is only self-referential. “It doesn’t matter if you gain 50 pounds or lose 50 pounds or you have a sex change: what have you, all these shapes and sizes in the center; is a part of ourselves that is palindromic by nature.”

He alone really understands the dollhouse. The rest of us are tour visitors wandering from room to room in hope we’ll either found the toilet or the exit. Either way, it’s a journey worth making at least once.