Recommended Reading, an Open Question, and More: A Reveal Miscellany

Hello Revealers,

It's Friday, which seems like a good time to take care of any unfinished business and lingering items before the weekend begins. Let's start with some book recommendations from two friends of The Reveal.

• Alan Sepinwall, longtime television critic, author of the essential TV newsletter What's Alan Watching?, and co-host of the TV is Good podcast has a new biography of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone (and more). It's called Serling: A Journey into the Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary, and it's available wherever you usually buy books. You're going to want to read it.

You've also got two chances to see Alan in person. He'll be at [Words] Bookstore in Maplewood, NJ on November 11 and at New York's Paley Museum on November 13th.

• Also new: Funny Business: The Old-School Wedding Crashers and Knocked-Up Virgins Who Changed Comedy Forever by Matt Singer, editor of ScreenCrush, co-host of Filmspotting SVU, and author of Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever (and our long-ago co-worker at The Dissolve). If the title isn't a dead giveaway, Matt's latest explores the wave of movie comedies that dominated the '00s (and at least part of the '10s). Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell: if you want to read about their heyday, how it began, and what happened after it's peak, this is the book for you.

Matt's also currently on tour. If you're reading this, there's still time to catch him in Iowa City on October 22. He'll be appearing at the Refocus Film Festival. And if you're in Chicago on October 26th, you can attend attend a screening of Step Brothers at the Davis Theater (great theater) where Matt will be signing books supplied by the Book Cellar (great store), and participating in a discussion with The Reveal's own Scott Tobias (great guy). You're not going to want to miss this one! (Unless it's your wedding anniversary. Sorry Matt!)

• Here's something paid subscribers know about that free subscribers might not: Most Fridays, we open this space to an Open Question where we throw out a prompt for our readers. (One recent example: "Are there any movies you're too afraid to watch?") We're keeping our comments section limited to our paid subscribers, but we're including one with this free post anyway. Well, two, actually, tied to the books above:

1) What's your favorite 21st century comedy?
It's a broad question, but if I were to narrow it to the films included in Matt's book, I'd have to go with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a movie that can make me chuckle just thinking about it with lines that sometimes just kind of rattle around in my head, like "Dewey Cox has to think about his entire life before he plays" and "The wrong kid died!"

2) What's your favorite Twilight Zone episode?
Two answers come immediately to mind: The one that terrified me as a kid and the one that I don't think I got until I grew up. The first is "The Dummy," in which a ventriloquist (played by Cliff Robertson) is terrorized by his own dummy. The second is "Walking Distance," in which Gig Young discovers the meaning of the phrase "You can't go home again."

• While we've got you, here's a preview of what's coming up at The Reveal. Next week, we'll drop another installment of our trip through the Sight & Sound greatest films poll with a look at Fritz Lang's M, I'll be dropping a new installment of my annual "It's October So I Watched A Horror Movie I'd Never Seen Before Column" (it's about a pretty great movie, too), and we'll have reviews aplenty, including our takes on films like Wildwood, Clayface, Wicker, Possible Love, and more.

• Where else can you find Scott and me? Glad you asked: We probably should mention the podcast we co-host with our longtime collaborators Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson, The Next Picture Show, a little more often than we do. And if you want to hear me talk about Harrison Ford movies with my pal Mike Ryan, author of the newsletter The Hard Pass, I invite you to check out Ford Focus: A Harrison Ford Podcast.

• Finally, if you've read this far, we're guessing you're enjoying The Reveal. If you're a paid subscriber, please consider sharing this newsletter with others who might like it. And if you're a free subscriber and want to upgrade, here's your chance to save big on one year of an annual subscription. How much will you save? So much we don't even want to show you here, but it's our biggest sale ever and we're going to take it down at 12pm CT on Monday, so act fast.