The accents were fine. The point of Blue Jasmine is that everyone interesting in San Francisco actually moved there from New York, even the working class people.

If you're going Buffy - Giles and Joyce should have been a couple.

That was true of the TV show. I'm not getting much of a noir vibe from the trailer, which worries me.

I'm starting to wonder if my love back in the day for Veronica Mars the TV Show was just a desperate search to find a replacement for Buffy/Angel. The trailer doesn't look promising.

I agree. For me the heart of the show was Veronica and Keith against the world - that was what was different and cool about the show. Veronica's love life? Not that exciting. Plenty of shows have done that sort of thing better.

"Of course, the Mandarin gag doesn’t work if the viewer speaks Mandarin."

And they were much better than the Stones. Supposedly that is one reason it took so long for RnR Circus to get released - the Stones were embarassed.

He didn't sing the lead at the same time on the studio track, they added vocals after they laid down the instruments. If you listen to the Beatles play Paperback writer live (look on You Tube), Paul simplifies the bass line considerably while singing. He was no Geddy Lee, in other words.

I'd give it another try, I think it's one of their better efforts.  Maybe a little raw and underproduced, probably in an effort to put more space between Travis and Coldplay, but it sounds good to me. If you like the pre-"Man Who" stuff you should like "Ode".

Why did you stop listening to them?  They've put out plenty of good music during the interim and toured the US pretty regularly.

"Ode to J.Smith" is a fine album - Travis is probably one of the more underrated bands of the past 20 years.  Very good live too.

Is Hutz supposed to be a Roma now? I thought he was a Ukrainian Jew?

"We Built this City" is simply the worst song of all time.  "American Pie" doesn't come close.

It's insincere in the way "Rocky Horror Picture Show" was insincere, and just as annoying.  People in the '70s weren't ready for hipster irony, they just did camp, and camp gets tiresome fast.

1982-1986.  Then walk away.

My favorite REM album is Murmur, I love Chronic Town, I saw them play in '83. I am one of those people who think REM started going downhill fast after they left I.R.S. records, and yet I will still argue that "Shiny Happy People" is a pretty good pop song - most importantly Kate Pierson's back-up vocals on that song…

To a Soviet audience of the 1970s those highways looked unbelieveable.  I always rationalized the highway sequence as a cheap way to add what would have seemed like impressive FX to a drunk movie viewer in Tomsk.

If I recall, the "highway driving" sequences were filmed in Japan.  What doesn't come across to an American in 2013 is that those wide smooth roads  with neon lights would have looked like crazy sci-fi FX to average Soviet film goers in the 1970s.

To Angry Marmot's point - Hitler probably got the inspiration for killing Jews and Slavs from his voracious childhood reading of Karl May novels about the American West.  He wanted to turn Poland, Ukraine and Belarus into the "German Frontier", and get rid of the indigenous population the same way the English and…

Of course almost everyone knew in the '60s that the Nazis had tried to eradicate Jews and had built death camps for that purpose.  But most Americans didn't take much of an interest in it, and it was almost invisible in pop culture prior to the 70s.  Why that was so is an interesting question - maybe some latent…