I am not going to add to the discussion, but as meta-discussion: any time one compares the "American system" of education another country's, it is worth keeping in mind that it is almost always an apples and oranges thing. Many industrialized countries do have truly "national" systems; the US has a zillion different…

Maybe your blender isn't cheap enough. In the worst ones, the blade assembly comes right off if the plastic cap holding it to the bottom of the pitcher is unscrewed even slightly. With age, the plastic cap will crack and loosen a bit, to the point where a nudge in the wrong direction will do it.

My guess: Sly makes it to the event, and maybe even gets on stage, but doesn't perform.

Uh, 1974: Blazing Saddles, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Chinatown, The Conversation, Day for Night, Death Wish, Herzog's Kaspar Hauser film, The Godfather II, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Young Frankenstein. And, of course, Zardoz. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

Meg didn't have an identity beyond whatever the plot required at any moment, and Charles Wallace was just too much—- like how teens in teen movies never speak or act like actual teenagers, they are Hollywood Teen archetypes, Charles Wallace was a boring and predictable Super Kid Genius archetype. When I was a kid I…

a wrinkle in time
is one of the worst books i have ever seen recommended for children by people who have good taste in other areas.

I count myself as a huge fan, but with some of those movies, even I was clawing my eyes out and begging for it to be over, regardless of the riffing. I wouldn't expect excruciatingly bad movies to be anything but a somewhat rare and/or acquired taste—- and could understand the hate if it was based on that.

Ween
Surprised nobody has mentioned them. They're an especially hard sell to anyone who still remembers "Push th' little daisies" or has known a hardcore Ween fan (I don't consider myself one, and have never met one who wasn't irritating). I really like their music, though, and will occasionally try to put people…

I will never, ever, ever watch Sinbad in Houseguest or Jingle All the Way.

uh, what are you talking about? some kind of race war in new jersey?

meh
rent "A Boy and His Dog" instead.

AFAIK there is no good home video edition of Beat the Devil. I have looked, all I've found are as crappy, and maybe in fact the same, as the file you can find on archive.org. It makes me think that maybe there is no good print of Beat the Devil in existence—- or at least none in the hands of anyone who thinks there…

Good luck, Artie
I don't appreciate Artie's comedy as "good comedy", like that I would recommend to others… and I can't see what people find so great about his work on Howard Stern (one of those things where you have to have followed it from day one, maybe)… but he does make me laugh, he has a warmth that a lot of…

cosby's rap album
Reminds me of a project James Brown was working on in the years up to his death—- some kind of awful save-the-hood message song called "Killing is out, School is in" (or something like this). Read about it in an excerpt of a book on Brown in the New Yorker and always hoped it would see the light of…

AVC likes Tarantino, Anderson, Coen Brothers
Wow, stop the presses. But seriously, this is a pretty good list. I might've swapped "Up" and "The Hurt Locker" in positions.

It takes a while to write three thousand pages of commentary. Give us time.

Completely off topic, but does ZMF have any opinion of "Blind Fury" starring Rutger Hauer in a retread/reinterpretation of the Zatoichi character?

This is unseemly.

Re the first reply to this post, mostly, I'd kind of like to see a video game adaptation of the film "Overlord."

i love this movie
The amazing thing about Mac and Me is that it is played entirely straight. When people describe various decades they often use a broad brush and speak of the 1990s, for example, as the decade when sarcasm, irony, hyper-self-awareness firmly embedded themselves in popular culture, and became sort of…