Rapture details
At the end of the world, i.e. The Rapture, various things were predicted to happen in the fourth book of the New Testament, which was cobbled from various "gospel" documents floating around in the tenth century or thereabouts. The key events are a monumental battle between good and evil, the return of…

The "dull" parts of "The General" are mainly concerned with Buster's relations with the girl. The girl thinks he's come to rescue her, but of course, he discovered her by accident. She messes up their escape, making noise and such, until Buster hides her in a boxcar. Then he sees guys throwing boxes into the boxcar.…

Keaton was faced with an army of MGM screenwriters and executives for "The Cameraman". It accounts for the different, more sentimental treatment of the girl. His usual creative team was gone, off to work on other MGM movies. One had died. "The Cameraman" is the last film he had some control over. "Spite Marriage" is…

And money is what we are talking about: millions of dollars for a Super Bowl ad. That CBS allowed this in means that they did not sell all their ad space to "real" advertisers, and so they were stuck with this thing to fill the available space. Focus on the Family is a right wing organization created to suck money…

What no one seemed to realize is that the networks have turned shows where employees of an industry are rewarded for their efforts the past year into just another crummy reality show. And just like reality shows, awards shows have proliferated without sense to the height of foolishness.

Sigh. I've said this here before but the only "historical" record of Jesus is the paragraph in the History of Josephus (a Roman Jew) describing Jesus as a Jewish rebel against Rome. The gospels were written many hundreds of years after the event and were designed to formalize the Christian belief that existed in many…

Everything old is new again
I wonder if someone in Disney saw the old romcom "Three Coins in the Fountain" which had three love stories involving couples of different ages working in Rome who already knew each other but the coins moved things along. This horror goes all the way to magic in the "inoffensive" non…

Arnold is thinking that a few hours after this garbage, he has to deal with a huge state that is out of money and water (love that rain), hamstrung with voted propositions that limit any solution, full of politicians who don't have a clue, he's all alone on the mountaintop and everyone expects him to come up with…

Infinitely better direction, lighting, music, technical work, and general production stuff.

Actually, the thing they could change in the origin story is Peter Parker's relationship with women. The girl he and a jock called Buzz fought over in high school was Gwen, a gorgeous dumb blonde who was the daughter of an Air Force biggie who I believe figures in the radioactive spider thing. Mary Jane was a blind…

Irene Adler?
The result of three names on the screenplay. Never a good sign. Her presence is a dead giveaway this movie is a stinker. Just as Holmes was meeting her for the first time, Adler was in the process of being married to a big shot lawyer in a vain attempt to elude the Baron she had tried to blackmail, and…

I hate to mention this…
But the Christmas tree comes from Germany-it was a certain pine worshiped by the Druids who piled gifts and human sacrifices for the gods beneath it. When the Christian missionaries got there, they cleaned up the act and the Christmas tree was born. I believe that it was Prince Albert who…

Soupy the jazz fan
Coming from Detroit Soupy Sales was a great supporter and fan of jazz and had jazz artists often on his programs. Some day the video of Clifford Brown playing on his show will surface, ditto Monk, Jackie and Roy, …it was great when one of these would come on among all the comedy.

Jeff Dunham's problem
Is that there was once a ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen who was witty and clever enough to have a popular long running radio show with W. C. Fields, followed by a movie ("You Can't Cheat an Honest Man") where Bergen's dummies were so strong they were characters in their own right. So Jeff…

A few missing details
The comments mentioned before miss the point that even high class prostitutes aren't independent. They are part of a maze of corrupt operators who book her appointments, pay off any curious cops, take some of Allie's earnings for the organized crime people providing startup funds for the…

These are the two things they're not absolutely not going to do. By the way is this the second remake or the same one they've been talking about for a while that still hasn't gotten off the ground?

A real racist Bugs Bunny cartoon was the one where Elmer Fudd was replaced by a stereotype black character a la Stepin Fetchit who does all the usual Elmer gags with Bugs except Bugs eventually overcomes him by getting him into a dice game…

A guess
Let suppose you were a producer who wanted to make a movie that could make you a fortune. Showgirls is so bad certain people will go to see it, and you know who you are. But movies cost money and the producer doesn't have enough. So he gets someone to put up a website with what he has. People are talking about…

Amos n' Andy: Check And Double Check
Is from the early 1930's. Amos and Andy was originally a popular radio show which Hollywood got its hands on and made a couple of B movies. Check and Double Check is only worth seeing for Duke Ellington's 30's band, which plays "Double Check Stomp" - one of the first times a black…

There's another way to look at this
Jessica Simpson is a profit center for Simpson,Inc., a company in the Hype Industry, providing product to the media market. As Amelie correctly identified, her identifier is sadness. Seeing how well George Clooney, Inc. did going to Africa and being all UN and all, Simpson, Inc. did…