The Lost/Battlestar Galactica problem.

But that's exactly why bardic tradition kind of sucked. The advantage of written literature (and film) is that you don't have to deal with the local incompetent bard but can get a definitive version by somebody with talent.

I liked the "decadent aristocracy in space" parts, but then I'm a fan of Dune.

Even though the Star Wars movies haven't done it so much, there just are so much more possibilities for other stories there than in The Matrix. What other story in The Matrix universe is there to tell other than the one we've seen? It's the story of The One and the people who help him get there.

Was it local? I guess it would have to be given that it was set in Texas. I guess I thought it was supposed to be a national thing like "Good Morning America" given the similarity of the host to Regis.

It's almost as if aging, not having (as) shit jobs, and having families leads to being industrious and more serious. Also not hitting the bars as much. Unless the job or family thing falls apart.

Yeah, except in most places the indies are gone as well, having been killed by the big stores. When (rather than if, in all likelihood) the last Barnes & Noble where I'm living goes under, there will be literally *no* bookstores in my city (to be fair, I'm only about 25 miles from Washington DC and there are a few…

It's a temporary store lasting a few weeks or months. We always had them (think "Spirit of Halloween" costume stores, or those book-remainder stores that called themselves "Crown Books" after the real Crown Books went under), but now they are trendy. In the DC area we even have pop-up restaurants for some reason.

The only thing I kind of liked about it was Winona's graduation speech dissing Baby Boomers. Yes, it was sort of self-righteous but it really kind of encapsulates exactly why Gen-X hated the Boomers — all the hypocrisy involved in the hippie-yuppie transition. Gen-X can't really sell out in that way because we never…

Yeah, she has job that most young people would kill for (yeah, bringing coffee to a talk show host isn't glamorous, but that's how people get into show business), and she throws it all away just to make the host look bad.

How about You've got Mail! (technically M@il!, ugh!) for the late 1990s. As I mentioned recently, it really was about a very specific time in the late 1990s — you had the general public using the Internet, but before Internet shopping took off to any degree. So it was a battle between Meg Ryan's little bookstore and…

And incest relations!

I would also have accepted Jumanji 2: Electric Boogaloo. But seriously, it was Zathura (2005). Which may not technically be a sequel, but was based on another book by the same author featuring an enchanted board game (seriously, Van Allsburg, find another topic).

Buffy: You saw the Grand Canyon?
Xander: Well, I saw the movie Grand Canyon, on cable. Really lame.

A lot of the public *likes* dreck. It's why Michael Bay has a career.

Don't forget the inevitable montage of failed attempts by the space octopus to get the Beefeater guards to react.

But think about this — when Raiders was made, those classic serials were only 30-40 years old. So it would be like mining 1970s-1980s culture today. It's not like Hollywood *hasn't* been mining 1970s and 1980s properties.

Yes. The Japanese appropriated the works of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Ridley Scott to create the original manga/anime.

You mean the glassy eyed stare of the CGI Leia *wasn't* a reference to Fisher's drug habits during the original trilogy?

Not as clever as having Ed Wood's dentist fill in for Bela Lugosi by covering the bottom of his face with his cloak.