I'm pretty sure people could hear me cringing in the cringy parts. It's important to have the right crowd, though. I couldn't imagine watching this in a suburban mall audience.

The horrible thing is, I can't guess which scene, because there are so many to choose from (SPOILERS):

Like Ghost World, it's one of those movies that's stuck between tones. It's amusing in a way you usually don't get from drama, but it's not really funny. The closest thing you get to a standard joke is the protagonist's sisters teasing him, and we're not supposed to laugh at that, because their mockery is genuinely…

All due respect, but your viewpoint is the very sea change Broadcast News is noting and decrying back in 1987. Once upon a time, the network's news anchor was supposed to be a journalistic heavyweight, not just a spokesmodel or newsreader. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Kronkite, those guys were legit journalists, who wrote…

Black or not, I laughed a lot. It does have its moments where the humor is so dark that you feel bad for laughing—Ben Wishaw suddenly whipping his head at a table to induce a nosebleed, for example—but it also had more laugh-out-loud funny moments than most Apatow/Adam McKay style mainstream comedies.

Or Punch Drunk Love (as much as I love it). Or Ghost World (claiming that the Illeana Douglas scenes provide "some of the film’s most purely comedic moments" is a polite way of saying those are the only funny scenes in the whole film).

In a similar vein, I find it hard to take the list seriously when it has Frances Ha at #6. The Ha in the title is purely ironic.

But the author of that review did add a comment to the post—not even at the top, later deleted—that told everyone that despite the C+ grade and a review that read like a D-, the film was essential viewing! That has to count for something…right?

Agreed. But by '87, date rape had definitely received enough media coverage that Tom's story was, at best, a bit of a chestnut (simultaneously, it's not so un-newsworthy that Jane would be a lovestruck idiot for allowing it to run).

I really like your comment. One of the biggest tropes of fictionally portraying people who aren't intellectually gifted is that they then have to be stupid and a failure in every aspect of their life. If any exchange in the film could be interpreted as a mission statement it'd have to be Jane's exchange with the…

Strange, I've always taken Aaron scoffing at Tom's date rape piece as the opposite of not understanding that date rape exists. I think Aaron understands that date rape exists, and thinks anyone else with half a brain knows that it exists as well. For that reason, he thinks that date rape isn't news, at least not the…

Joe Spinell, rest his soul, probably should've legally changed his name to "The Guy Who Played Willi Cicci in the Godfather Films."

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and Raising Arizona are probably the two most affectionate portrayals of dumb guys in the Coen's canon. In Oh Brother, all the characters are idiots, with McGill probably being the "smartest" character in the film (and he's still pretty dim). H.I. is another relatively high-functioning…

I don't know. I think we can tell by Otto's constant bluster that he doesn't know what he's talking about, even if we don't know about the subject matter. Also, later on Cleese's reactions to every one of Otto's lines underline that he's really dim.

Stallone also gives a good not-too-bright performance in Copland. However, in the second Rocky, he took it too far and basically sounded mentally disabled.

It doesn't help that they seldom show any affection for their stupid characters (but then, maybe that should just be "they seldom show affection" period). It's easiest to stomach in the stories where the joke is mostly at the expense of the "smart" character (Byrne in Miller's Crossing, Turturro in Barton Fink) rather…

It's hard not to feel like a bully when writing about stupidity, or writing stupid characters. One of the reasons Broadcast News works so well is because it gives a three-dimensional view of Tom, and it holds the smart characters in equal contempt. Jane exiles a romantic rival to Alaska and tries to have sex with Tom…

This is probably a better representation of how the character has generally looked between that first appearance and her latest series:

If this law existed in a vacuum, your claims might seem plausible. But if you look at the actual statute, and all the other, similar sweetheart legislation the NRA's rammed through over the years (like the gag order and the Tiahrt amendment), it's impossible to see this as anything other than congress rolling over and…

Is the song about people going up to her, thinking she starred in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar, and her having to say "No, I was in Battleship!"?