You're right about Basic Instinct; Paul Verhoeven managed to make something actually kind of elevated and subversive out of Joe Esterhas' script, which, at face value, is nasty, pulpy, and generally misogynistic piece of work.

I mean, the idea of a powerful, sexual, intelligent woman who demands to be recognized as an equal to a man AND also will totally hunt you down and try to murder you if you cross her was basically the heterosexual alpha male's nightmare in the late 80s/early 90s. Even in something like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,…

Falling Down does that thing where it tricks you into identifying with Douglas' character because he's a famous movie star giving a charismatic performance as a man who's reached the end of his rope, but then turns the whole thing around by proving that he's the bad guy by the end of the film. It's not the subtlest…

Sure. Nothing reinforces the male ego quite like a woman abandoning her principles to fall in love with him, or having her turn out to be deeply imbalanced, psychotically clingy, to the point where she has to be punished. Usually killed. Disclosure subverts the model slightly by having Moore's character be fired and…

It's the same old story. Men were used to having all the power, and were incredibly threatened by the idea of women taking it away from them. Hence the huge influx of thrillers where a woman shows up and disrupts the status quo. With seduction! And murder!

As far as side-scrollers of the 80s go, I always preferred Gladiator. Simple, yet effective. Also, both games were pretty much impossible–although in Gladiator you could memorize the patterns. And both featured ripped dudes stripped down to their underwear.

I'd go further and say that it fits in the very Michael Douglas-y subgenre of Guy Who Makes a Bad Decision But Then Gets Pursued by a Psychotic Woman in a Way That Makes You Forget What a Sleazy Thing He Did. Basic Instinct, where he fucks a suspect in a murder he's investigating; Fatal Attraction, where he has a…

I don't find it strange that the kids use the word 'queer' as an insult; I distinctly remember the word 'gaylord' being thrown around pretty freely, and it's basically the same thing. But it basically just meant 'lame' or 'different' and I don't think there was any real understanding of what the words actually meant.

I ride the subway at least twice a day, and based on most of the people I've seen riding the train, any porno that might spontaneously break out would be incredibly sad.

I picture Paul Banks gesturing at this enormous warehousey space full of couches, like "See? You can totally stay over. It won't be weird at all!" while Carlos D stands off to the side somewhere and grimly fashions a new armband.

My friend is from Poland and, uhm… he has a beard!

I mean, why do you really need 200 couches?

Love Turn on the Bright Lights, though I don't pull it from the shelf that much. Antics wasn't quite as good, but it suffers primarily but it's just not as good as the first record. That said… Paul Banks' lyrics sometimes cross the thin line that separates cryptic from nonsense.

Role Models is really great. It made LARPing look like a viable life choice. Even Wanderlust has its moments (I'm thinking primarily of the Dick monlogue, Lauren Ambrose giving birth, and the way Katherine Hahn says hummus).

The '94-'95 season was one of those fascinating failures—not always pleasant to watch, but kind of unforgettable. Whereas I doubt anybody will be writing in-depth analyses of the past few seasons, which haven't been blazing tire fires of badness, but just mediocre enough to be forgettably watchable.

SJWs seem like people who need to inflate their own sense of superiority by showing off how sensitive they are to certain issues and "correct" they act. For the most part I don't doubt that they feel passionately about the issues, but there's definitely some sort of void in their lives that they're trying to fill.

It's a terrible sketch, but I don't actually think it's homophobic. The joke isn't the fact that the guys were anally probed, the joke is that a bunch of dudes who just got violated by an alien species can't bring themselves to acknowledge what happened, even though they clearly all just went through the same thing.…

Ok, so I've checked out the first three of these and while it can be funny, and Alec is awesome, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. It seems like either the questions lead the contestants to the only answer that makes sense or the questions are so esoteric that you could really give anything as the answer. So if…

See also: Dirk Benedict vs. female Starbuck.

Yeah, it was called Salamander in Japan, but Life Force in the US. It was a cruel, cruel game.