The British version of Pride and Prejudice shown on PBS in the early 1980s was very good indeed - 5 hour-long episodes, a proper length for an adaptation of this book, and well-cast actors.

I can't address that assertion directly, but: Having been a music student at several different institutions (all of which included jazz departments or the equivalent - I was even a composition classmate of Grover Washington Jr. around 1980), and having read about Whiplash and seen or heard several clips from it, I can…

I like your list except for #5. Desire is a comedown at best. The songs tend to be lyrically inert - many of the lyric credits go to Jacques Levy (would Dylan's own lyrics for "Hurricane" have been even worse?) - and the performances of some of the same songs during the Rolling Thunder Revue (also featuring the…

I'm afraid that the parts of the musical when everyone is singing toward the audience (especially the "Into the Woods" segments, including the opening and ending of the first act) simply can't be translated to film satisfactorily. This is, I think, why "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" didn't survive in the Tim Burton…

One of the Discovery's three space pods from 2001 - actually I don't think they exist anymore, but weren't they recreated for 2010?

The problem (for me) with LA Story is that the audience is supposed to find Ms. Tennant's character as appealing as Harris Telemacher does. That's an invitation I can't accept.

Ever since I saw Toys more than 20 years ago, I have actively avoided movies scored by Hans Zimmer.

Only about 13-14 episodes have elapsed since the departure of Josh Charles (although he's still directing the occasional episode, or has done so). Between that and having to set up Panjabi's exit, the story possibilities are somewhat constricted versus (for example) the start of season 4. But a lot of good art has…

Yep, I saw him on stage before he ever became well-known, in The Heidi Chronicles. Tony Shalhoub was also in the cast. Pierce was "David Pierce" in the program; this was in New York in 1990.

The Peter Hyams movie from 1984, adapted from Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two, is called simply 2010. The whole The Year We Make Contact thing was simply an advertising tagline that stuck so well that many people think it's part of the title, analogous to what happened with Die Hard 2 and X-Men 2 whose "subtitles"…

Elsbeth had never appeared in two consecutive episodes before now, had she? Better in small doses is right. Nothing against Carrie Preston, of course.

It just shows to go ya'.

"Silver Springs" is always welcome when I happen to hear it, but I don't own it - it's the flip side of a single and not on an album, is that right?

As others have said: No mention of Bare Trees? Unconscionable.

"Rubber Soul marked a turning point between the jangly, three-chord pop songs of the band’s early days, and the more mature songwriting that came later…" Oh, come on. Just to take one example, "If I Fell" was more than a year earlier (the Hard Day's Night album) and has at least 11 different chords.

The only parts I appreciate any more are the dialogue-free sections, with only the great Jerry Goldsmith orchestral score on the soundtrack. Not one of the actors makes a good impression, perhaps because the dialogue (which was continually rewritten during shooting) is not only awful, but had to be looped for all the…

Have not looked at the 664 previous comments, but surely someone conversant with Collins' role in Star Trek - The Motion Picture must have already made a joke involving the term "Decker-unit"…

Some public libraries carry LoA books. All the ones I've seen are really well edited, with brief author biographies, lists of edits and corrections versus the original editions, etc.

The Library of America is doing just that! Not the "complete works" as only a handful of the short stories are included, but I think they're printing all the novels:
Novels & Stories 1950–1962
Novels & Stories 1963–1973
Novels 1976–1985
For the first of these, see www.loa.org/volume.jsp?Requ….

In any discussion of Vonnegut and (or versus) SF, it's noteworthy that both Vonnegut and Robert Heinlein saw their first wide exposure not among SF readers but in the weekly mass-circulation "slick" magazines. In Heinlein's case, after a pre-war career limited to the SF pulps and a postwar novel or two, he sold "The…