Before this movie came out, I read several different reports to the effect of "If you respond to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg you'll respond to La La Land." I'm a longtime Cherbourg fan, and just now on TV I've seen a long trailer for La La Land - and I can already tell that seeing the whole movie would be excruciating…

That Thing You Do! is fun, and it holds up to repeated viewings over 20(!) years, but I wouldn't call it a musical, despite the several original songs.

Wasn't it enough that she (along with Spacey) looked at us for the first time in that scene?

"We"? I'm a blue-state Democrat. The ones who fucked up were the Republicans and their national committee, who couldn't figure out a way to prevent the game-show host from gaining the nomination.

I think jokes about the new president are highly appropriate in any AV Club posting.

The idea for the final scene of the U.S. Life on Mars was ripped off from Philip K. Dick, specifically the resolution of his novel A Maze of Death. (Hardly the first time an idea of his was stolen/altered; The Truman Show is a prime example.)

The 1977 movie - which ran for more than a year in some theaters - was never called "Episode IV etc." until after the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, in which the crawl began with "Episode V". There may not have been a "precise date of the change," but the Episode IV designation and subtitle were not in use…

That's one thing I like about the (dozens of) Dick novels: They complement each other, but none is a sequel to any other. (High Castle is an outlier in that it's set in the author's own present day, 1962.)

Yet another borrowing from other Dick novels is the destruction of Washington, DC. This is not described in the 1962 High Castle novel - which has no scenes in the eastern U.S. - but in novels such as Now Wait for Last Year it's explicit that the White House is now in Cheyenne, Wyoming. And many of his stories and…

Judging from the photo in the New York Times review of Sleepless currently online, the car isn't an "olive-green '68 Pontiac GTO" but rather a '69 (with the optional headlamp doors). Personally I'd rather have a '68, given the choice.

Not to take anything away from Blatty, but he didn't write A Shot in the Dark from scratch; it's based on a French stage play, L'Idiote. He and Blake Edwards rewrote it to insert Clouseau, as well as new characters Dreyfus and Kato who weren't in The Pink Panther.

FYI: The original theatrical run of Clue had different prints (with different endings) playing in different theaters at the same time - I remember seeing newspaper ads that specified "Clue (A)," "Clue (B)," or "Clue (C)".

And it was called simply Star Wars, in 1977 and for years afterward.

Thanks for mentioning The Alvin Show - I'd noticed that the paragraph about the 1960s mentioned only the records.

My understanding is that Breathed simply sold the rights and had nothing to do with the adaptation of his book of the same title.

Although Tagomi is a main character in the 1962 novel, he only has one out-of-universe experience and it lasts no more than a few minutes. He's sitting in a city park staring at a unique piece of handcrafted jewelry, a bronze pin made earlier by Frank, and thereby ends up briefly in our own universe - he asks someone…

From what I gather, the fact that Rico and his buddies were totally vulnerable to the Bugs in battle (itself a key element of the satire) started out as a budgetary matter: The producers had enough special-effects money budgeted to create the infantry's powered, heavily armored suits - equipped with all manner of…

Such a project was recently announced. That is, the proposed film is supposed to depend more on the original novel. The screenplay is to be written by the writers of the new Baywatch movie, if that tells you anything:

It wasn't unfinished - it's just that PKD was unsatisfied with the ending, which was dictated by his own use of the I Ching while writing the novel. One way to interpret the ending, of course, is that when Juliana and Abendsen come up with the Inner Truth hexagram at his house in the final scene, they become aware…

"Land O’Smiles" is mentioned once in the 1962 novel as a brand of marijuana cigarette (Childan has one, by himself). The Yakuza, however, are never mentioned at all.