Also a fine moment, from early in the movie: when our hero is captured by the Holnists and forced (with other captives) to watch The Sound of Music every night.

For me, Star Trek V was both the worst and the most disappointing. Very close runner-up: Logan's Run (1976), which in no way lived up to the novel.

For decades now, any release from a big-name book publisher - whether rushed to market or not - is likely to be poorly edited. HarperCollins, the publisher of Baldwin's book, is a property of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, but it's not likely to have turned out any better if one of the other few remaining…

Although Manilow did indeed compose jingles before he started to make records, the implication should be avoided that he wrote all the hits he was associated with. He didn't write or co-write "Mandy" or “Looks Like We Made It” or “I Write the Songs” or "Can't Smile Without You" or "Tryin' to Get the Feeling" or…

Maybe I'll give them a try one day, but that would mean having to hear "Sex Kills" again (which I saw her do on the Letterman show around 1993-94).

Hey, I've got our still-functional Capitol continuous 8-track cartridge of Sgt. Pepper, circa 1968, that we used to listen to in the car when I was little. (My folks were pretty cool for their era.) Because of formatting required to divide the material into four "programs" of equal length, I never knew the correct…

Aw hell, "Getting Better" is simply great. (As is its musical descendant, XTC's "Ball and Chain" from 1982.)

Eli and the Thirteenth Confession

In 1977 at Symphony Hall in Boston, I heard a live version of "She's the One" that was much improved - I've never heard the Live 1975-85 album so I don't know if a similar version is on that, but the instrumental interludes were a lot less monotonous than on the album (i.e., they weren't all the same damn chord).

Writing "the crucial soundtrack by Simon & Garfunkel" is true but implies they were the only contributors to the soundtrack. There was other music throughout (instrumental) by Dave Grusin that was just as good, heard for example when Mrs. Robinson first invites Benjamin into her living room and when he first turns up…

However, Michael Learned could act.

For me, the early version of "We Can Funk" would be added to this list. I think it's far superior to the overwrought George Clinton collaboration version that turned up on the Graffiti Bridge album in 1990 along with "Joy in Repetition" (which was unaltered from the bootleg of a few years earlier).

Yes, but there are many good reasons we don't celebrate Space: 1999 as the big success in first-run hour-long syndication that led the way for the dozens of others in the early '90s.

There was no Nazi captain, darn it. John Gill was a historian, not military.

Don't conflate the two original-series Mudd episodes. In the second season, the Harry of "I, Mudd" was a comic character through and through. By contrast, the Harry of "Mudd's Women" was played straight, although he had a few very funny lines such as "Well, I'm about to start devoting my whole life to it."

But TNG wasn't on a network - Paramount gathered an ad hoc group of stations across the country that usually showed a given episode during two different time slots each week. Some of these broadcasters were network affiliates and some were independents. The success of the model pioneered by TNG led to other syndicated…

That makes no sense. In that episode ("The Neutral Zone," the last one of season 1), those three people had all been frozen more than a hundred years before Mudd's original-series adventures.

I caught the first show of the in-the-round Lovesexy tour (featuring lots of The Black Album and Sign ✇ the Times) in the fall of 1988. Peak Prince, no doubt.

"…like Joni Mitchell on her later records, his voice has deepened, developed an appealing smokiness." Maybe so, but does anyone listen to later Joni Mitchell records?

I just can't take seriously any drama involving body-switching, having long ago absorbed comic versions of the same idea - for example, the Kurt Vonnegut Jr. short story "Unready to Wear," or John Fiedler (inhabited by the alien once known as Jack the Ripper, but tranquilized) saying "Die, die, everybody die!" in the…