"Trusty" is what you call your steed.

Don't forget the black denim vest covered in safety pins.

ישי! הלילה נבשל!

We're not even lining pockets. Insurers don't want this. This is pure spite, the new engine of democracy.

Everyone I know in Arizona is complaining that there's nobody in the state to present a serious challenge.

Even more galling is that the screenwriter seemed to think that rendering the entire story pointless was somehow a more effective cautionary tale.

And they're actually happy, which makes for a much better contrast when shit goes horribly wrong than the miserably self-involved nebbishes in the remake.

(Sighs, repeats) being a pod person is curable.

2007's The Invasion revolved mainly around the mid-2000s paranoia over global pandemics, with at least a couple of the main characters being epidemiologists this time. However, being a pod person is easily curable, voiding any stakes or poignancy whatsoever.

Goddamnit, that was my idea for how to remake She's Out of Control.

I too find the '50s version more effective. The main thing the remake has is how it flips the attitudes of 1950s suburbanites and 1970s urbanites, but that has the unfortunate side-effect of making the characters a lot less likable.

What are the chances that this is worse than the last version, in which (in addition to just being an inconsistent, shitty-looking movie) being a pod person is easily curable?

But they're not a commodity for monetary speculation. So much wealth in the South had been sunk into the profound overvaluation of slave labor, totally detached from the actual product of that labor, that it was the only thing holding up the southern economy. Slavery indeed still exists, but there's no longer any…

Without a market for southern cotton, the speculative bubble on slaves themselves would have burst. That's exactly what happened when the Civil War began.

Idaho now has mandated non-compete. So, in the state, you can be fired for any reason with no recourse, you are prohibited from collective bargaining, and you can't get a new job unless you can prove in court that the position doesn't hurt your former employer's business.

The real issue at work here is that slavery itself was a bubble.

Are you familiar with Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives? It's a fascinating window into a world in which there were no world wars and no cold war, and consequently we live in a present where we've reached the technological level of the early 1950s.

1. Can we discuss how little sense "Mason-Dixon demilitarized zone" makes? The Mason-Dixon line is the border between Pennsylvania/Delaware and Maryland. Maryland was part of the union.

The gore is…an issue in the movie. Even if it's realistic, it's not framed correctly. Peckinpah would've pulled it off. Mel Gibson just can't.

Any period setting, really. The past always looks better because it's past, you know what comes next. This drive toward recreating the sense of immediacy is refreshing and exciting.