Special Bulletin scared the crap out of me; I was watching it along during an out-of-town trip in a mediocre hotel, which did not help my mood any for the next few days.

Special Bulletin and HBO’s Through the Looking Glass make a great faux news nuclear peril double feature.

Which version of On the Beach did you do? The original or the remake?

The thing is, I think all of these movies underplay the true effects of a total nuclear war given the number and power of nuclear weapons we and the Soviets had in the Eighties. The Last Ship (the novel, not the terrible TV show based on it) probably gets closer to the truth: all major land masses become completely…

I’d never heard of By Dawn’s Early Light until now. What a cast!!

I was 9. For the next few months I was afraid every plane flying over us could be a nuclear missile.

I did a whole mini-festival one weekend for a friend once with all of those plus When the Wind Blows, By Dawn’s Early Light, and On the Beach. Good times.

Weirdly, listening to Buckley in the discussion after the movie was more depressing than the movie. HE was real. Reagan ended up being more rational than Buckley and others like Edward Teller.

It’s a great piece of film, though I tend to think Threads is the better one given it commits relentlessly to the darkess of the concept.

In unrelated news, North Korea just fired a missile over Japan, and Donald Fucking Trump is still our president.