One reason I kept my DVHS unit long past its obsolescence in playing D-Theater and recording High Def stuff the better part of 20 years ago now is that I doubt there are more than a handful of other VHS capable decks out there with an HDMI output. I’ll have people over who when for fun I put a tape in are outright…

One of the things that hit me on rewatch (and why older me views the movie as far weaker than when I watched it as a teen all those years back) is that they start with the tract housing shot - and then almost ignore the suburban setting besides the occasional happily disconnected adult having a glass of wine. It’s one…

it was the right decision in terms of protecting the actor from really inappropriate personal scrutiny

That whole lockdown series was one of the best things to show up on Youtube during the pandemic - three millennial girls just doing three millennial girl roommate things.

One thing that I realized years later about Pump Up the Volume is how it’s the last movie that shows a 1980s (-ish given its release date) high school. Almost immediately afterwards, you had two simultaneous, very brief flashes in the pan: grunge and the neo-African look made popular by Public Enemy and on In Living…

Who is advising Harry about the optics of what he writes?

With all the revelations, something that I’ve wondered about for a while is how isolated he’s become from whatever support network he had.

“Yankees Fans. (Eyeroll.) ”

One of the few things I remember from watching Attack of the Clones in the theater on the day of release (or for that matter now, since I think I’ve fast forwarded through it at most a couple of times since) was the “Yoda! Yoda! Yoda!” chants as it was clear who was about to be the cavalry charging over the hill, and…

It also actually had a romance

Great find. I’m almost positive there was at least one more (and maybe two? - they played constantly on the TV guide channel) with him trying to murder the implied boyfriend at Meadow’s college, but you see exactly why nearly 25 years later I remembered this as one of the most misleading promos ever made.

Imperioli says he couldn’t tell if The Sopranos was supposed to be a spoof, a comedy

Alex Wellerstein has expanded on his brief comment on the Oppenheimer clearance, and I think it’s worth passing along what else he had to say given he’s about as good as it comes to nuclear history.

I’m glad to see someone else on the 1883 train.

What an idiotic move.

Besides her impressive songwriting skills, she always struck me as perhaps the only member of the group who learned from the megastar days that this wasn’t who she wanted to be and grew from the experience.

Lincoln needs to be higher if for no other reason that the thesis presented in it about why he pushed for the Thirteenth when he did is genuine historical research; there were several articles on that at the time. It also properly points out just how much of the North wasn’t all that enthusiastic about where Lincoln…

What Sweeney’s comments made me think of was Uma Thurman circa 1988, where I remember a review of Dangerous Liaisons that said there were audible gasps in the theater when she took her shirt off. (I also suspect no mainstream reviewer would write that nowadays.)

“It’s raining again.”

The finale was decent; it was everything that led up to it that was the problem.