That's my favorite one.

The films get progressively more avant-garde/less bound to traditional rules of narrative filmmaking as you go. Badlands is a fairly conventional, Days of Heaven is more experimental with its visuals than the rules of cinema—and then you get to The Thin Red Line.

Right. They also rewrite Uncle Jesse as a high school drop out during this period, right? I'm now remembering a whole episode revolves around it with the guy who played Cousin Larry on Perfect Strangers being a snobby dick about it.

If you take the view that the "villains" in Breaking Bad are the ones that Walt views as being antagonistic towards his goals, Gretchen and Elliot sort of fit that bill.

It also has a huge international following that this show doesn't.

Full House didn't run well past the point it was watchable, which is one reason I think there was demand for it.

The Pure Michigan ad campaign bewilders the fuck out of me because that florid prose is also tying visiting Michigan directly to the concept of mortality—and it's a tourism board commercial.

I grew up in a household where three out of five family members developed a serious case of cancer at some point. The episode where the family has a cancer scare with one of the kids is unbelievably horribly written. It's like nobody on staff had experienced illness in the family, knew anyone who ever had, or bothered…

If the author really wanted to make the book unadaptable, he should have developed that into a full-blown homoerotic fantasy exchange featuring a young John Travolta to boot.

First, yes, that's a plot point in the sequel. (The author read this section of the book on NPR when it came out, which is why I know this.)

To me, Breaking Bad was the darker version of MacGyver for this generation. One of the more white-knuckled episodes of the run involved using household items to recharge a car battery.

Yeah, it's not like she's been in the national news before with her dad—who is also Gary Busey-level insane—calling her nuts, wearing a vial of Billy Bob Thorton's blood around her neck, and was suspected of sleeping with her brother. And I'm sure there is some sane, compassionate reason she chose to file for divorce…

That's Mel Gibson, I was talking about Alec Baldwin. He's the subject of the post to which I was replying. He's being favorably compared—on some level—to Gibson and Pitt in the post above.

I don't think anyone ever accused him of hitting the kids, though. That makes it different. People generally don't take verbal abuse as seriously as they should. Physical and sexual abuse, however, is a different thing.

I usually don't follow celebrity gossip but this is unavoidable. From how this is playing out, it seems equally likely Brad Pitt is a huge asshole with impulse control issues and Angelina Jolie is the craziest, most vindictive ex ever.

I think I'll check that out. According to the lists of books he recommends, he does seem to like "dirty realists" and authors not normally associated with that label who either influenced those writers or simply share their tastes, like Richard Yates. You recommendation makes it seem like it's in that wheelhouse and…

I love how Clinton supporters rail on and on about "crap conspiracy theory" but never get into specifics and then get condescending and dismissive. The fact that you guys support the one candidate in the race who peddles the notion that there exists a global conspiracy to make her look bad and has a base of voters who…

Low turnout favors the more conservative candidate because the people who vote in low turnout elections are people who are habituated to vote reliably, i.e. financially secure and older people, which happens to be Clinton's base.

Ron Paul and Rand Paul are popular with a very niche set of Republicans and do well in crowded Republican primary races because of that. Once the field winnows down, they're effectively out of the running. Neither of them ever appealed to half the party's base and a majority of independent voters.

People actually like him and high turnout favored him dramatically when it wasn't paired with, say, some combo of progressive district just happening to have had all their younger or more recently registered voters purged, other irregularities, the national media calling the race over beforehand, or…