I could see really going back through this show at any point during the next few decades. Same with "The Wire." That's some nuanced shit right there.

Ahh, to be a GBV fan. So rewarding, yet so very, very frustrating.

Them's fighting words.

Any discussion of '90s music inevitably yields endless 'they-shoulda-been-bigger' examples, but…

America was at a crossroads, as far as moralizing, e.g., within a 12-month timeframe:

So between this and that Stanford Prison movie, is this a new sub-genre, i.e., the handful of interesting things you learned in your Psych 101 class before realizing it's actually a boring discipline?

This seemed like such a good idea for a movie, but what a disappointment.

Did Gyllenhaal feel emasculated by all the Brokeback Mountain jokes or something? So many of the roles he's done since then come off as a trying-too-hard declaration that he's not to be fucked with.

I'm glad to see other people feel the same way. All my friends were eager to see this by the time it got to video, so I was sort-of peer pressured into gathering 'round the TV. There was the perception it was the Cool Movie to watch at the time.

Anything political aside, I followed his Brian Williams-like scandal very closely over the couple months that it happened… he's such a liar it's really quite comical. Literally: some of his defenses were chuckle-inducing.

Done and done.

Re: Kicking and Screaming

My daughter attends daycare with a boy named Atticus, and it is after the character. Actually, we named our daughter Harper, and it is basically after Harper Lee… Fortunately, I think my daughter's name remains unsullied, best as I can tell.

I heard about this on a radio news break from a national source (ABC?). It reported the story intercut with clips from the movie. As far as those things go, it was pretty funny.

Victim: "Why are you pulling a rope?"
Killer: "Well, have you ever tried pushing one?"
[hi-hat]

LitW is THE most jaw-dropping act of vanity/temper-tantrum I've ever seen in a movie. I actually wondered why the film wasn't widely reported just for how much its creator's hubris was on display. The way (as mentioned) he inserts himself into the story as a writer whose writing will literally save the world once…

I find your take eerily spot-on: I have a friend who's your typical suburban dad. Unlike so many of us who are also of that ilk but were dragged into it kicking and screaming, this guy seemed to race toward that lifestyle. Like, you could almost believe that he aspired to suburban fatherhood even as a teenager.

Agreed. In the '90s we used to talk about and provide examples of how the albums made by bands just discovering heroin were often really good, but the ones made after they'd been on heroin a while sucked.

Yes, the songs on "Dirt" portray the hellishness of addiction in a way that hadn't been attempted before (or at least for a while), but I still see it as a form of glamorization. To me it's like that Francois Truffaut quote about there being no such thing as an anti-war film.

You gotta admit, Alice in Chains, particularly "Dirt" era, made doing drugs seem cool. They glamorized drugs… there's really no way around it.