This brought back a lot of good memories. I was in grad school at UM for the entire run of the 2000-2003 dynasty, and it was an amazing thing to go watch those guys play every week at the old Orange Bowl. The teams that Butch Davis built and Larry Coker wisely did not touch were so stacked with talent, it was…

Ray Lewis wasn't part of the teams that the first movie profiled; he was at UM in the mid-90s, when they were on their downward slide due to the sanctions they were hit with for their bad behavior in the 80s/early 90s.

Don't sell short Far Beyond Driven (probably the most extreme, abrasive metal record to ever debut at #1 on Billboard, and it did so right in the middle of Alternative Nation's heyday). Phil doesn't exactly make himself sound terribly intelligent on the live album, but I would never really lump them (or their fans) in…

Metal was one of my genres of choice in high school, and Phil's band Pantera was probably my favorite. I moved away from it as I got older, but in one of those ironic twists, I've found myself really drawn back to it in the last couple of years, and not just drawn back to it, but the more extreme the music, the…

Phil's drug problems had a pretty strong hold on him for most of the late 90s and early 2000s. My one and only Pantera gig, on their very last tour, I was lucky enough to catch him on a reasonably good night. He was on the entire show, with only one long-winded rant that made next to no sense getting in the way, but…

The phrase "You son of a motherless goat!" still works its way into my speech at least once a week…

I heard this album for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and this review has it pegged perfectly. I didn't know Paul Banks was playing the bass, and the playing's certainly not as good or as prominent, but this definitely is the band's best since Antics. It doesn't screw with the trademark Interpol sound all that…

Unless my dad got rid of it, my copy presumably still exists somewhere. Game was hard as hell—that encyclopedia was still over 1,000 pages long, so you had to be pretty fast in looking shit up if you didn't already know it. I'm visiting home next month. I ought to look to see what happened to the games.

See, and I'd always heard that he died of a tropical infection that he picked up in South America while filming the thing, which made the movie to me seem all the more awful. Not only does a respected actor's last role come in such a shit-show, but it killed him, too. If that was never true, well…the movie still sucks.

I wouldn't guess that she's 25, either, but that's probably because she's got the emotional maturity of a 13-year-old. I swear I'm going to break something the next time she writes a song about the broken heart she's got because her latest boyfriend dumped her after getting freaked out because she wanted to pick out…

Winters took exception to a few things in both his autobiography and the biography written about him, starting with the scenes of his leave time in Paris, adamantly denying that he saw the face of the young SS soldier he killed in Holland when looking at the French boy on the subway. He also stated that the tent-type…

All of the lines of the officers drunk on Hitler's deck crack me up. You've got Nixon drunkenly trying to remember Hitler's chain of command ("No, goddammit, Hitler, Himler, Himler, Hitler, Goering, Goebbels…"), Welsh "standing fast on his present position" while struggling to remain vertical, and Spiers doing his…

Agreed with all that you've said, and I'd also argue that it raises the actors' game, as well. Even if you're an extra in the background, you can't rest on your laurels by simply taking up space; if you're in focus, you've got a role to play, too.

One of my all-time favorites. 3 hours long, and it feels like it's too short. Just a beautiful movie. Gregg Toland's work, as you've said, is phenomenal. For those who don't know what deep focus is, it's the camera development that allowed for objects in the back of a shot to be as clear as those in the front, and it…

Hate to burst your bubble, but that line is from "Why We Fight", not long before the patrol discovers the concentration camp…

The words "Kyle Chandler" just about sold me, right there. Factor in the WWII period piece aspect, and I'm really on board. Is this streaming anywhere, right now?

Not to diminish the power of the episode or series as a whole, but random fun fact: the German general who addresses his surrendering troops is played by German actor Wolf Kahler, who 20 years earlier played Colonel Dietrich, the Nazi in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" who gets his face sucked in by the wrath of god at the…

This was my problem with The Pacific, too, and it's been a big enough one that I've never gone back to re-watch it. The producers wanted to encompass more of the Pacific war as a whole, which I guess is an admirable goal but one that's wholly unnecessary. Did people complain that Band of Brothers didn't capture enough…

It's called "We Stand Alone Together", and it's pretty wonderful. Fills in a few gaps in the storytelling of the miniseries (for instance, why they were still in Holland after Market Garden fell on its ass), and it has some great footage of the vets in old age, not only stuff that was left out of the talking heads at…

I'd add one other little tidbit from Orloff on this episode: in real life, Winters was the one who entered the widow's house in the course of searching the town. Orlofff asked, and Winters consented, to changing it to Nixon for the purposes of the plot being focused on him, namely, that for all the grousing that guys…