Unless my memory is playing tricks on me (I haven’t seen this since it came out), there’s also a really weird reference in Natural Born Killers. When we meet Juliette Lewis’s terrible family, who’s supposed to be like a nightmare version of everything bad about middle America so we won’t mind if Woody Harrelson…

Everyone’s already covered this pretty well but if you’d like to read more complaints about The Goonies at greater length, here’s mine: https://boxd.it/NYgEd

Either you missed the point of that Klan analogy by 1000 miles, or you’re just fucking with me now, because “the second Klan was less violent and maybe Hugo Black wasn’t racist for being in it” is about the least appropriate response I can imagine. What the hell?

I’m not sure how it’s possible *not* to see Berg’s argument as being partly about his view of contemporary liberals being soft on the USSR, since he comes right out and says that. That’s not my interpretation; it’s central to the closing part of his review where he explains what he thinks Lindbergh’s real deal was.…

Back to Lindbergh: Louis Berg reviewed his wartime journals for “Commentary” and concluded that he wasn’t an anti-semite (fitting with how he’d seemed earlier), just a dupe fixated on how the western countries should ally with Germany against the Soviet Union and Japan.

Well, sort of. As that article mentions, once you got to the 15th century, “de” in a name meant it was a nobiliary name— but before that, it could be an ordinary person who didn’t have a formal family name and just used the name of their hometown, like “Joe of Pasadena”. This Oxford story is from the 14th century, so…

While the idea that you could get a bunch of them to chase gangsters in an organized way is obviously one of Anderson’s anti-realistic touches (especially since they really hate the sound of automatic weapons), it’s a myth that there’s no place for cats in law enforcement. Being silently judged by one from the corner…

Any conversation like this about who is or isn’t “method” is inherently confusing, because that’s not just one thing. Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner all had different takes on Stanislavski’s ideas and they all tend to get lumped together... and none of them were really about telling actors to stay in character all the…

My dad is 8 years older than Springsteen, has his own hair and his original face, and looks basically like that. It’s not unusual. I wonder what this guy thinks old people are supposed to look like.

And I’m a weirdo who likes to see reviews of festival stuff that I won’t have any way to see this year, but lots of people aren’t; I wish I had a dollar for every time someone showed up in the comments for reviews like that to rant about how critics only write about that hard-to-find stuff because they’re snobs who…

“...a shield they’re using to hide subtle but nonetheless significant adjustments to the story and its characters”

I guess I’m *still* misunderstanding your point, since I just don’t see this as contradictory in any way. Pullman doesn’t describe the governing system in any detail, but he doesn’t give us any reason to think that the Magisterium runs every little detail of everything directly. He depicts it as a theocratic empire.…

“At one point Lyra suggests reporting Roger’s disappearance to the “State Police”: who, precisely, is this? Is it just the Magisterium? The show has made no clear distinctions between the state and the Magisterium, so I’m a bit perplexed by this evocation.”

“...you’d think Veidt, being the smartest man in the world, could write something better.”

The character Jeremy Irons is playing was a much more sociable and outwardly benevolent character in the comic. He’s been in hiding and slowly going nuts since then.

Where are you getting this “Iron Eagle” thing? Gossett was in a movie by that name, but I’ve seen no mention of it in connection with Watchmen. Even on IMDb, where every unreliable rumor finds its way into cast lists, he’s just “Will Reeves”.

If you define it loosely enough I think you could pick a lot more than that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stalker and/or Roadside Picnic also had some influence from the Algis Budrys novella “Rogue Moon”-- the weird area there is on the Moon rather than Earth, but it’s an alien-influenced terrain where physics are all…

Cool, thanks - that’s why I couldn’t find it, because I forgot it didn’t have “printer” in the name. So, on the one hand, that’s not how a laser printer works: they have plenty of moving parts, and the laser doesn’t write on photosensitive paper as he says - the actual printing part of it is more or less just like a…

How about just don’t read it and don’t worry about it? You don’t need to bookmark the page; when the movie opens for real, they’ll either rerun this review or run a new review with a link to this one. It’s fine that you don’t want to hear about things early, but there are other people who do and that’s why movie…

Derry is closely based on Bangor, which King moved to in 1979. While he liked Bangor in some ways, he said he got increasingly creeped out by the culture - and there was a real-life gay-bashing murder there in 1984 that he based the Adrian Mellon scene on. I think that’s probably what made the “something’s deeply…