I’d throw in (fitting for the article) It’s a Wonderful Life too. People forget only like the latter third of that film even takes place at Christmas (less than Die Hard!) and the plot could have easily been done without it being set at Christmas at all. Still an undisputed Christmas classic.

And of course, tons of…

It became a Christmas tradition for me well before it became a cliche online joke. No it’s not a movie about how Christmas has to be saved for the thousandth time but how many of those films are any good?

What’s especially troubling is that the film seems to portray this as a positive - like he “grew up” and finally did the right thing, i.e. engaging with American capital and abandoning his idealism.

I don’t know if this is a popular opinion but honestly IMO it’s a terrible movie. Not only is it meandering and messy but the characters’ actions aren’t really (internally) believable and a major plot point is that Vince Vaughn is basically raped by his future wife and decides that he likes it. There’s a few decent…

To the extent that was true (it wasn’t to my memory, but I imagine it depends on what games you were playing), it’s probably just because a lot of third party developers treated the GameCube as an afterthought, before largely moving away from it entirely outside of some exclusives. The actual exclusives usually looked…

I think it’s probably the combination of the DNA and the weed. Otherwise she would have gotten a mustache long ago.

True as it goes, but misses the point. In that season they repeatedly had Mr. Garrison, as Trump stand-in, practically breaking the fourth wall to say “yeah she sucks but unlike me she has some idea of how to run a country.” They were basically making fun of the frustration many had with the fact that Trump was…

I’m not sure there’s as much of a distinction between deadpan and earnest as you think there is, but Airplane!-style deadpan or whatever would absolutely not have worked, because it’s still obviously in a “comedy” mode. Even with those movies, they intentionally picked actors who were mostly known for dramatic work,…

What I’m getting at is that, like a lot of Verhoeven satires, Starship Troopers is not “satire” in the way usual way we think of it in America, where it is fairly spelled out and filled specifically with ironic jokes that give the game away. A modern remake under a typical American director would have to have a bunch…

Relative to other forms of physical media, video games have remained pretty prominent in physical form honestly. Tons of big movies now don’t even get a Blu-Ray or DVD release anymore, and music is mostly online or only sold in physical form as niche items (outside vinyl which is mostly for collectors, speaking as…

This is honestly a big reason I can’t really deal with Nintendo anymore, and haven’t owned a Nintendo console since the Wii (outside the two Classic mini consoles, which were insanely difficult to get and a reminder of why I’d otherwise checked out). I’m not denying that they probably make great games still, but good…

IIRC it was also missing No Sleep ‘til Brooklyn, which was a pretty big omission. 

Verhoeven wasn’t going for an actual satiric/comedic tone though. What makes it work is that it’s played completely straight. 

Kavner and Smith were different situations. Kavner was hired because she was already on The Tracey Ullman show so they were essentially saving money and time by casting her. Smith was cast to play Lisa because it was the Tracey Ullman shorts era and there were like three characters outside of the family. (Initially…

It’s not even really that. Characters like Hibbert were not really important to the show at the beginning. They needed a doctor for one episode because Bart was in the hospital, and they thought it would be funny to make the doctor a Cosby caricature because they were up against The Cosby Show in their time slot at…

This is true too, but I think with a show like The Simpsons it’s important to understand that they were just working with the pool of actors who were readily available, and they were making a show about a white (well, yellow, but you know what I mean) family living in a mostly white suburban town. Characters like Apu…

Yeah. I mean I hate to even slightly sound like one of those MAGA Chuds who thinks taking down Gone with the Wind for 5 days is tyranny or some shit, but there is something to be said for the fact that comedy in general has really moved heavily into “clapter” territory the last few years where it’s just making…

This is the age-old problem with all satire, though. There’s always going to be someone who just actively decides not to understand the point. (And it wasn’t just an early 00s thing: look at All in the Family and the reaction to it from people who unironically thought Archie Bunker was an awesome dude.) And how do you…

To our individual opinions now, informed by decades of syndication, maybe. In the early 90s, absolutely not. In 1990/1991 The Simpsons was absolutely gigantic and that first episode was one of the most popular and iconic. By 1993 it was safely transitioning into just another popular show, maybe even a cult one, which…

Leftists have always hated it. We/they view it as another “West Wing” that broke the brains of a lot of liberals, and in this case whitewashed a lot of horrible people by putting them in a “woke” story and framing. This piece on it goes back a few years.