Your last paragraph hit the nail on the head.

Band on the Run also deserves praise for randomly having Christopher Lee and James Coburn on the cover for no apparent reason.

Mull of Kintyre is such a great song that I can’t understand why it didn’t get much radio play in the US (I had never even heard it until I lived in Europe, despite listening to classic rock and oldies stations regularly in my youth in the US). Did someone just decide “Meh, Americans don’t like bagpipes” and choose not…

There’s a lot of music hall repertoire in Paul. It comes from such a heart-felt place that I can’t help but appreciate what some might label “schmaltz”.

I’m not going to state my opinion on this trial, because I watched as little of it as possible.

Funny, just the other day I was wondering what every happened to her.

To be fair, that's what my grandmother thought my brother was for Halloween circa 1978, when he went as a home-made R2D2.

“In an attempt to become a jack-of-all-trades, Wawa is on its way to becoming a master of none.” That was my though even just reading the headline. Wawa has always done a select few things really well, and the one thing they did better than anyone else was getting you a decent (but not the absolute best) hoagie fast…

“That’s great and all, but Pulp Fiction didn’t become the tenth highest grossing movie of 1994, a critical smash nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture and winning Best Original Screenplay, and a cultural touchstone included in the National Film Registry because a bunch of college students got posters of it…

I worked in an AMC multiplex that year, and yes, it was a very good year for mainstream movies.

I remember one thing about that movie and it was the island natives with their Jewish-fusion culture.

To be fair, the food on offer in vast stretches of the US really does suck by international comparison. But New Orleans is definitely a stand-out against that trend.

When the movie is filled with merchandisable characters and seems to run down a plot/character checklist of studio-mandated appealing elements, a movie can feel less like a piece of entertainment and more like the central spoke of a marketing push.

The part that never fails to make me laugh:

That last criterion is the biggest reason why Shawshank wasn’t going to win that year.

Shawshank couldn’t have won in that era because it was a box office disappointment.  You didn’t get to sit with the popular kids back then if you didn’t make them richer.

Maybe only in retrospect. I personally thought Pulp Fiction was a better film at the time, but Forrest Gump was a well-received crowd pleaser, so it was no surprise when it won.

I would actually say the opposite.  1994 was a particularly strong year, in my memory.  In addition to what was already mentioned, we had Lion King, Speed, True Lies, Wolf, Maverick, Reality Bites, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Ref, The Crow, The Mask, Hoop Dreams, Clerks, Stargate, Heavenly Creatures, The…

Next do “Philadelphia Cream Cheese”.

I’m old enough to remember the tale-end of the era when many small towns had their own bottling company that would make their own sodas. Many of them offered a variety of flavors that went way beyond the 4-5 basics that Coca-Cola and Pepsi saturated the market with. The one I particularly remember was based out of…