Well plausability goes a long way.  With the day care abuse hysteria in many cases the stories which kids told were fantastical, especially in the McMartin trial where kids were claiming, in addition to abuse, that they were being taken on balloon rides, and sent into (nonexistent) tunnels under the school and that…

I think you’re overthinking it.  Every era has a mixture of different pop culture fare for different groups.  You could make the same argument about today contrasting something like Handmaid’s Tale with Blue Bloods or something. 

There’s a great line in Mad Men (from Roger of all people) saying “I bet there were people walking around in the Bible complaining about kids these days”.

I doubt it.  Gore was the son of Al Gore Sr, a Democratic Congressman and Senator from Tennessee.  Gore Sr was fairly liberal as a Southern politician went.  He was one of only a few Southern Senators to vote for the Voting Rights Act (although he opposed the Civil Rights Act) and he strongly opposed the Vietnam War. …

This movie came out less than fifty years after they passed a major immigration law specifically to limit the arrival of Italians and other Southern and Eastern Europeans.  We’re farther away now from the days of Jim Crow than Love Story was from the days of anti-Italian bigotry. 

Yeah, I think people forget how the sixties were.  Several years later, the studio which did The Godfather didn’t want Al Pacino to play Michael because he was too swarthy. 

He reportedly told federal officials that they should illegally seize land to build the border wall and that he would pardon them for any criminal charges.  This, at least arguably, constitutes bribery of a federal official.

That’s nonsense. It may possibly be their intent but it’s a terrible strategy. Distractions like that work when the redound in the person’s favor. So in the 2004 election cycle, George Bush repeatedly issues terror warnings on pretty thin evidence and always suspiciously close to some piece of good news for the…

Virtually none of Trump’s lying is strategic.  Not in that way.  And he doesn’t have any kind of control on how much he can lie. 

The news reports are that he walked back to his house.

You’re right that the age range is different, but it establishes that he’s got incredibly poor sexual boundaries when it comes to young family members. To me, if he’d fuck one “daughter” it’s entirely plausible that he’d molest another. 

I’ve never watched the Amazing Spider Man films, but even Garfield admits that they were disappointing. 

I believe Dylan Farrow, but to say that kids never lie about this kind of stuff is taking it too far.  I’d probably agree if we’re talking about it on their own, but what we learned from the daycare sex abuse hysteria of the 1980s was that kids can be easily coached by adults into making up stuff.  That’s basically…

Yeah, Mel Gibson got nominated after his whole “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” rant.

I don’t know.  Woody has always come off as kind of creepy.  Even before the whole Soon-Yi nonsense and these accusations from his other daughter he seemed like a guy who could have been a child molester.  The fact that he married Soon-Yi was surprising because it was so unbelievable, but if you had told me before…

Yeah, but Heimdall was a very minor character.

She was seven IIRC.  But I my point is that it’s not exactly out of character that he did this.  Yes, his defenders will argue that Soon-Yi was never technically his daughter since he never adopted her.  But she was the daughter of his common law wife and lived in his household as a child/sibling of his actual…

In Atonement wasn’t he falsely accused or raping someone else? 

And adaptation. Lee c0-created many of the characters behind the Marvel movies, but they’re often not adapting his specific stories. The Marvel based films are mostly not adapting specific comic stories, but when they do, few of them are Lee’s. The Iron Man and Spiderman origins were cribbed for parts of those films.…

I actually think he’s great as Spidey.  He really captures the goofy nerd side of Peter Parker.  And Spider Man 2 is still one of the best super hero movies of all time.  But I never bought him as a teenager.