The problem with Master and Commander, and with doing more of the Aubrey/Maturin series is that much of them take place at sea. Filming in and around water automatically multiplies your budget by a factor of ten. It just complicates everything. It’s why the shoots for Jaws, The Abyss, Waterworld, and Titanic were…

The heart of the movie lies in the Enterprise crew wandering through contemporary America, getting into misunderstandings and hijinks, reflecting on the absurdity of late-20th-century conventions. It’s an environmentalist fable, but the parts that everyone remembers are the fish-out-of-water gags.

“[P]eople are still watching it” isn’t the only metric. Doing, say, a once yearly special that got enough viewers to merit another one the next year isn’t exactly the same thing as banging out a regular series. Were that the case, we should probably be comparing Sunny to things like old Andy Williams Christmas…

Yeah, but apparently he was no Richard Dreyfus:

Turns out we're both right (or wrong) depending on how you look at it:

I'm pretty sure it's been done. A few times.

“Burt (who was maybe Hollywood’s biggest star at the time)...”

I thought the control center pictured at the lead was actually in the house. That would be impressive. It is not. It’s from Getty Images and appears to be a museum display. The actual pictures of the inside of the house are nowhere near that impressive. And the twitter guy’s cute little captions for each picture are…

“[N]ot a goddamn motherfucking thing happens in Two Lane Blacktop.”

Schlitz and Stroh’s weren’t really that small. They just never quite achieved the mega-dominance of your Buds, Millers, or Coors. Schlitz in particular was really a contender for a while (I think they even sponsored one of The Who’s post Keith Moon tours), but poor business decisions and declining quality made them a…

Wikipedia pins Ferris’ hometown as Winnetka, which makes sense though I remember no specific reference in the film. Filming took place in multiple North Shore locations (much like other Hughes films). Ironically, one key non-Chicagoland location is the front of Ferris’ house, which is actually in Long Beach, CA.

Eh, well Tom Skerritt was already about 53 in 1986. I imagine Maverick plays about the same role in the new film as Skerritt does in this one: an instructor and a mentor. I honestly don’t know if there’s an age limit on instructors at Miramar, but at least the concept is you have seasoned veterans imparting their…

For a lot of white suburban men it was a perfect pure fantasy exercise. Maverick gets to hang out with cool guys, ride a cool motorcycle, fly jets, be a war hero, and end up with a bitchin’ babe. What’s more, it repackaged fighting in a war as a seemingly bloodless, technical exercise where you pressed a button to…

6. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Paramount, $83,867,664

Russia was pretending to have far more missiles than it did by literally building wooden facsimiles.

The Chicago loop is pretty big, but in the middle of a weekday I think it could probably be traversed end to end a couple of times and then some by car in a couple of hours. Ferris appears to live in a North Shore suburb, which in midday traffic on the Edens Expressway would probably have you downtown in about 30…

What Top Gun’s character arc is: “This is you being awesome” + “This is a bad thing that happens to you” = “This is you becoming EVEN MORE awesome, because that’s the reason why that bad thing happened to you.”

All those kids volunteering to spend a good chunk of their youths at sea after seeing Top Gun helped scare the Russkies into running up the white flag a few years later.

Top Gun is one of the most homoerotic spectacles ever to come out of Hollywood. Cruise has absolutely zero sexual chemistry with his ostensible love interest...

The thing about Sorkin is he generally can only write characters and stories that appeal to his target demo, which is fairly narrow. And even then, I look at myself and see I should be in his target demo, and yet just the thought of some of his stuff makes me want to wince.