It’s not uncommon for shows to have one of their best episodes be the pilot. “Mad Men,” “Twin Peaks,” “Cheers,” and “The Mary Tyler Moore” ( which, like the initial pilot for “Game of Thrones,” was disastrous and had to be refilmed) all come to mind. “The Twilight Zone” had a strong pilot. Hell, the early sixties was…

It’s fine, I’d even watch parts of it again on a rainy day, but it seems like a lot of people hold this movie in much higher esteem than I think it warrants. It’s cool people like it. That’s great. It’s just kind of by-the-numbers. Honestly, it’s really no better than “Marooned” and actually a lot less fun (I mean, no…

Time travel and nazis. So, nothing “Star Trek: Enterprise,” “Star Trek: Voyager,” “Star Trek,” and “The Time Tunnel” didn’t already beat to death. Feel free to add to the list.

I’m expecting, whenever the pandemic is finally really over, to see Liz Phair sign on to a nineties-themed one-hit wonder cruise ship gig for the rest of her career. 

I was working on a similar experiment and managed to get some video as well:

I think it’s one of those road-to-hell good intention misfires but far from awful. It kind of got to me when I saw it. Partly because even bad Soderbergh is still watchable Soderbergh, partly because I was still coping from an exhausting break up from an emotionally stunted woman who, by the end of it all, honestly see…

So did “The Sopranos,’ “Babylon 5,” and Joseph Kennedy all run the same old gypsy woman off the road?

I’ve been seriously thinking about a trip out west just to see “How the West Was Won” in the Dome the next time they scheduled it. I’ve skipped seeing numerous pan and scan TV showings and the special blu-ray release in the hopes I’d be able to do this. I’ve seen bits of the film and it’s mediocre to outright awful…

Started the weekend by getting my second vaccine shot in Detroit. What a difference three weeks made. After my first dose I felt like Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding.” After the second dose I felt more like Chuck Heston in “The Omega Man” only the plague zombies were out in the daylight and they were EVERYWHERE. No…

The word Fuck really was as incendiary as that scene in “A Christmas Story.” It was the scorched earth cuss word. Upon reaching adulthood, one could say damn, goddamn, bitch and even shit in front of one’s parents but fuck was the one word you never dropped. I think I was a junior in high school before I started using…

When Irwin Allen beats you to the punch by half a century you might as well pack it up.

God, The National Lampoon was brilliant. Yeah, it was often crass, puerile and frequently really offensive, but more than anything, it was fucking brilliant and it very much was the inspiration for kinder, gentler The Onion.  That Volkswagon ad was right up there with the “Senior Vittles” one, which parodied news…

If we’re going to indulge in ageism then let's start with "The Simpsons," "Saturday Night Live" and "Star Wars," you sad, old, old fuckers.

https://www.thewrap.com/mark-elliott-renowned-voiceover-artist-of-disney-movie-trailers-dies-at-81/

So it’ Picard ruminating over past mistakes and wanting a second. Q shows up and there’s time travel. I thought “Tapestry” pretty much nailed that premise a long time ago.

Good question but I’m more interested in the unfilmed vampire movie Faulkner wrote for Howard Hawks, “Dreadful Hollow.” It’s supposedly a great script (with lesbian vampires) and showed that Faulkner was actually well versed in pop culture and vampire fare specifically.

All of these films have their moments, with “The Killers” being the best by far and my favorite being “To Have and Have Not” solely for the Bogart/Bacall chemistry (and Hoagy Carmichael.) The one I’ve always avoided was “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man” because it sounds horrible which is tragic because the Nick…

Once again I got sucked into the most lavish Ed Wood movie Ed Wood never made, better known as “The Ten Commandments.” This happens every year at this time and it’s always the gargantuan train wreck spectacle of so much money and production talent piling up on the screen under some truly uninspired misdirection that…

Wasn’t this how we got the Roger Corman “Fantastic Four” movie?

Given that this was an inherited show and that Warner Brothers had their fingers in the pie, this show was doomed before the first episode aired. All the platforms are leaning hard into self-produced content which is where the big money is. This was also never anything more than an already questionable premise (it…