I stopped watching this season after episode 2 because I realized I just didn’t care about anything that was happening.  The reviews since have suggested I made the right call.

Rocky IV is one of the essential movies for understanding American culture in the Reagan era.

Clinton rolled into industrial states saying point-blank she was going to make it more expensive for the companies there to do business (when she wasn’t promising to shut them down entirely, e.g. coal).

The Nazi kidnapping thing is, even by the generous standards of conspiracy fiction, a big stretch. Charles Jr. disappeared in March of 1932; Hitler did not become Chancellor of Germany until January of 1933.

Wasn’t Herman actively campaigning for FDR in the 1940 election, anyway?

The precise definition of neoliberalism refers to the economic ideology that displaced the postwar consensus in the Reagan/Thatcher period and promoted deregulation and privatization of services compared to what existed in the 1940s-1970s.

The personal plots about the family I thought wrapped up pretty well, with everything around the drive to Kentucky and back being particularly strong.

Murphy was on SNL when he made his first two movies: 48 Hrs. in 1982, Trading Places a year later. Both films were major hits, and both popped almost entirely because of Murphy, who mercilessly stole them from his older and better-established white co-stars.

But even while Herman is standing with a crowd or resistors in Paterson, he’s still hoping that somebody else—Walter Winchell, in this case—will be fighting his battles for him.

I haven’t read the book, but assuming Lindbergh isn’t pursuing a confrontational foreign policy versus Japan, there probably wouldn’t be an attack on Pearl Harbor.  As long as the Emperor and Tojo felt that Lindbergh would assent to Japanese swallowing up the British and Dutch territories in the Pacific Rim, they…

The only thing holding this movie back is Bond’s bizarre failure to make some sort of “carve”-related pun after killing Elliot Carver.

The first time I watched Risky Business a few years ago, one of my main takeaways is that the scene where Cruise’s friend calls a prostitute for him, and Jackie turns out to either be a man in drag or a transwoman (this is a 1980s film, you can be sure the filmmakers didn’t know the difference), could have been so, so…

Depends on the denomination (if you’re a Calvinist, for instance, it wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t one of the elect; if you’re a Catholic or certain Orthodox adherents, works would factor into it), but above all else, he’d have to actually be sincere about it, and it’s generally not all that likely that people like…

I liked the way the episode captured the experience of paranoia when you aren’t really sure who to trust, with some people (like Taylor or the first cop they meet) being totally innocuous while others aren’t.

It’s always interesting to see movies where plotting heavily revolves around now-obsolete or outmoded technology.

It’s always interesting to see movies where plotting heavily revolves around now-obsolete or outmoded technology.

Ah, the movie where Spielberg inadvertently invented paid product placement.

At its core, GRRM was always telling a story about people who choose to give a damn about other people versus people who don’t.  The moral lines between the heroes and the villains were always there, if periodically muddied by circumstances and/or D&D’s terrible writing.

Like Star Wars before it, Raiders is pure film-nerd pastiche. Lucas and Spielberg weren’t concerned with capturing the messy sprawl of actual human emotion. They were drawing on old movies, as well as memories of kid-culture staples like pulp novels and Uncle Scrooge comics. Raiders is full of visual quotes, and…

The entire charade is just an excuse to tease the Betty-Archie-Veronica love triangle central to the comics which this CW adaptation inexplicably echewed.