Barrymore wasn't just a big star, she was America's (and the world's) sweetheart and kid sister. We'd grown up with her as Gert from ET gone bad then good again, and at the time she inspired more protective feelings in people than any star since Audrey Hepburn. In other words, this was completely masterful casting…

Well, I'm digging it. Half-way between Beck's Midnite Vultures and Scritti Politti's Cupid and Psyche is a sweet spot for me, probably for lots of people.

Well, at least check out 'Our Song'. It really is pretty stellar stuff that's nonetheless perfectly in character for a 16 year old.

'Love Story' is OK, but mashed up with U2 for the backing track it's pretty great:
https://youtu.be/JSUQlA_TLGI

Elster's plot in Vertigo is also ridiculously complex and therefore hard to believe that anyone would believe it would work (there's far too much that could go wrong, and much that's almost impossible to pull off…). Early reviews of V. were tepid largely for this reason. We latecomers are primed to think that there's…

Claudia Cardinale is definitely not reproducible.

Aside possibly from Kendrick Lamar and Alabama Shakes, the greatest thing in music for me this year has been Aphex Twin's epic (freely distributed) closet-clean-out, user48736353001. It's ridiculously good.

The Beach Boys had consistently killer B-sides: I Get Around/Don't Worry Baby is probably the best but consider also Barbara Ann/Girl Don't Tell Me and Wouldn't It Be Nice/God Only Knows. In general, any act that goes through a period of being mindblowingly good does tend to have great B-sides - the good stuff's…

Des'ree's 'Kissing You' is pretty killer, and much better than anything else I've heard from her. For whatever reason, the R+J soundtrack brought out (lucked into?) career peaks for a lot of people.

The whole Trent-curated soundtrack is coherent in a way that the movie just isn't (in any version).

That Super Deluxe edition of Sticky Fingers is on Spotify. Checking out (very expensive!) expanded editions of things is a lot of what I end up using Spotify for I'm finding.

Excessive optimism about technological progress is pretty common in films. E.g., Planet of the Apes (1968) has a close-to-light-speed interstellar mission blasting off from Cape Canaveral on July 14, 1972. (In real life 1972 was the last Apollo mission to the moon and no one has been out of low earth orbit since.)

Also this movie had one of the best teaser trailers ever:
https://youtu.be/wBbCsIVEYZY

The truth is that the James Bond films got away with all sorts of stuff that would have been rejected or earned R-ratings for almost anyone/anything else. E.g., the Maurice Binder title sequence for The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) has an incredible amount of nudity and suggestiveness for a PG film.

Look closer; it's on my Austen explosion list as 'BBC Pride & Prej'.

Don't know that one. Note however that I could have added:
4. Ghost In The Shell. Anime ascendant and the future we're still living in, still creating arrives.

Well, a couple more obvious cultural high-points of 1995:
1. End of Season 2/Beginning of Season 3 of The X Files. Central conspiracy as satisfactorily resolved as it would ever get in S03E02 and year kicks off with peak MOTW eps like 'Die Hande Die Verletze'. (Post-Twin Peaks and Pre-Sopranos this was as good as TV…

One of the German govts key responses to all the Edward Snowden revelations about its comms being hacked by the NSA etc. has apparently been to get thousands of type-writers out of storage and go back to hard-copies only for key communications. A Brazil/steam-punk future (for security reasons) is still a possibility!

Ha. Roger Roger. Anyhow, it does occur to me now that artists' 'I'-catalogs might be an interesting way of comparing them. (Might also be interesting to separate out first person pronoun songs.) Stephin Merritt/Magnetic Fields has a head start what with his album I, all of whose tracks' titles start with 'I'.

I for 'I am The Walrus' (HM: 'I'm looking Through You'). Surely?