I thought it was shown at some point in the movie that he wasn't a great sailor and probably shouldn't have been out there all by himself to begin with? Or am I misremembering?

One thing that didn't feel right to me was the way the training seeming to happen so quickly — faster than it took for him to get his MD and PhD, although you'd think becoming a magician would be harder. But if the Ancient One has used the time stone to twist his narrative around while he was learning magic, it would…

Oh right, I forgot about Cusack. He had a good run as a major lead.

Plus the theme song to St. Elmo's Fire was so terrible. The Breakfast Club soundtrack is really dated, but it's fairly listenable.

Did any of the actors in the John Hughes high school movies ever become really big stars? The biggest I can come up with off the top of my head is Matthew Broderick, who is well known but not really a major lead star.

I have a feeling that all of 30 seconds was spent on the decision and countless hours have been spent by his opponents trying to make hay out of it. It's the kind of gross amateur psychoanalysis that the press likes to do to excuse the lack of real reporting they could be doing. It reminds me of the fake furor that…

I've heard a couple of long interviews with him, and he's always seemed extremely engaged and generous. He was on Prairie Home Companion about five years ago and while I have limited patience for that show, Lithgow was awesome on it.

Some people have gotten way too overheated about this over the years. The bust that GW Bush had in the Oval Office was a loaner from Tony Blair. Obama returned that bust to England and placed a different Churchill bust outside his private office by his rooms in the White House.

Thanks for reminding me of those. Those articles are absolutely great rundowns about how actors work.

His kids books are quite good. Much, much better than the typical celebrity kids books. They used to give them out in Cheerios boxes, for some reason, which is how I got a couple of them for my kids.

I seem to recall a lot of the movie's qualities were ignored early on because before the movie was released, people were doubting that Bruce Willis the lightweight, somewhat annoying TV actor could carry a big Hollywood movie. So even after it hit the screens, the buzz around his performance drowned out a lot about…

I can't remember how the air ducts looked in the movie, but I swear I've seen ducts big enough to hold a man. Never strong enough to hold a man, though, because it would be ridiculous to make something designed to carry air so strong that it could support two hundred pounds instead of splitting open like a wet paper…

Greatest accent ever.

I thought Jackson's character early on was great, but then he was turned into this grinning sidekick that took away so much of the tension between him and McClain. Irons did about as good a job as anyone could in trying to follow up Rickman, though.

I'm not someone who gets hung up on plausibility in movies, but the second one is a rare exception. It is so incredibly stupid that I can't stand it.

I hadn't heard about the giant snotwad bit, but this article hints a bit about some major issues in his life, with an ugly divorce, drinking problems, problems with his faith, etc.

The article notes that Apted wishes the first had been cast differently, and I would bet the underlying assumption of 7 Up was the girls were not going to do much except have babies when they got older, so why bother talking about their aspirations for the future. Also, England today is a very diverse place, and I…

That seems really unfair to Peter. He made a short comment in 28 Up criticizing Margaret Thatcher and the conservative tabloids went on a crusade to get him fired. He went through a terrible time due to a minute in a single movie. Imagine if some public school teacher did nothing more than say some bad things about…

I agree it's a mess, but to me it's a hot mess instead of a cold mess, if that makes sense. It's a movie you can't bear to sit through the whole thing, but there are pieces of it, like some of Teri Garr's performance, that are really striking. But yeah, it's still a steaming mess.

Riding a Toro tractor with a Totinos.