I've long been aware of and enraged by some drivers' "pass hesitation" — their habit of moving into the left lane and then either decelerating or just hanging out there instead of passing. It's especially common when passing trucks. I suppose it's rooted in some drivers' overwhelming fear of them, though I would think…

I don't know. His shirt looked relatively clean and mended by the epilogue. I think they're committed to his costume, much as I'd like to see that montage, and what sort of "new look" he'd come up with.

George Clooney? An Irishman?

I certainly think that you can only justifiably call out the "black guy is first to die" trope when he's the only (or nearly so) black guy in the cast. The same goes for "Magic Negro". In a cast with this mix, these things just become statistically likely.

That inability of the protagonist to fulfill familial obligations because only he can defend the world from the present threat is a pretty standard cop/action movie trope, and the idea that he really was neglectful before the current problem came up and keeps him from mending his ways is likewise a pretty standard…

Keeping in mind Tolkien's disdain for the Nazis, it's clear that whatever stereotypes he may have associated with the Jews, those beliefs did not directly translate into "hate" or general belief in their inferiority. I recently read Ivanhoe, which evidences the same sort of insensitive, but not really malicious,…

There's a trope on display here of which I've become increasingly aware and always struggle to describe concisely — Where certain negative qualities become stereotypically associated with a group, but then become so identified as "code" for the negative stereotypes that it becomes difficult to refer to those qualities…

Or simply that she was a wounded bystander of some crime, and that Irving threw himself obsessively into trying to bring the shooter to justice instead of being there for his family. We're deeply in action movie cliche territory here.

I stand corrected. I am the shame of the '80s.

I much enjoyed it in the theater as well — as well-crafted and earnestly delivered as it is batshit wacky, and very definitely a throwback in tone to '70s Hammer stuff. It was such a common trope at the time for films about some sort of contagious threat to end with the heroes nipping it in the bud, that it was…

I'm not sure Carlson's looking for something to do was so much a question of his being generationally "left behind" as a personal issue of looking for something to make him feel like a part of things as Andy tried to "turn the station around". There was at least one episode where Carlson's evil plutocrat mother…

I can accept that broader entertainment choices have banished the days where everyone was forced to watch the same 3 networks plus UHF, but it's unfortunate that all the stuff that one used to stumble across has so largely vanished into the woodwork, and left such cultural ignorance behind. Recent generations have…

Dawn Wells has held up a lot better over the decades, though, whether due to genetics or just more prudent plastic surgery.

Strasser was, of course, singing the traditional German patriotic song The Watch on the Rhein, in place of the Nazi Party anthem The Horst Wessel Song which the producers originally intended to use, but the rights to which were owned by the Nazi Party.

I saw killing off Michael J. Fox as specifically inspired by Robert Wagner's demise in Towering Inferno which was a little shocking at the time because of the trend Franko mentions.

I'm glad to see all the fans here, because even if I think "masterpiece" is a bit strong, it surely was excessively dumped on by critics, both professional and amateur.

"And the idea of somehow taxing the system by trying to recursively build our own complex simulations within this one?"

I recall a similar controversy and sentiments from him over the original ending of Mermaids which, as in the book on which it was based, had Christina Ricci's character actually drowning. He ended up being replaced as director on that, though I'm not certain of all the dynamics.

I've seen both the stage and film versions, and I think each ending works in its own medium. The stage version seems to maintain a certain ironic distance from the characters (mind you, it was a regional theater version that I saw, so maybe the acting had something to do with that), whereas the movie somehow makes…

Apparently Peter Cushing was an enthusiast of Wells' rules —