Carol Cleveland from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Especially the sketches where she abandons her husband and goes behind the partition with the marriage counselor, where she asks the travel agency customer if he wants to go upstairs, and where she tells Terry Jones to be gentle (and he ends up watching the montage of…

Maybe you're thinking of Raising Arizona, in which M. Emmet Walsh tells Nic Cage a story about a guy with a sandwich in one hand and a fuckin' head in the other.

I kept waiting for footage of Jim not sleeping with what's-her-name at that hotel in Florida.  Nothing says "I love you" like not sleeping with another woman.

I totally agree, Warren.  I think this was one of the first books I read with that kind of a surprise ending—but it was so well written, I knew something was up (like how the protagonist kept getting a male telephone operator no matte what payphone he used) AND YET I, too, was blown away by the ending. 

I Am the Cheese.

If it sucked, can it be turned off too soon?

When Kevin refused to let Jackie have the girls on the birthday, it was a bummer, but I could kinda see his point—they have a schedule, and Jackie needs the structure.  Plus why should he do her a favor?  Life sucks, so get used to it, Jackie. But when the end revealed that he DID let the girls see Jackie as a…

Isn't it stupid to unlock and open the door—when you don't know if there's a shooter out there—no matter who was leaving the room? 

I am a teacher, and I've been instructed NOT to go out there during a lock-down. It's called a lock-down because all doors are supposed to be locked. Unlocking and opening a classroom door exposes everyone in that room to a potential shooter. Which is apparently what Mr. S did.

Will Schuester:  "No, Sam, you can't leave the choir room!  You'll endanger the lives of everyone in this room if you do!"

I kinda wish PTA's recent movies had more of that silly yet tragic pathos captured in such lines as "You're not the boss of me!  You're not the king of Dirk!" or "Full fuckin' race cams!  Woo!"

I, too, am a teacher who uses the "YP-MP" line on students.  They usually figure out what it means, but I get a perverse thrill knowing that I'm quoting a line from a movie about porn.

But she asked him to come insider her.  Remember, she said she'd been fixed?

I recommend Greetings from Earth, but two things:  it's not like Bacigalupi's stuff, and I think it's out of print and thus not super easy to find (although I got a used copy off Amazon with no problem).

Almost finished with The Drowned Cities, Paolo Bacigalupi's sequel to Ship Breaker, which are both YA sci-fi and kinda like little siblings of his "more mature" book The Windup Girl in that they're set in a post-global warming world where very few fossil fuels remain yet we can create man-dog hybrids bred for…

I taught this book to a class of high school seniors, and one girl said of it, "Is it okay if I really like this book?"

Nory was okay, but the book about the guy who wanted to kill George W. Bush with remote controlled circular saw blades was terrible.

Augie March was assigned in a college lit class.  I read it, but when the prof praised it from one end of the classroom to the other, I didn't quite see what the big deal was.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't a Smart Car but rather a BMW Isetta:   http://www.isomillennium.it…

I like good metatextuality as much as the next guy, but the strained ones that draw too much attention to themselves and exist only to reference for the sake of referencing are so grating.  Like when Julia Roberts played a woman who looked like Julia Roberts in Ocean's 13, or when the characters in Kevin Smith movies…