There's a story that LBJ was once in a national security meeting when one of his advisers asked him what the U.S. was doing in Vietnam. Johnson stares at him, unzips his pants, whips his balls out onto the table, and declares, "THIS is why we're in Vietnam."

I will also be that guy and note that the high concept of Executive Power is not a "great one" as Todd claims. Unless those italics were meant to be sarcastic. I don't even know anymore!

And that's when Lincoln said, "Don't dis my homies!"

The best thing about How to Succeed in Business is imagining it as a secret history of Bert Cooper.

I'm 100 pages into Tony Judt's 800+-page Postwar. I most recently finished up the section on the Marshall Plan, about which Judt is very positive. Particularly interesting are the passages in which he contemplates what might have happened had the Soviet Union, or even just Czechoslovakia, accepted U.S. money.

Hey, speaking of wonderful supporting performances by Laurence Fishburne, he does great work with a small role in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, which I watched this weekend.

For my penultimate weekend in St. Louis before moving to our nation's capital, I watched a lot of movies - two triple features and one movie that doesn't really fit.

It far more subtle and well-executed than Inglourious, which seem to be two different films stitched together awkwardly. And me stil love Inglourious, but it feel like trial run for Django, where Tarantino accomplish fission of different types of movie more successfully.

I have to disagree with Cookie that "Django not over-top fantasy of violence." This is exactly what it is.

I like the last line of the trailer — "Before this is over, you're gonna be begging for a bullet" — which I take as a warning to the potential audience.

I bought TRM when I was 14. I didn't understand it and hated it. But I've always been someone who goes back to things I hate when that hatred is based on bafflement. And went back I did. I think "Moonlight on Vermont" was the first branch I grabbed onto. And "Dachau Blues" struck me as really funny. And then it all…

I'm a pretty big Beefheart fan, and Trout Mask Replica is still my favorite. That's probably partially due to my love for sprawling, unwieldy double LPs, but in my opinion, "trimming the fat" is not something you want from a Beefheart album. The fat's where it's at.

It’s telling that her two most memorable and acclaimed roles of the past decade were in intense psycho-dramas about broken, mentally ill protagonists wrestling their demons: 2006’s A Scanner Darkly and 2010’s Black Swan.

Hey Nathan, nice job on NPR today. I hope you are called in for many more stories covering that crucial nexus between pop culture and urination.

Yes! That movie was fascinating in that it conflated all kinds of unrelated groups (hecklers, film critics, internet commenters) simply because all of them hate Jamie Kennedy.

Oh, I don't know. Judging by the astoundingly poor quality of the line readings, they probably recorded all the dialogue in a day and used whoever happened to be hanging around the recording studio.

Hey, he was president three times! As his twitter handle (@3xchair) never lets you forget.

Weird, does it look good? I remember that movie looking really grungy and almost ugly, but I also haven't seen it since the days of VHS.

I hate Funny Games, but there's a lot more to Haneke's work than the implicating-the-audience tactics of that movie. Check out Cache, and see what it does for you.

It's ten great performances in one!