SANANAB

Touching and nice and beautiful in a way only old movies can be.

Super-fun, super-dramatic spy movie. Even Henry Cavill somehow doesn't seem to suck, although that might just be good editing. Pretty impressive that the sixth movie in an extremely irregular franchise would be the best one.

Not bad, but, unless you're already a fan, jump to season two. Or just watch the last episode if you're not sure. The romance subplot was awful, but they picked up the fumble later on.

Bob Hope spends December touring East Asia, finishing with a Christmas in Vietnam, where things were already pretty grim. This is pretty solid early-middle Bob Hope. He wasn't young and hungry, but he still hadn't given up on being funny like in the 70s, and he was decades away from this trainwreck. Great music, great as a piece of history, the jokes are not bad.

I watched this dozens of times as a kid. Watching it again, it's not perfect: it has too many cheap scares, it's a bit of an Alien rip-off (in spite of having no aliens), and it looks like a cutscene from an old point-and-click game (which is a good thing and a bad thing). But, man, there's still a unique charm and sense of place that's uncomparable. Especially impressive considering it had production difficulties and was rushed to the screen. Give it a watch but be forgiving.

I like this movie, but I wish I didn't. You don't want to be the guy who really likes Fight Club.

Netflix has been uploading classic Jeopardy episodes, and changing which episodes are available every few months. I enjoy this much more than I ever enjoyed Jeopardy on television, if only because I can easily skip over the contestant chit-chat section.

I've been slowly working my way down reviewing the IMDB top 250 movies. Most people have an opinion on this by now. It's still a fine movie but, after the Bruce Lee thing, Taratino has turned from young, cool Elvis to Fat Elvis. Since this movie is idiosyncratic and auteurish, part of its appeal has be lost by Tarantino becoming so lame.

In the summer of 1999, I was lucky enough to see Dave Chappelle at an outdoor comedy festival. That was right around the time when people were starting to call him the greatest comedian of all time. It was pretty routine, in many places at that time, for large groups of conservatives to picket movie theatres, TV affiliates, and venues for any kind of live performances, because anything that wasn't G-Rated was considered an attack on God and family. That was mainstream conservative back then.

Around the same time, I read a book by Robert Anton Wilson that said, "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." At the age of 15, I thought that was so ridiculous and impossible that I got angry.

Time has proven me wrong: The left-wing media are almost 100% outraged by this, while Fox News et al. are praising it, although he's still fundamentally the same comedian as he was twenty years ago, when no one would have ever mistaken him for a conservative.

Anyway, this isn't his best special, and it's not his worst. The super-secret hidden epilogue is good.