The first returns were all about the same thing as this post, but I clicked a Reddit link to see what they said about it, and the first zillion comments were all about ad blockers, and all of them getting their zingers in (“I ain’t raw dogging it on your website”). I scrolled for a while and gave up, without ever getting to a post about the subject. I figured next up was a bunch of puns.

A brief reminder of why I don’t miss Reddit.

I just saw a post in a different thread where someone called it the worst thing they’d ever watched.

I loved it, but I could definitely see both sides. It was a weird movie. But great. And fun.

“Well, you’re fooking elephants, ain’t ye?”

Watch those two movies, two nights in a row, and every movie you watch for the next year will suck.

I did enjoy it, but what is he looking at?

“Oh, no! I shouldn’t be driving this car!”

In the 40s & 50s, Alfred Hitchcock made a series of incredible thrillers that hold up to this day. Some were B&W, some were color, but ALL of them were at least 4 star movies, and many are 5 stars, and some are absolute CLASSICS.

My favorites:

• Lifeboat (1944)
• Notorious (1946)
• Rope (1948)
• Strangers on a Train (1951)
• Dial M For Murder (1954)
• Rear Window (1954)
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
• The Wrong Man (1956)
• Vertigo (1958)
• North By Northwest (1959)
• Psycho (1960)

He made a lot more than these, and like I said, they’re all terrific, but these are my personal favorites. Rear Window is my favorite film of all time, a PERFECT movie. Also, in Rear Window, Grace Kelly was the most beautiful woman who has ever appeared on screen. Watch it, and tell me I’m wrong.

Hitchcock is addicting.

Having people hear about big tech companies unionizing can only help. Unions keep pressure on the companies, and keep them from going too far. Other companies hear about it, and offer up their own reforms voluntarily, hoping it will keep the workers from unionizing. Either way, unions work for EVERYBODY.

Unionize Everything!

I’ve always felt the structure and pacing of 2002 to be musical, literally a symphony in four movements. The classical music soundtrack really sells that concept.

The light show at the the end has to be taken in context. It was 1968, the peak of the hippie movement, and one of the most explosively creative moments in popular art in history, partially fueled by hallucinogenics like weed, but also LSD, which was making it’s way across the country. It was already widely available in California, where it was being distributed by associates of the Grateful Dead in San Francisco.

In LA, Kubrick would have been quite familiar with the trend, everyone was, it was being talked about in the media constantly. Would it be that surprising if Kubrick tried what everyone was talking about, and was as blown away as everyone always is, and had to reference it in his movie?

Light shows of various kinds were becoming a standard addition to concerts, using colors, lasers, projections, blobs of colored fluids, etc. Kubrick knew that people would be coming into this movie to trip, and he wanted to give them a big light show to entertain them. If they dropped their tab at the beginning of the movie, they’d probably be reaching a nice peak right around when the light show started, or at least tripping enough to enjoy it.

I’ve always figured that was the reason. If it was any other era, I would doubt it, but this was made in California in 1968, when EVERYTHING was about drugs or the Vietnam War, and this wasn’t about the war.

That’s a pretty good analogy.

Something I never hear people talk about with BB is how it hit differently when it was first being broadcast, than when it hit streaming.

The original show spooled out slowly, an episode a week, and then nearly a year before the next season, then they broke the final season in half, and dragged that way out. So between episodes and seasons, you remember the excitement, and you apply that to Walter, and sort of forget all the atrocities he’s committing. He’s just a cool anti-hero.

But when you binge it on streaming, your shock at his behavior doesn’t dissipate, it accumulates, and by the end, he’s just a bad guy who got a lot of people killed, and deserves his fate.

I watched it during its initial run, then binged it, and I can’t think of any other show that had such a different dynamic between the two.

You quit too early! It totally redeemed itself by the end!

Just kidding, I’ve never even heard of it, but your review of it made me want to check it out right away. It’s sounds like my kind of movie.

“Hey, mom, can we go to church again on Sunday? I like church.”

Giggity.

Yeah, she had a weird Democrat thing going on, then she slipped into MAGA. Strange trajectory, probably because she was fronting for Russia.

Something has been up with her for a while. She’s been unusually quiet, and she showed up at that FBI raid in Atlanta for some reason. Maybe it’s been stuff going on with her husband that has kept her out of the spotlight, or maybe that’s just the nature of the position as top spook.

Whatever, she’s still a traitor and a Russian spy.

Fairly often, for lots of reasons.

Years ago, my wife took a job as the lone secretary to a lawyer with a high volume of paperwork, permit applications, etc. The previous secretary, who had retired, didn’t like the computer, and just typed everything by hand.

My wife automated all the forms so she could jump from field to field, and get the paperwork done much faster. So fast in fact, that he decided not to hire the second secretary, and just dump it all on my wife. Then he turned out to be an absolute monster in so many ways that my wife just up and quit one day, which was fine with me.

But she had never told him about her automated forms that she created. He just thought her increased productivity was due to using the computer. So she told me that she made those forms to help herself, not him, and dumped all of them before she left, and he never knew.

Yeah, you’re right, they’d be better off without an extra $400k. Let the rich guys keep it. /S

It’s not fair! The poor get all the breaks!