I’m biased, because I think SCTV Network is the pinnacle of sketch comedy on television. The syndicated series is awesome, but their two-year run on NBC late-nights after The Tonight Show (Carson!) was 100% perfection. Their channeling of TV variety shows is so surreally brilliant, & my theory is that they were liberated by not feeling the need to be politically topical, strangely enough. SCTV begat The Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show…, Portlandia, I Think You Should…

Bud Cort’s death last month, age 77, revived all sorts of reflections & inspired new deep dives into this oddball Black Comedy.

• Hal Ashby had quite a decade, in the 1970s. Perhaps the greatest run of any New Hollywood auteur at the actual time? (H&M, The Landlord, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Coming Home, Bound for Glory, AND Being There?!? just wow…). His drug-addiction did him in, perhaps one of the most tragic industry cocaine trainwrecks of them all, that I…

Trump gets shot at by someone who seems like his follower.

Jack Black, who debuted in this film as a proto-MAGA Bob Roberts cultist, just this week sold his longtime partner from Tenacious D, Kyle Gass, down the river for saying — punk-rock gallows humor — what a lot of folks have clearly been thinking. (Bad timing Kyle, but Jaybles, your progressive bonafides are likewise taking a hit these past several months!)

This film anticipates those sorts of headlines.

Tim…

What a buried gem. I’d never even heard of this film before it showed up in the Criterion Channel’s 80s Horror collection. 

About 30 minutes into this US / New Zealand joint production, a pastiche of 1950s “teens-in-peril” sci-fi and late-1970s body-count slasher films, Strange Behavior (aka Dead Kids) just seizes the drive-in-theater mantle of the former and stages a jaw-droppingly entertaining, highly-choreographed dance number at a 1960s Hit-TV-themed costume party. Set to Lou Christie’s classic Wall of Sound-type hit,…