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We were talking about this in one of the thrrads! I cannot WAIT to talk about Melissa Joan Harts HAIR! That wig! She looks like a poodle and we all know June's thoughts about poodles

So my argument is that you kind of need both. In school or in a museum you can learn about the numbers of deaths and concentration camps and refugees. But that kind of fact-based learning will still likely feel abstract and not completely "real." Humans are emotional, tribal creatures. I think for a lot of people it doesn't truly hit home until you can connect it to a personal story like this movie does. You see that in politics all the time: the candidate who wins isn't the one who had all the thorough facts and figures behind them, it's the one who connected personally. The message is much more powerful if you feel personally connected to it.

you wait 3 years for a christmas episode and ye pick a movie that's impossible to find over here ... i mean cmon ... Santa With Muscles is on youtube!!! good one paul ... you ruined chritmas!!!! btw ... do not search for this on ebay if you're at work ... there's some NSFW stuff comes up ... people seem to get very kinky around the holidays ... and sure why not ..it's christmas!!!!!! have a good one everybody!!!! ... except whoever picked this movie ... you should be made listen to the star wars holiday special full blast on headphones for the whole of the 25th anyone have a link to it somewhere? Edit .. I'm able to play it for free on freeform using a VPN .. Christmas is saved!!! So I'm guessing you guys in the states will have no issue with it .. saves paying a tenner to apple

Is this a Zack Morris v AC Slater Holiday Rom-Com Death Match?

I don't think that is a realistic "task" of this film. A film can't convince you of a historical event if it doesn't fully describe what that event is. The film can add detail, realism, empathy, and insight to our understanding of the event. But I'm not sure that Schindler's List conveys the essential, stipulated facts about the Holocaust to the novice or skeptic. Without any context, one might think that the Holocaust was a series of random violent acts and perhaps a concentration camp here or there. Only when I visited these camp sites did I fully realize how this was a state-sponsored death industry, as efficient as steel or automotive factories. By the same token, "Twelve Years a Slave" is not the ultimate "slavery story" that can be appreciated without knowing about America's history of endemic racism and institutionalized human trafficking. "Schindler's List" might be treated as the ultimate telling of the Holocaust because of the movie's ambitious scope and pedigree, but it is still just one story. This theme of context (the context in which we watch a movie) is brought up in this excellent story from This American Life about "Schindler's List". I highly, highly recommend it. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/644/random-acts-of-history/act-one-5

As great as the Melissa Joan Hart/Mario Lopez combo is, I’d like to take this time to remind everyone of MY favorite abc family Christmas movie “12 Dates of Christmas”. I’m having my annual viewing of it this weekend, and I know many of you enjoyed it last year. Maybe make it a double feature on the Freeform app

The HDTGM Gods are watching us

Holiday In Handcuffs is free here.

At the mention of Belladonna, my ears really perked up. Since I am a 90s kid who was obsessed with being a witch I of course immediately recognized this as the (first) cause of Jimmy Angelov's death in the 1997 classic Practical Magic. Nicole Kidman puts a drop of this into his drink every night so that she "can get some sleep" because he refuses to ever let them rest. Once he becomes fully abusive and threatens to kill her, Sandra Bullock drops a whole bunch into a bottle of tequila that he is drinking and it kills him. They certainly didn't show the symptoms that KumiteCourtney mentioned earlier either, but I would've said he had the mad as a hatter classification lol. I thought that this was where Paul was going when he mentioned this fact but it appears I am strangely alone in my remembrance of this perfect movie.

Absolutely

I think it definitely affects you, but in a different way perhaps? It's hard to define, but it definitely feels different (not more or less valuable, just different).

I agree that it's not the function of this particular movie to show the full breadth of the Holocaust. I'm not sure any movie could. The closest I've seen is Shoah. It's a 9 hour documentary that is primarily victims and survivors of death camps telling their story. It's haunting and Schindler's List, for all its power, seems almost quaint in comparison.

I am thrilled to watch this movie again! A movie which I described on Letterboxd as: “...the film equivalent of a Taco Bell Cheesy Gordita Crunch. It's all kinds of gross and definitely terrible for you, but every once in awhile, you've just got to indulge.”

Along those lines, I have found there's quite a few much more nuanced critiques out there than the Mamet one brought up on the show, which are quite thought-provoking about the nature of art. https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/85945/listless

“I really think we should stick with the pun about that Jan-Michael Vincent helicopter show.”

Basically agree with everything here. I was also surprised at how swiftly this film moved, not having seen it in at least a decade. It just flies right along, despite the 3+ hour run time and brutal subject matter. I've heard criticisms like Hoberman and Mamet's before, and I tend to agree with Paul: I think these criticisms generally lose sight of the needs of dramatic storytelling, versus historical record. An audience watching drama responds to things like relatable characters, emotional highs and lows, a driving narrative, etc. You can subvert these things sometimes, but if it's totally devoid of that stuff they're going to check out. So yes, Spielberg chose to focus his story on a non-Jew who was flawed but did a heroic thing in the end. I think this works well for his approach, for a couple of reasons: 1. Spielberg is, above all things, a brilliant director of action. I think this extends to his characters too: he works best with lead characters who are always moving and doing things. Schindler is that, and is Spielberg's way in to exploring the Holocaust. If his central character is Jewish then that character will have to be static and constantly victimized. I don't think Spielberg works well in that mode. (Seems like the only way to get really active Jewish protagonists in a Holocaust movie is to generate a fantasy world, as Tarantino did with Inglorious Basterds.) 2. The audience for this film is not just Jewish people. If Amy's statistic about Holocaust denial is to be believed, then it seems another important task for this film is to get people who might have doubted the existence of the Holocaust to believe it. Schindler is a non-Jew who is led down the path to full understanding of how terrible his government's treatment of Jews really was. The movie is leading its modern audience down the same path. This is part of what makes it effective as drama. I've got more thoughts (boy, this movie was way more emotionally effective than I expected it to be on this rewatch), but will need to return later.

Hey Paul! As a medical student one week away from exams, I have spent most of my days this week glued to a textbook in the depths of the library. HOWEVER, I had to rip my tear-crusted, sleep-deprived eyes away from my giant textbook so that I could talk about those Belladonna eyedrops. Yes, those deadly suckers that June and Jason were skeptical about. I had just learned about them in class and I just need to set the record straight. Firstly, YES, they are real! Renaissance women used them to make their eyes bigger. Today, we commonly use a chemical in the Belladonna plant for certain heart issues and motion sickness. Also, you CAN die of an overdose on the Belladonna eyedrops. However, I have not come across straight-up Belladonna eyedrops in this modern age (not that I actively look for them). Perhaps she made them herself?... Lastly, I want to talk about HOW the poison works because I don't think the writers understand what happens when you OD on something like Belladonna. It ain't pretty. We have some rhymes in the medical community for the symptoms of this poison: Red as a beet, hot as a hare, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter. Oh and constipation. Like, unbelievably severe constipation. What a way to kill someone. Anyway, thanks for a great show! You guys always make my day brighter after a stressful day in the hospital. Keep up the good work!

I can deal with Rowena being a killer, as nonsensical as it was. What really pissed me off about Rowena is that she was a terrible journalist. I've been a journalist for more than 20 years, so bear with me because this is the culmination of years' worth of frustration at how journalists are portrayed in movies and on TV. In just the opening scene, Rowena breaks one of the cardinal rules of journalism: We can’t pretend to be someone we’re not in order to get a story. It’s just not allowed. She's also not allowed to hack into a dude's computer and record him without his knowledge. Granted, you can absolutely say that an individual reporter could break the rules, but Rowena brings this story along with Miles to their editor and they’re transparent about how they got the illicit recording of the senator admitting his affair. Miles says it’s legal, but it’s not. Had Rowena recorded the conversation herself on a recording device she brought with her, OK, that’s legal in New York (though she still couldn’t pretend to be an aide; more on that in a sec). You can’t just tap into someone else’s computer and steal private information that way, which is what Miles did to get that recording. In the real world of journalism, there was the infamous Chiquita case in Cincinnati in 1998. A reporter wrote an explosive exposé on Chiquita International that detailed how it secretly controlled a ton of independent banana companies and how its ships had been used to smuggle cocaine. The story was huge news and at first heralded as a great piece of investigative journalism, a story that took its two reporters a year to investigate. But then it came out that one of the reporters hacked into the company’s phone system to get thousands of voicemails upon which he based his reporting. Because he got those voicemails illicitly, the newspaper renounced the story within days and paid Chiquita more than $10 million. No editor anywhere in the U.S. would put their paper in that kind of position, and that’s exactly the position Miles was putting his boss in. As for Rowena pretending to be an aid, let's look at the landmark Food Lion case in 1992. In that case, two ABC journalists lied on employment applications, providing false references and lying about their educational and employment backgrounds. Based on those lies, they were hired by the Food Lion grocery store chain and exposed unsafe, unhealthy and illegal practices committed by the store -- including selling old meat so rancid that it had to be cleaned with bleach to mask the odor. Whether the allegations were true didn't ultimately matter because Food Lion sued ABC in federal court. I'll spare you details of the years-long court battle, but long story short: A federal court found the ABC producers had trespassed. Today, any remotely reputable boss in this country would squirm if a journalist failed to identify themselves as a journalist, and not just on employment applications. Sure, someone can say something in public, and if I overhear it, I can absolutely report it. But I can't pretend to be something other than a journalist in order to get info that I then report. It's a no-no. Some other "oh, COME ON" moments for me: 1) How does a supposedly top-rate journalist have the know-how to apparently be one of the best investigators in the country yet needs a colleague to set up her damn email account?! By 2007, several newspapers had dropped to a few days' publication because the web was, y'know, a THING. BlackBerry had been plaguing us with work emails since 2003, and Apple's iPhone was released in 2007, the year this movie came out. Perfect Stranger treats the Internet as though it's as nascent as did The Net, and that movie came out 11 years earlier. 2) She kisses the guy she's investigating. I'm so sick of every Hollywood depiction of journalists showing them seducing their sources. We can't do it! We'd be fired and banished from the business. It's sticky enough if you start dating a source after you've covered him. You cannot make out with him and then write a story about him. It's way past unethical. 3) There's no way any hard-hitting reporter would leave her phone at the table when she went to the restroom at the restaurant. (I'm referring to the moment Harrison checks her text messages and sees Miles' incriminating note about the computer.) When you're mid-story, you take your phone everywhere. I've interviewed plenty of people in public bathrooms, in my bathtub, crouched at the end of my dad's driveway on Christmas ... (Insert Jason saying, "Brag" right about here.) Cell phones were a pretty big part of our jobs even in the sepia-toned age of 2007. She would not have left it behind. And even if she had, she sure as hell would've noticed Harrison kept it beyond that. He pulls it out midway through their drive home. No friggin' way. I'd have scoured that restaurant from top to bottom by then looking for the thing. I mean, maybe it's possible I'm supposed to believe she wanted him to find the phone ... But I don't see how that would assist in her end game. And the final thing is: It feels like this movie was written for a 20-year-old to play the Rowena role. It would have translated better if she had been someone new to the profession making rookie mistakes and being a technological idiot. Instead, Halle Berry is a 41-year-old woman who should, in theory, have some 15-20 years experience by now. She should be a pro but she acts like a newbie. In that sense, the whole thing felt like bad casting.

At some point while they were concocting their plan, Miles suggests that Ro get online and "practice flirting" over the computer before going after Hill, so it seems that Miles set her up to look for some rando to cyber with, and used that as an opportunity to get her to dirty talk to him. Considering this, combined with his "voice acquisition" software, he was probably in his jack shack listening to Ro's voice enunciate all the dirty talk, having himself a good ol time. By the by, if I were starting my message board account today, "Jack Shack" would be my screen name. Maybe "Jack Shaq." 2007 was prior to the ubiquity of smart phones, and that, to me, is when the phone addiction really took off. Prior to that, most people I knew treated their phones much more causally. Yes, they took their phones out with them, but they'd be much more likely to leave a Nokia flip phone at the table while they went to the bathroom because they wouldn't have been able to look at YouTube while on the john like they can now.

No, we keep them in our rats.

So, a really weird thing taking up space in my brain is that I've heard the phrase "no matter how attractive a woman is, there's a guy tired of her." The place I heard it was on one of those VH1 comedians joke about the news shows like Best Week Ever or I Love The 90s. The news event I remember it being in was Halle Berry's husband cheating on her. So, I wondered if that was put in there intentionally because those shows were all over the place for a while and it's something Halle Berry or someone writing a Halle Berry movie could easily have seen.