StevenRanselMills

Just a little disappointed there wasn't more talk about GROSSE POINTE BLANK, which is probably the closest to a realistic reaction that a John Cusack rom-com character should get. (Of course, he gets his redemption and he does get to have her in the end. Though if you're wondering what it looks like when the hitman doesn't find redemption and get the girl, it looks like the 1961 crime film BLAST OF SILENCE)

This episode is particularly funny to me, since back in January I was telling my mother how I'd finally gotten a DVD of Jake Kasdan's first film, Zero Effect, having watched it back in 1999 and wanting to see if it was as good as I remembered. The film is clearly a refit of the Holmes archetype (Kasdan acknowledges this in the commentary,) and its focus on the detective as intellectually brilliant but emotionally broken and socially inept would be eerily familiar to anyone who watches House. I'm sure there are other arguments to be made as to why the film went virtually unnoticed despite the deluge of Holmes and Holmes-like characters in the fifteen years after, but in talking to my mother, I came to the conclusion that the zeitgeist just wasn't quite right for Zero Effect to be a big deal.

It's Cracked. The podcast, in particular, leans towards discussing pop culture phenomena. If I want to hear erudite people discussing historical and intellectual topics in a fairly in-depth manner, I'll go listen to In Our Time. If I want to hear writers digging into how pop culture works, I know the Cracked podcast will usually scratch that itch. Chris Bucholz wrote about the Newton-Leibniz calculus controversy a year and two days earlier. His article was all about inventions and scientific advances, so the calculus story fits right in there. If you listen to the whole podcast episode, there's a few brief mentions of the development of the telephone but it's almost wall-to-wall pop culture, so even if they recorded an absolutely brilliant ten-minute discussion of how Newton privately worked out calculus while Leibniz was the first to publish a full-blown paper on the idea, it probably would have been cut out because it doesn't really flow with the rest of the subjects covered.

I can see how people get the impression of TMBG as a "kids' band" - even setting aside the theme song for Malcolm In The Middle, the three albums they made specifically for kids, and the wide exposure they got in 1991 on Tiny Toon Adventures, they still have a superficially upbeat and cheerful sound that kids respond to. I would ramble on about the frequently dark tone to their lyrics, as well as all the literary and cultural references they touch upon, but that runs straight into the juxtaposition of "high" and "low" culture that Liana is complaining about with the Beatles. It can be done well, and it can be done badly, but I have to recuse myself concerning TMBG as I've loved them since my teenage years...

Liana's opening point, that people tend to think better of bands they grew up with, rings true to me - I discovered punk rock in my twenties, and a lot of the friends I made in that scene are crazy about the Ramones, the Misfits and Black Flag, bands they listened to as teenagers but never really "clicked" with me. (and then when Soren calls They Might Be Giants, one of my all-time favorite bands from the age of 15 on, "a kids' band" I was like OH HELL NO, further reinforcing Liana's point...)

I really hope Jack and Jason will keep doing these deeper discussions of social, economic and political phenomena; they're not as laugh-out-loud funny as the pop culture topics but they are still damned fascinating.