WordWolf

I'm going with the original "The Producers." Gene Wilder played Leo Bloom there. Furthermore, the studio didn't promote the movie, and it would have flopped as an unknown movie if not for an amazing coincidence involving Peter Sellers.

No, but I'd bet money you've seen all the DC- Marvel movies, including "Howard the Duck", in the theater (except possibly during covid lockdowns.)

About a week after we saw "Presumed Innocent", "The Kids in the Hall" did that scene with the guy who claimed to be evil, with an evil assistant, man-servant Hecubus. "Hecubus, have you seen "Presumed Innocent?" "Yes, master. *gives away the real ending* " "Hecubus! I haven't seen that movie yet! Evil!" We would have been SO cheesed if they'd given the real ending away BEFORE we saw it.

Wild swing here, my gut wants me to try "GREEN ACRES."

IIRC, I sat next to you in the theater when you saw this movie. I generally don't choose crime dramas or courtroom dramas to watch.

I did catch Moon Knight. It was different, but interesting. It wasn't the version of MK I preferred, but they never seem to know what to do with him, so that's no surprise. (Is he like Batman, or the Shadow, or does he have super-strength, or does he have multiple personalities.....) I approve of the newer versions of Anton Mogart/the Midnight Man and of the Scarlet Scarab (sorry, Abdul Farouk was a stereotype.) If season 2 brings us Bushman, I'm going to be surprised because he's a black villain and, well..... There's plenty of other foes to bring in, just from the comic book. Morpheus and the Black Spectre alone can carry a season. Stained-Glass Scarlett could be brought in for a complete left turn, and so on. BTW, I miss Jake's fake moustache, and the diner he used to go to for information. But, I expect I'm in the minority there, both times. I think whoever did this new version did some work and went through all of the character's history, and I appreciate the little details they included.

I get the feeling that when I catch up, I'll finish Legends of Tomorrow and catch all of Naomi, and Flash, Superman and Lois, and Stargirl, not in a specific order. These will probably be ENORMOUS binges.

It IS "Murder in the First" (with Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon.) I thought the "action" "reaction" thing was as close to a giveaway as the movie had, especially since it was repeated at the end.

"When you try to win sometimes, you lose sight of the goal." "Mr. Stamphill, you are skating on very thin ice." "Maybe your Honor, but I'd like to get to the other side." "How do you think the Yankees will do against the Redskins this year?" "The Yankees are a baseball team. The Redskins are a football team. Personally, I think the Redskins would kick the $h1t out of them." "Mister Young, we have GOT to talk. Would you like a cigarette?" "No thanks, that $h1t'll kill ya." "I was wondering if I could talk to you, sir, about a continuance." "No." "You don't understand, sir, he just sits there. I can't even get him to speak." "Well maybe he's practicing for the gas chamber. Tell him to take deep breaths." "Now, if you escape, action: l lose my job... Reaction: l have a family that l will not be able to provide for! Now, knowing this information, can you tell me why you would possibly want to escape and jeopardize my family? l've done nothing to you but my job. And instead of letting you learn by breaking the rules, l feel l need to show you how to obey them. Tolerance. Tolerance for pain. My tolerance of you. But tolerance can be mistaken for kindness. And kindness can be mistaken for weakness. And we can't have weakness, can we, Henri? " "I do not need YOU to tell me what is, or is not okay. In this court room, I am the one who decides what is, or is not okay. Okay? " "Did you kill Rufus McCain?" "I was the weapon, but I ain't no killer. " "Action - I won. Reaction - you can't ever take that away from me." "Take him to the hole."

Possibly the most insidious part about the "do as you fool well please" that vpw said was how it dismissed proper Christian mindsets and proper Christian conduct. Jesus said to love the Lord your God with everything you've got, and to love your neighbor like you love yourself- then clarified "neighbor" to include Samaritan to Jew (Jews were used to scorning Samaritans.) So, that's reasonably straightforward. Love God with everything you've got- and act accordingly because otherwise you're only PRETENDING to love God with everything you've got. Treat people as nicely as you treat yourself- which is obvious in your actions because otherwise you're only PRETENDING to love your neighbor as yourself. That's not hard to understand. That's not hard to explain. Then vpw comes along and says "you can do as you fool well please" so long as you do both. WHAT??????? You can dismiss cries for help if you feel like it? Yes, because vpw was claiming you could do whatever you wanted, and soft-pedaled what Jesus said and what he meant. If you followed Jesus' instructions, there's a lot you could NOT do- because it would not be good for others, or it would dishonor God Almighty. But vpw didn't care about either- he was determined to have a rule where he could do as he fool well pleased. How else could he be so casual and claim that God Almighty was ok with ORGIES when to participate would violate a lot of the Old Testament, disgrace God and dishonor others? He dismissed all the implications in actually loving God and loving others.

Um, 90210??

Awooo! WEREWOLVES OF LONDON. (Draw blood!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_the_U.S.S.R. "The opening lyrics refer to a "dreadful" flight back to the USSR from Miami Beach in the United States, on board a BOAC airliner." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Airways_Corporation "British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was the British state-owned airline created in 1939 by the merger of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd." ". A 1971 Act of Parliament merged BOAC and BEA, effective 31 March 1974, forming today's British Airways.[1] For most of its history its main rival was Pan Am."

This goes back to the main things you can't get past. 1) Rocky's experience of the ROA was wildly different from mine, let alone yours. His had happy people who were happy to see each other and interact for the first time in a year. That wasn't exactly what mine was like, and after the 1989 ROA, that wasn't what ANY of them were like. Further, if you were in during the 80s, and a minor at the ROA, and not a kid of the BOD or something, you were held on a VERY short leash. BOD kids got away with everything, the other kids were 1/2 way to being in prison- which can be hard to imagine for anyone who didn't see it. So, when Rocky met up with old friends at the ROA, they felt like they belonged TO EACH OTHER- which is something he posted. If your experience of the ROA was different, that didn't erase HIS experience. ROA 88 and ROA 89 were completely different events, as experienced by attendees. Neither one meant the other didn't happen. "The ROA was disgusting." Depends on which ones, and where you were at with them. In the 1990s, they sounded awful for everybody. 2) An inability to separate the concept of "belonging" -which appears in healthy marriages, healthy friendships, and son- from groups like twi and the Nazis enforcing conformity is a really fundamental problem. I seriously recommend you get that fixed if you want a happier life. "Belonging" IS. Breathing IS. Eating IS. All of them can be done in harmful ways- vpw smoked for decades and ended up with cancer. Eating the wrong foods in the wrong amounts can lead to a heart attack. Socializing with twi can stunt your emotional growth and leave you unable to relate to other people. OR, each can be done in a healthy manner.

"I felt it was a common enough phrase." Perhaps in some circles, but not in others, I'd say not in most. "If you belong in a cult, it's because you don't belong somewhere else." I disagree strongly with this. Cults hook people in, they trick people, they deceive people. The Jesus People that vpw tricked into joining, they were doing fine without him. Evil cult leaders like vpw use the normal human impulse to "belong" (to form and participate in social structures, whether simple or complex) and SUBVERT it into serving the cult. There was nothing wrong with the impulse to "belong" any more than there's something wrong with the "impulse" to breathe regularly and eat regularly.

Well, you don't get it. " As I said, Cult is Family. Was I wrong?" Trick question. twi put itself in the place of the HEALTHY family. You correctly identified that. If your family confused them in twi, that was the idea- but the family was incorrect. " I was at maybe 10 ROAs. I watched the adults." You really don't get the same experience at an ROA WATCHING it as PARTICIPATING in it. For that matter, the 1970s ROAs were different from the 1980s, which were different from the 1990s. The ones from the 1970s didn't resemble the ones you attended. The few I know personally were in the 1980s. From what I hear, they were the tail end of good ROAs and were weak compared to the ones that went before. ROA 1988 was the last legit ROA. I know because I attended ROA 1989 and the difference was dramatic- and ROA 89 was mostly STAGED. A lot of the legit twi'ers who attended, showed up for the very last time, and never came back. Going to 1990s ROAs is a lot like attending another "Woodstock" that was made using film footage and descriptions of the original but no input from people who attended the first one. It's a cheap copy that almost mocks the original. Again, we've been through all this before.

You extrapolated from what you witnessed to the experiences at campuses everywhere. You just lumped in social fraternities- with the drinking and parties- with service fraternities- that don't drink and give community service and leadership training- and, apparently, didn't even notice the difference when it was pointed out. No, you're not sorry to be offensive or oblivious- but it says something. "I resented having to dumb things down so we can all belong." I get the feeling that you use the word "belong" differently than most people. Actually, they recalibrated the IQ test scoring because the scoring went up, last I heard. Some people jumped to the conclusion that this means people are getting smarter. Myself, I think that it means that people taking the IQ tests are getting better at taking the IQ tests but not getting smarter at anything other than test-taking. Either way, the scores went up and had to be recalibrated to put "100" in the average once more. That doesn't indicate "dropping" scores. In a cult, the cult takes the place of a family, and I thought that was self-evident. If you want to know how to overcome the urge to actually "belong" somewhere, you have to stop being a human- it's part of the human condition. However, this problem is self-correcting. Emile Durkheim began the field of Sociology by noting that those who "belonged" - whether in a healthy marriage or some social group- lived longer than those who do not. So, take your pick. Find HEALTHY ways to socialize, or wait for the Reaper. "the childish sense of belonging." So long as you denigrate what makes for healthy people rather than try to understand it, your chances of "belonging" won't be so hot. You'll be continuously pushing it away to maintain a consistent self, and trying to belong as a matter of survival, and that just doesn't work. And you're manufacturing the problem in the first place by making "belonging" into a dirty word and healthy connections into something to deprecate.

Ouch. A teacher who can't relate to students and doesn't understand them. "I get they hate learning." twi as a cult -and its parts like pfal- are not HEALTHY parts of people's lives. They MIMICKED healthy parts of people's lives and that's how it went as far as it did. Healthy people got tricked into joining, and formed a whole sub-culture that grew twi. twi will never grow like that again because that relied on a unique social movement that vpw diverted- and the internet makes it too easy to look up twi nowadays. That has nothing to do with students in high school or college, or why healthy people in society feel the need to "belong" to something- which can include a healthy marriage or a healthy circle of friends or any number of other "somethings" to which they might belong. (Really, this is lesson one of Intro to Sociology.)

Bolshevik, you've said you studied the "hard sciences"- which means you haven't studied the SOCIAL sciences, like Psychology and Sociology. I know that, in some circles, people who work in the hard sciences don't think much of the social sciences, but each has their place. Sociology, for example, isn't an entire field you can pick up in an afternoon reading the newspaper. Ever consider that you don't know the fields you've never studied? I'd hardly think to educate you on the hard sciences- but you're supposing you understand group movements, group cohesion, etc, having never studied them- and are perfectly happy to suppose you understand them and we don't. Some of us have actually studied them. Being a CONTINUOUS outsider doesn't do well for one's mental health. If you're not even happy belonging to your nuclear family (wife, kids) or your social circle (buddies you hang out with) , you're shutting yourself out of vital parts of life. If all you could say about family or friends is that those who enjoy being part of a family or hanging out with friends is that you don't because you prefer "freedom" and those who do enjoy them "don't like freedom so much", then this messageboard really is the least of your problems.

The pieces that are missing are that there were different eras. In the earlier days, there was more of a sense of belonging, and less high pressure sales. I hear that the 70s/early 80s were a lot more of the former and a lot less of the latter. By the end of the 1980s, lcm had drawn his line in the sand and demanded that twi'ers follow him blindly. THAT marked a huge difference, because 80% of the people got up and left- joining the local leadership who refused to follow lcm blindly and were kicked out. A few years after that, the high pressure sales really cranked up at twi.

It's been said many, many times at the GSC, but I'll say it again- everyone's twi experience was different. When and where I went, "teaching at fellowship," for about 1/3 of us, was something quite comfortable. (Not everyone is comfortable teaching any group of any size.) We didn't have someone looming over our shoulders, and there was no uncomfortable feeling. We also experienced regular growth WITHOUT GOING DOOR TO DOOR.

When I was in high school, I went to the Bronx High School of Science. Entrance was by competitive exam- you had to try to get in, and take their exam to attempt to get in. Most students blew the exam. (When I was in the 8th grade, I was in a Special Progress class, where most of the class took the exam. I was the only one that made it. The next year, encouraged someone made it, everyone took the exam. None of them made it.) Anyone who went there knew that the school would be unusually difficult. None of us went there if we "hated learning." Lots of us, including myself, belonged to clubs at the school. None of that computes, according to Bolshevik. In college, I was in a fraternity. It was (and still is) a SERVICE fraternity. It's not dedicated to parties and drinking, it's dedicated to public service and community service, and is mentioned on resumes because lots of people know it as a good training grounds for workers, for volunteers, etc. They also have leadership training programs. It's considered a sign of good citizenship in some circles, and Eagle Scouts are recommended to consider joining when they age out of the Scouts and go to college. So, why did I help set up my college's fraternity chapter in the first place? According to Bolshevik, it assisted in "the rise of the midwits." Of course, another possibility is that- since I have a genius IQ and studied Sociology and can offer alternate explanations, and Bol never studied Sociology- that Bolshevik is incorrect and other explanations cover it. At the moment, I'm not exactly eager to lay it all out AGAIN (we've been through this before) for someone who insults me so freely and thoughtlessly.

Only Josh Gad actually RODE on the Orient Express, although Branagh did visit it and walk around it. One clue people missed was that the director was also an actor in the movie. There's more than one "Orient Express." The route used for the movie was "the Simpion". When I mentioned he was Belgian, I was 50/50 convinced someone would say it was "Tintin."

It IS "Murder on the Orient Express." Agatha Christie rode the Orient Express, and a snowfall blocked the track until it was cleared. That, and the Lindburgh kidnapping in the news made up the core of the story.