Tag: Movies
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Bah! Humbug!
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) is a faithful adaptation of Charles Dickens’ traditional Christmas story. With Puppets. The film works because of Michael Caine’s faithfulness to the part of Ebenezer Scrooge, playing the role with all drama and no comedy, anchoring the story and never once giving a wink and nod to the viewer that…
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Nobody passes on the outside of turn four!
Sometimes a good leader just has to be a bit….’inspiring’. Days of Thunder (1990). It’s actually a terribly formulaic movie based around NASCAR. It’s now old enough and nostalgic enough to be considered good. This marks its second appearance in SignPosts.
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Didn’t any of you guys ever go to Sunday School?
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas teamed up in 1980 to create Indiana Jones, a modern take on the old 1930’s serial stories. Released in 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark became the highest-grossing movie of the year, and earned a place not only in pop-culture history but also film history via it’s selection by the…
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Squirrel!
John Hughes wrote and produced some of the most classic 1980’s “Slice of Life” movies, telling the stories of teenage dreams and angst in generic suburbia. He’s also the writer behind National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, basing the screenplay around his short story Christmas ’59. It’s probably deserving of its own longer essay, but we’ll save…
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It is a Christmas Movie.
There is no debate. Die Hard (1988) is a Christmas Movie. I will not be taking any questions.
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A crummy commercial?
A Christmas Story (1983) is now a holiday staple, in part due to the constant airplay on cable and broadcast TV for the last 20 years. Based on Jean Shepard’s 1966 book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, it remains a classic satire of Pre-WWII American suburbia. A lot of the jokes have…
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Gonna add a whole new wing on here.
Mr. Mom (1983). This line works great anytime someone asks about a KPI.
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Don’t mess with the bull young man.
The Breakfast Club (1985) John Hughes movies hold a special place with Chicago People of a certain age. His run of movies from Sixteen Candles to Home Alone exposed the world to a certain segment of life, teenage angst, and what it was to grow up in this world. The fictional town of “Shermer, Illinois”…
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There is another matter…
The Hunt for Red October (1990). Having seen the movie hundreds of times, I finally read the book. The book as-is would have made a terrible movie, but used the extra space to really dig into some of the details of the end of the Cold War. It gives a bit more context to this…