Movies and Streaming Video

Just before Christmas Rocky IV was on cable yet again, and I watched the last hour of it with my wife and kids. While it was never what anyone would call a ‘good’ movie, certainly not like the original Rocky, it has often been a guilty pleasure because it executes perfectly on the whole built-up feel-good emotional roller-coaster motif. But watching it with kids who were born after the memory of the Soviet era had exited the cultural mainstream brought just how out-of-date all of the Cold War jingoism has become. I would have to put Rocky IV into the…

While I sort of lost track of the sequels, I definitely remember seeing the original Back to the Future in theaters back in 1985! I saw it with a bunch of friends who were, like me, home for the summer from college but busy working as much as possible to earn whatever we could for the coming year. And while the screening at a campus the following spring elicited some derisive chuckles over the ‘flux capacitor’ – since flux means change and capacitor is for storage – the room was packed with folks who really loved the film. And why…