1)Michael Jackson halftime show - Oh okay, it wasn’t “widely hated,” I got the wrong impression, but I did rewatch it and didn’t like it, for the reasons Ken said Jacko haters wouldn’t. I will grant that it was a turning point for SB Halftime shows (I can’t for the life of me name any from before 1993, and I watched the NFL regularly, Super Bowls included, starting in 1989 and up through John Elway’s retirement a decade later.)

2)Slaughterhouse Five movie: Yeah, it was directed by George Roy Hill between his two big Newman-Redford hits, both of which I was lukewarm on. Maybe he wasn’t much of an “auteur”? It’s HIDEOUSLY dated, not very well shot or acted at all, and Hill didn’t have much of a feel for science fiction, even Vonnegut’s kind. (Certainly he is nowhere near as downcast or bleak as Vonnegut.) It stars the actor who Spielberg used as the cop in The Sugarland Express a couple years later. I used to say it was the most badly dated major feature film I’ve ever seen (so that we don’t count stuff like The Zodiac Killer or Ingagi), but now it might run neck and neck with Natural Born Killers. I don’t even recommend watching it. I had never heard of that Timbuktu movie before, but the thought of part of Cat’s Cradle actually being filmed (the Donnie Darko director was apparently interested in a big budget adaptation of the whole book some years ago, but that’s probably fallen through) has piqued my interest. To my knowledge Vonnegut never got much in the way of good film adaptations; the others I’ve seen were the 1996 Mother Night and the 1999 Breakfast Of Champions with Bruce Willis, neither of which was very well liked when it came out. I didn’t hate them, but don’t feel much like revisiting them.

3)Old actors with young women–the only other example I can think of where a teenage actress played someone supposed to be in their 20s (not using aging makeup or anything) was Scarlet Johansson in Lost In Translation, she was about 18 or 19 at the time of filming but her character is, I think, supposed to be 23. There could be more but I can’t easily think of them. I think the oogie factor may, in part, have something to do with Patrick Stewart having looked really old for a really long time? He was around 40 in Excalibur and looked old even then. Anyway, I just watched the 1997 Lolita which had Jeremy Irons all over 15 year old Dominique Swain and only flinched a little bit at that, and that’s oogier than the Trek thing. But then again, remember when that guy’s head splattered all over the place on TNG? Oh BTW Patrick Stewart did play a white Othello with the rest of the cast as black, this was on stage once.

4)Friday The 13th: Was never a fan of this, or this series. It’s just a mediocre Halloween knockoff without that movie’s interesting widescreen, Steadicam or music. Or really much suspense. I don’t recall Kevin Bacon doing poorly in the film and he does get a good death, but nobody gives a great performance obviously, and the woman playing Jason’s mother (who I think stated in public that she thought it was a dumbass movie anyway) is up there with the retarded guy in I Spit On Your Grave and Andy Robinson’s Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry as the hammiest, most amateurish acting I’ve seen in the genre. She gets a pretty good scream before she’s decapitated, though, I guess. Friday The 13th Part III was shit, I skipped the second one because it was supposed to be just the first one remade but with Jason as the killer instead of his mother, and Part IV, with Crispin Glover and a creepy Corey Feldman, verged on being okay–I think it’s the one fans defend the most–but still, the only Jason movie I really consider any good at all is Freddy Vs. Jason, and that was more a showcase for Freddy than Jason (it’s also really the only Freddy movie I care for, really, though the Nightmare On Elm Street films have a better track record than the Friday The 13th series.) And even then, the only part of F vs. J that I really feel like going back and watching is the big fight between the two of them at the end, which was honestly pretty entertaining.

5)Drag Me To Hell: This was okay but I don’t think I ever saw it as a classic. I think it was Sam Raimi trying to get back to basics after the poor reception Spider-Man 3 got, and I’m pretty sure even he was complaining about Spider-Man 3 being a crappy shooting experience and getting out of hand before Drag Me To Hell was even released, or maybe I’m misremembering things, but it can’t be good for Raimi’s soul that the main thing people do with Spider-Man 3 today is make “Bully Maguire” memes and YouTube poop videos out of the infamously laughable scenes where Tobey Maguire plays “bad” Peter with the suit and the stupid lock of hair over his face. Sam Raimi is probably a better and less obnoxious filmmaker than Tim Burton and in many ways this resembles a Burton movie if it were less obnoxious, torturing the heroine like that in a way that suggests the filmmaker got his ass kicked real hard in high school. And I do remember it as being pretty cruel–details about the boyfriend’s mother not liking the heroine because she comes from a farm, the little kid going to Hell at the beginning, and the sad fate of the heroine. I don’t know what really made me fixate on that though for this film, there’s other films where I, for whatever reason, don’t glom on to how cruel they are. What’s wrong with me? The CGI wasn’t too great, no. It got really good reviews when it came out but I don’t remember a cult forming around it.