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Category Archives: Popular Culture


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Vale Margot Kidder

Margot Kidder played Lois Lane in the 1978 Superman movie, displaying a hard-edged tenderness that was a perfect foil for Christopher Reeve’s guileless strength as he portrayed the Man of Steel.

For a comic book reading teenager in the 1970s watching a puffy Marlon Brando as Jor-el or Gene Hackman’s supposedly wig-wearing Lex Luthor were prices that seemed worth paying to get a Superman movie on the big screen, but there was no sense of sacrifice when it came to Kidder and Reeve who perfectly embodied the fictional characters they were plucked from relative obscurity to play.

Their skill as actors enabled them to respect their characters in such a way that they could have fun in the roles without ever seeming to send them up.

The personal lives of both actors transcended their careers, and for a kid from the 70s the fact that they are both gone is both surreal and another reminder of time’s relentless march.


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How Rita Experienced Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is a favourite movie; this video edits the footage to portray how Rita, the female character played by Andie MacDowall, experiences the events portrayed.
It doesn’t necessarily ruin the movie, but it does highlight how inexplicable her reaction to Phil’s (Bill Murray) transformation is.


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Yes Commissioner?

This Batphone won’t actually work.

Though there are such things available on the internet if your discretionary budget permits.

For us more modest denizens of Gotham this will suffice.

(Aficionados will recognize this is based on the Batmobile’s mobile Batphone, rather than the desktop version found in study, Batcave and Commissioner Gordon’s office.)


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Why Is “Sic ‘em” Used As A Command For Dogs To Attack? (via Today I Found Out)

Another of life’s big questions: where did the practice of using the phrase “sic ‘em” to command dogs to attack come from?
No mention of where the succinct Australian variation “skitch” come from though.

The phrase seems based in older language usage, but how do these sorts of things find themselves in popular usage:

“Sick,” in this context, had nothing to do with the word meaning “ill,” but rather was simply a dialectal variant of “seek,” which used to sometimes carry the connotation of seeking with the intent to attack. (This sense of the word “seek” was used as far back as around AD 1000 in the work, Beowulf.)

Read more about it at Today I Found Out.


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Watching The World Burn

This does give me more of a sense of foreboding than it should.


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One Trailer For Every Wes Anderson Movie

As we wait for Wes Anderson’s upcoming movie Isle Of Dogs, this extended treatment from the Honest Trailer team demonstrates that while it is not true that if you’ve seen one Wes Anderson movie, you’ve seen them all, it is true that if you see more than one Wes Anderson movie, you’re going to see a whole bunch of awfully familiar character archetypes, plot devices, shots, and elements.