I went to every movie in 1988. I swear. Bloodsport, check. Bad Dreams, check. Hero and the Terror, check, check, and check. I even braved the picket line and saw The Last Temptation of Christ. (Disappoint mom, checkity-check). Wasn’t the uproar over The Passion of the Christ the bizarro version of the protest over Scorsese’s weird Jesus movie?

Anyway,  the nominees for Best Picture of 1988 were…

The Accidental Tourist: Okay. So, I lied. Up top, there. Oops.

Dangerous Liaisons: Liked this way more than I thought I would, but just seeing the title reminds me of one of the best jokes ever on the funniest episode of Friends.

Mississippi Burning: Rest of the world don’t mean jack-shit, you in Miss’ssippi now, boy. I don’t care if I’ve misquoted it, that is the best line ever in a movie.

Rain Man: An under-quoted line from this movie, in my humble opinion, is “HOT WATER BURN, BABY!” It’s really effective. Tom Cruise is the most hated out of all of those who say they get hated on, but I thought he was great in this. Dustin Hoffman’s performance continues to amaze me, but the movie feels like it should be more emotionally affecting than it is. Had Spielberg directed it, there wouldn’t have been a dry eye in the house and it would not have won Best Picture. (more…)

Back before the show “Rescue Me” went completely off the rails, there was a great episode where Denis Leary and the boys in his firehouse were ordered to go to sensitivity training. The training session went awry when the racially-mixed fireman started keeping score on which ethnic group had the most offensive nicknames. They were talking volume and level of offense taken at the utterance of such epithets.

Me and my racially group of friends had these same kind of conversations, except that we weren’t racially mixed, we were a bunch of young dumb white guys. But I had black friends confirm our findings: there’s not really a racial epithet you can sling a white person’s way that carries the venom that a word used over-and-over-again by rappers carries for African-Americans. But my thinking has evolved.

There is a word you can call a white person that carries with it all sorts of horrible implications, and that word my friends is RACIST. (more…)