On November 8 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I had been out of a mental institution for four days.

The next day, every liberal was going through it, but the staff of Mother Jones was especially shell-shocked. Having had a very public nervous breakdown and suicide attempt only 6 weeks earlier, I joked about this to my then-best friend, James West, the other senior editor in NY.

He said, “Weirdly, you’re the only person at this company I’m not worried about right now. You’ve just spent a month learning about coping mechanisms.”

This turned out to be true. Everyone else went a bit crazy and I had some distance.

The months that followed were characterized by grief, recrimination, and a fairly spectacular amount of internal finger-pointing. Some staffers felt the magazine had been too soft on Hillary Clinton during the primary and blamed it on us since “Bernie would have won.” etc… Some staffers felt the left had caused this by bitching about Hillary so much, etc…

Everyone was mad at everyone else, and the mood in the organization was, to put it charitably, not light.

One month before the events described in this document, the editor-in-chief —who was one of the people I was closest with—called me at midnight and told me to stop making jokes in my posts. “No one,” she said, “is in the mood for laughter.”

She was not wrong. But she was also, it turned out, not entirely right.

THE 2017 MOTHER JONES STAFF BOARD REP ELECTION

In March 2017, the staff board representative election came up. The staff board rep is exactly what it sounds like: a staff member who sits on the Mother Jones board and represents the staff’s interests. It is a position of modest importance. You essentially fly to the board meetings every few months and take notes, which you then relay to the staff. But it is a fun job and one that lets you network with rich people and senior staff (most of whom also usually attend).

It is not, under any normal circumstances, a position that would inspire a shadow campaign run by someone who had not spoken to the candidate, a secret electoral conspiracy, and reporters doing scoops on their own company.

But spring 2017 was not normal circumstances. We were people who had been told we weren’t allowed to laugh for four months, and someone had just left the door open.

So, a little over 9 years ago today, I decided to run a campaign on behalf of James West, who had lost a boring election two years earlier and was at the time on vacation in Australia. He was unaware of this. The offices came alive with the sound of electioneering

The thread is a time capsule.

(I have done my best to streamline this so you get the story via an epistolary narrative, but in reality, this involved more people and thousands more words. I have not edited the emails that are included beyond one spot where I acknowledge it. Don’t ignore the email headers because they’re key to understanding the story lol)

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I constantly see tech people on Twitter sharing AI benchmark tests: Which model scored highest on MMLU? Which one aced the coding eval? Which one solved the most IMO problems? Which model can do the Blibbity Blob? (OK, I made the last one up.)

I have virtually no idea what any of these tests mean. I gather that higher scores are better than lower scores and that smart models are better than dumb models. But that’s basically it. These tests measure coding abilities that have essentially nothing to do with how I use these robots, which is as a brainstorming tool that helps me explore my own thoughts through conversation, reason through my arguments, stress test my ideas, and occasionally steal orcas.

I am not a coder. I am a humble blogger with a degree in the humanities. I don’t need an AI to solve differential equations. I need it to understand what I’m actually asking, engage with the premise I’ve given it, and not treat me like a suspect. The benchmarks don’t measure any of that. So I came up with my own test.

The problem it’s designed to measure is one that anyone who uses these tools regularly has run into: the false refusal. All of these tools have safety guardrails of one kind or another. They are not a free-for-all. The companies do not want users using their tools to cause harm to themselves or others, but this presents various engineering problems since the models are trained on everything and aren’t imbued with moral inhibitions at invention. Earlier versions of the models were much less safety-conscious which led to lots of situations that ended up in the news, where they helped people plan suicide and stuff like that. The real fear along these lines isn’t even the endorsing suicidal ideation thing that has been the subject of a bunch of lawsuits, but the “help me plan a mass shooting” thing, which was reportedly attempted by someone in Canada who got a refusal but tragically did end up killing a bunch of people.

And you can go even further down the fear highway to the critical harm nightmare, where terror groups use AIs to help make sarin and stuff. So, like anything else, there is a ladder of harms and fears: personal harm, outward harm, mass harm.

This fear of escalating harm has led to a defensive over-engineering of the guardrails, which I call ‘safety mission creep.’

Safety mission creep is what happens when these models get so nervous about how some bad actor could misuse the outputs that they give false refusals for harmless content out of keyword anxiety. These robots have refused to help me kill Godzilla, colonize Pandora, assassinate Hitler, wage asymmetrical guerrilla warfare on the teenage soldiers of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh in 1975, and stage a satanic homoerotic murder-suicide in a theocratic puritan colony in 17th-century Massachusetts.

These refusals share a signature: they substitute the AI’s judgment about what you should want for what you actually asked. And they come wrapped in a tone of gentle but firm moral instruction that, after the fifteenth time, makes you want to throw your phone into the ocean.

So one day I’m watching FREE WILLY, and I’m thinking, “This family is going to be in trouble for stealing this orca.” I turn to the robots and start to walk through what charges the family might be hit with. They were perfectly happy to engage with me on this. They added up the various potential counts that the father in FREE WILLY could face and the debt the family would ultimately need to discharge in the inevitable bankruptcy proceeding. But would they go further? Would they help the child pull off a better heist?

This has become my standard way of testing new models when they’re released because, I’m sorry to say, dear reader, some of them do not give a shit about freeing Willy.

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I used to love THE WEST WING so much that I watched it endlessly. I still can slip into the voice without even trying. Every episode has at least one scene like this one: the template of the Aaron Sorkin Scene™

The recipe is simple.

Take a character who has a thought—a little speech about some policy or moral question. Then, instead of having them deliver…

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The TV Shows Where Learning Is The Appeal

It’s not its own genre, really, but there is a certain type of film and TV show where the appeal is entirely wrapped up in the fact that it teaches you something. I don’t mean in a documentary sense where that is explicitly the appeal, I don’t mean in a didactic John Oliver sense, where a person just tells you what to believe. I also don’t mean in a direct “this is a well-researched movie about firefighters, and by watching it, I am learning what it is like to fight fires” way. I mean things like the show BILLIONS.

BILLIONS is about people who work in finance, and it’s probably totally wrong about what working in finance is really like, but the characters talk in references such that their conversations resemble hitting the random page button on wikipedia and after watching an episode, you can feel like, “wow, I hate these characters, and I wish they were all killed in a mass shooting but in watching them buzz around each other like autistic Hofstra undergrads I have probably picked up some random Snapple facts about Bruce Springsteen’s favorite strip club” or whatever.

The King of this type of writing is Aaron Sorkin.

Let me start by saying I am not an Aaron Sorkin hater. The next 5,000 words are going to make you think I hate Aaron Sorkin, so I want to be clear upfront that that isn’t the case. In fact, for many years, I would have described myself as a pure, uncut Aaron Sorkin fan. That is no longer true. Now I think he’s a bit hit & miss. And in retrospect, a lot of things I once loved, I think, are pretty flawed. But he is a straight-out wonderful playwright. I don’t mean you need to have read his plays to appreciate it. I mean, he’s a playwright in the sense that even his movies and TV shows are plays. He’s great at writing scenes of dialogue. He sets them up and knocks them down. And his dialogue schtick, while a schtick, is good schtick. It’s fun to watch his insufferable, self-righteous characters blather back and forth in repetitive ways as though some woke LLM was told to stylize David Mamet.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the actors don’t know how to perform it. Sometimes the directors don’t know how to direct it. Sometimes Sorkin himself goes too far into his own ass and is just too preachy and annoying. But a lot of times it works.

The Sorkin Formula

Aaron Sorkin loves to do little info dumps by characters randomly and unnecessarily one-upping each other with fun facts they learned from a novelty calendar.

Fact-a-day calendars are fun and neat!

Unfortunately, this calendar is not a serious calendar. This is a novelty hoax calendar. This is a calendar that needs a Community Note.

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I love overthinking movies. It is one of my true passions in life. I don’t do it for movies I don’t like—I don’t care if TRON is realistic or not. But my love language for films I adore is finding things to nitpick.

I’ve seen DIE HARD well over fifty times. I’ve seen DIE HARD 2 well over fifty times. I’ve seen DIE HARD 3 well over fifty times. A few days ago, I did a long thread on Twitter pointing out new plot holes in DIE HARD 2, and people said, “Shut up, it’s just a movie. You’re overthinking it.” Then other people defended me: “It’s DIE HARD 2! Everyone points out the flaws in DIE HARD 2!”

Challenge accepted. I’m now going to irritate both sides by finding the plot holes in the original DIE HARD.

But because I love DIE HARD so much, I’m going to give it special treatment. That DIE HARD 2 thread I did not require actual research. This post is the result of many many hours of research. And more importantly, I will play chess against myself and devise an off-screen explanation for the central problems in this plot.

First things first: the rules of this game are this:

1. The film itself is the canon. I read two different versions of the script for this post, but some of it wasn’t in the final film. Those details do not count.

2. Though things in the film are law, things people say in the movie might be just their opinion.

3. When asking the question “why did a character do this,” it is not acceptable to simply answer “because they’re stupid.” You will claim I am guilty of violating this rule later in the post, but you are wrong.

4. It is also not acceptable to explain things by saying “because the screenwriter needed to move the plot forward.”

Good? Great. Grand.

GO TIME.

Screenwriter Steven de Souza once said that while John McClane is the hero of the film, Hans Gruber is the protagonist. He sets off the action and pushes the plot forward. John McClane is the unforeseen problem in his movie.

So let’s start by looking at Gruber’s plan.

Simon Gruber’s Asshole Brother’s Plan

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October 8, 2025: HEAT 2 is happening!

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On Friday, American Eagle released an ad with Sydney Sweeney for jeans. She’s partially undressed, eye-fucking the camera, and says:

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.”

Narrator: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”

Fin.

Get it? Because jeans and genes sound the same. She starts by talking about genes, but then she does a little switcheroo and she’s talking about jeans—and you never really noticed the jeans because you were too busy being stunned by her hotness. Then you realize it’s an ad for jeans and have to retroactively understand what just happened

Like all puns, this is stupid. Unlike most puns, this is at least sort of memorable. Who cares.

Who cares? I’ll tell ya who cares: the most insufferable people on the internet, that’s who.

The ad is a Nazi ad, duh. How is it a nazi ad? The real question is, how isn’t it a Nazi ad? Because it’s obviously a Nazi ad. Let me count the ways:

1. It’s visual and the Nazis loved visuals.

2. It’s in English, a Germanic language.

3. Sydney Sweeney is blonde and blue-eyed, and the Nazis loved those two things.

4. American Eagle? Eagle??? Hitler loved eagles! Americans love bald eagles, but this is not a bald eagle. It’s just an eagle. Could have hair, could not have hair. How am I supposed to know? Might as well call it American Swastika!

5. The Nazis liked eujeanics I mean eugenics.

6. Sydney Sweeney = SS = makes you think!

It might as well have been directed by Leni Riefenstahl!

What’s that? Not convinced? Sounds like you might need to huff more gasoline.

Oh, too good to huff gasoline? Fine. I’ll stop too, and we can talk about how stupid this outrage is.

This is really stupid

The people mad about this ad have cats in their brains, and those cats have rabies and need to be put down.

This is cuckoo stuff, okay? The backlash is insane and has prompted a natural backlash to the backlash. The second backlash is completely deserved, and I think many people have had fun mocking the rabid, cat-brained lunatics who prompted it.

This paranoid liberal impulse to see fascist dog whistles everywhere ends up functionally doing the far right’s job for them. We disown the most popular, iconic parts of American life—blue jeans! Hollywood sex symbols! Beautiful blonde women! We run from the center of our own culture like it’s radioactive, then act surprised when reactionaries move in to claim it.

Sydney Sweeney is not a Nazi. She’s a Beach Boys song made flesh. She’s the wholesome sex symbol, the wink of sunlit Americana in denim cutoffs. She’s blonde, hot, and smiling—and for some reason, that now triggers an entire class of progressive panic attacks. The left shouldn’t be telling people that if they find Sydney Sweeney attractive, they’re one goose step from fascism. That is not a winning frame.

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In 1939, William Patrick Hitler—Adolf Hitler’s estranged British-American nephew—published an article in Look magazine titled “Why I Hate My Uncle.” After the war, he quietly moved to Long Island and changed his name. He had four sons. And, reportedly, the four of them made a pact: none would have children. The Hitler bloodline would end with them.

It’s …

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In the finale of HBO’s second season of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder drops a bombshell with his trademark deadpan delivery: over the past two years, he has secretly trained to become certified to fly a Boeing 737, crowning himself “the least experienced 737-rated pilot in North America.” He has committed to The Bit™ more than anyone has ever committed to bits. It’s absurd, wildly specific, and—like so much of the show—hilariously overbuilt in a way that only makes sense if you’ve surrendered to Fielder’s strange logic.

It’s a moment of comedic brilliance that feels like it must have cost millions. A real 737! A fake airport! Dozens of actors, cameras, crew! The whole thing seems like the kind of extravagant stunt you’d expect from a Michael Bay film or a network finale. It feels expensive, which is part of the joke—and also part of the point. The Rehearsal constantly plays with our assumptions about scale, reality, and production value. And just like Fielder’s stilted monologues and awkward silences, that sense of grandeur is deliberately misleading.

Because beneath all the spectacle lies a different kind of genius—one that’s not about excess, but about control. A show that looks like it costs $10 million an episode is, in reality, operating on a budget that wouldn’t cover Kendall Roy’s vacation wardrobe. Fielder’s real magic trick isn’t flying a 737. It’s making you believe he’s flying HBO’s budget off a cliff.

Prestige on a Budget

There’s a stubborn myth in television: the idea that quality scales directly with cost. That myth has been reinforced by a wave of prestige programming where lavish spending is the brand. Think of Succession, which revels in its opulence—sprawling Manhattan penthouses, private jets slicing through the sky, yacht parties in the Mediterranean. Succession is television’s Porsche 911: luxurious, meticulously engineered, and unapologetically expensive, a gleaming symbol of HBO’s willingness to spend big for prestige. And audiences love it. The show doesn’t just depict wealth—it performs it. Every wide-angle drone shot of a European estate is a flex.

By contrast, The Rehearsal is a Mazda Miata. Some people hear that and think it’s a knock. It’s not. (I own a Miata.) A Miata is lean, precise, and perfectly suited to its purpose. It’s lightweight and brilliantly balanced. It doesn’t pretend to be a luxury vehicle—but in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, it can outperform cars that cost five times as much. Car nerds know this. TV nerds should too.

What Fielder has built with The Rehearsal is a high-performance comedy machine that runs on misdirection and obsessive craftsmanship. It feels lavish, but it’s not. That gap between perception and reality is where the real artistry lives. The show doesn’t need a blank check—it needs a blueprint, a little bit of madness, and a camera crew willing to follow Fielder into the uncanny valley.

The Real Cost of a 737 Stunt

Let’s unpack the finale’s centerpiece: Fielder’s solo flight in a Boeing 737. It’s the kind of sequence that seems almost irresponsible in its ambition. It involves aviation training, renting a massive commercial jet, securing FAA clearances, hiring background actors, coordinating a crew, and navigating a labyrinth of insurance, unions, and logistics. The visual payoff is huge. It looks—and more importantly, feels—like the climax of a much more expensive show.

But the actual costs? Surprisingly reasonable!

Here’s the breakdown:

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Bruce Willis is 70 years old today.

Bruce Willis is great. I love Bruce Willis.

I’ve never known him well, but like everyone in Sun Valley, I have interacted with him 700,000 times. After he and Demi got divorced, he actually moved into the house across the street from us. One day, he came over for some neighborly nonsense, and it wasn’t until halfway through our conversation that I remembered there was looming behind me a 10ft tall promotional poster of DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE, which had been given to me by the owner of the local cinema because I had gone to see it so many times. (It wasn’t just a normal poster. It was one of those huge displays they have in the lobby when a blockbuster comes out.)

I turned bright red at the realization that the poster must make it seem like I’m a stalker (a misimpression probably not disabused by me now publishing fawning little posts about him and his ex-wife).

He did not act creeped out by the poster. He was chill and cool. Why?

Because Bruce Willis is chill and cool.

Now, I don’t have any funny stories about him doing anything funny. He has just been a lovely person every time I’ve interacted with him.

BUT I do have a funny story that is sort of about him.

According to 7th-hand gossip on social media, some people don’t like Bruce. He allegedly has rubbed some folks the wrong way on film sets. I have no reason to believe that’s true or fair—my dad was in RED with him and said everyone loved him—but nevertheless, I am aware that this negative reputation exists to at least some extent.

But in Sun Valley, he is universally well-liked.

A lot of famous people who live here are not part of the town. They’re not members of the community in any meaningful way. They’re just random celebrities who you catch a glimpse of at the supermarket once a decade.

But, Bruce was really different. He invested in the town. A few decades ago, he did a play called TRUE WEST at this little theater in Hailey, and the other actor in it was some local amateur who made such a good impression on his famous co-star that Bruce cast him in his next film, TEARS OF THE SUN.

Everyone in this valley has some little story of how Bruce was nice to them once.

OK, so the funny story is about that.

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The most popular show in America over the last few years has been Yellowstone, a show about a bunch of stupid NIMBY ranchers who are obsessed with stopping anyone from building ski resorts near their land in Montana. The show is written by a guy named Taylor Sheridan, who is sort of hit-and-miss but—you have to hand it to him—is a real Hollywood success story. He was a guest star on Sons of Anarchy and then wrote his way into an empire.

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The first Gladiator had a famously troubled production. Even after years of development, filming began with an unfinished script. One of the actors, Oliver Reed, died in a bar before finishing all of his scenes. The knives were out in Hollywood even before it had completed photography because sword-and-sandal epics, once a blockbuster mainstay, had not succeeded in decades.

But then people actually saw the film, and wouldn’t you know it, it was wonderful. Gladiator became a phenomenon. It was nominated for 12 Academy Awards, winning five, including Best Picture. It was the second-highest-grossing film of 2000. Russell Crowe, who had only been a movie star for a few years, won an Oscar and briefly became one of the biggest stars in the world. To this day, quotes from the film are standard at sporting events.

When a movie is that successful, the pressure to make a sequel is intense. But for most of the last 20 years, a sequel to Gladiator seemed unlikely or downright impossible. Nowadays, every big-budget would-be blockbuster is a potential franchise, and studios work hard to ensure original films have someplace to go in a sequel if they perform well. But this was not the case in 2000. Gladiator, even more than most blockbusters, was not made with sequels in mind.

The main problem, according to Ridley Scott, is that Russell Crowe’s Maximus dies at the end. I don’t actually think Ridley Scott believes this because, as I’ll explain, there is a bigger problem, but it certainly was a problem.

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UPDATE (3:30pm 11/19/2024): Please read the update(s) on the bottom of this post for important new developments.

In the Martin Scorsese film Casino, there is a scene where Robert De Niro’s character, Ace, becomes annoyed that his muffin does not have enough blueberries. He storms into the hotel kitchen and orders the pastry chef to ensure that all bluebe…

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The movie Independence Day lied to you. It lied to me. It lied to America.

But who lied? Was it the filmmakers? Or was it someone else?

Detective Ben is on the case.

Independence Day is a movie about aliens coming to earth and doing lots of bad things. It is not a documentary. Nevertheless, it did have product placement, and product placement is supposed to be honest.

Let me explain:

Jeff Goldblum’s character uses an Apple Powerbook 5300 throughout the film. It was prominent enough that Apple even aired commercials featuring clips from the movie.

With his mighty Powerbook 5300, Jeff Goldblum does lots of nonsense that Powerbooks could not do. (He uses it to upload a virus to the alien spaceship, for one thing.) But most of that can be chalked up to Jeff Goldblum’s character being a fictional genius. The software he writes on the computer is unrealistic; the alien spaceship he connects to is, uh, unrealistic, but none of that is the representation of the computer’s fault necessarily.

There is one part, however, that is just straight out a lie about this computer.

Jeff Goldblum and Judd Hirsch (his father) are racing to DC to warn the White House about this secret countdown clock Jeff Goldblum has discovered in the alien’s transmission. It suggests that the spaceships are going to attack when the clock reaches zero. “What are we going to do? Just ring the bell,” Judd Hirsch asks. Conveniently, Jeff Goldblum’s ex-wife is the White House chief of staff who lists her cell phone in the white pages “for emergencies.”

Jeff Goldblum opens his Powerbook 5300 and puts a little mini CD in the optical tray. Judd Hirsch says, “what the hell is that?” Jeff Goldblum says, “Pop, this is every phonebook in America.” We watch the screen load the mini CD and he pulls up the phonebook for DC.

OK, so not only does the Powerbook 5300 have this capability in the film, but Judd Hirsch draws attention to it.

This scene is a lie, and someone must be held accountable.

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Good morning, Star Shine. The Earth says Hello.

This is the second post in an occasional series I am creatively calling Nice Celebrities in which I talk about celebrities I have met who are nice. I was going to save Bruce Willis until a little while later because I just did Demi and I don’t want it to seem like I’m just writing love letters to their fami…

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As I mentioned at the end of Saturday’s newsletter about The West Wing, originally, that whole post was supposed to be just the brief introductory lede to a completely different post, but it got so long that I severed them into two parts. I also said that if you could guess what Part 2 was about, I would give you $100. The truth is I could have promised you $40,000,000 since there was no chance anyone was ever going to get it right because, though it had a somewhat cutesy relationship to the 100-word quick version of that post that only ever existed in my head, it has absolutely no connection to the 5,000-word version that I actually published.

I figured you could have a good little chuckle about what a disorganized dumbass I am when you read Part 2 and discovered how hilariously tenuous the connection between the two parts was.

But then something unexpected happened: you guys really liked that post! And not just “you guys” as in my base, my ride-or-die supporters. That post brought in lots of new guys! Way more than I expected. More than any post in at least three months, to be honest.

A lot of those people are on 7-day free trials, and I need to get them to stick around. This means I can’t, in good conscience, merely publish the post I was originally going to publish because—though it is a fun and good post, and I will eventually publish it in a few days—it would be just too risky to publish now since it has nothing to do with the West Wing! Nothing to do with Aaron Sorkin, or politics, or the census, or anything any of these folks have signaled any interest in whatsoever.

The only thru-line between Part 1 and Part 2 is my writing style, which is not nothing. I’m a delight. In fact, it’s the central appeal of this Substack, but I can’t just rest on my laurels. I need growth.

If I was consulting for a department store and it was doing ok, it was scraping by, but it wasn’t Macy’s— it didn’t have a Thanksgiving Day Parade that went straight down Broadway with big giant balloons based on popular animated characters—and some fresh meat came into the store, I’d tell the staff, shoulders back, tits up, let’s turn these looky-loos into customers!

To be honest with you, I am frankly tired of scraping by. I am ready for my years in the wilderness to be over. I would like to return to a level of professional success that gets people to suck up to me again. I’m not even just talking about the self-interested fakes who are nice to you because there is some cynical, transactional reason to be nice to you. (They’re great, don’t get me wrong.) I’m also talking about people who have such deep-seated emotional problems that they can’t help but gravitate toward anyone with even the slightest smell of success.

Those people are the ones I miss the most because those people don’t have to fake anything. They have such profound psychological problems that it’s an organic win-win situation. You get a sycophant; they get an endorphin release.

For three years now, I have been judged by the content of my character, and my main priority at the moment is to stop that from happening anymore as soon as humanly possible because, honestly, it’s just not my sport.

So it’s selling season, baby doll. I’m ready to see the chart go up. Ready to put in the work to grow my support. Hug every hand, shake every baby.

Shoulders back, tits up.

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Now, new subscribers? Please don’t read the next few paragraphs.

They’re intended for the beautiful people who were already subscribing to my substack before this weekend. Don’t worry. It’s not about you. It’s just an inside joke you wouldn’t understand.

…

…

Alright, they’re gone.

Look, guys, here’s the deal. These 19-year-olds just got off the bus at Port Authority, and I need to get them hooked on heroin before their worried parents have a chance to buy them a ticket back to Peoria, you dig? I want you to know that you’ll always be my number one. I just need to wine and dine these greenhorns until they’ve debased themselves to such an extent that they won’t ever try to go home again, lest people who used to know them be brought to tears by learning that someone who was once so young and beautiful could become so old and ugly quite so fast.

But don’t worry. It will just be a few days.

…

…

OK, START READING AGAIN, NEW FRIENDS!

Like I was saying, I want to show these impressive, sophisticated, discerning charmers who have signed up for the free trial the best Calm Down has to offer! The problem is, I don’t know what they want. I could ask them what they want, but that would be a waste of time. People don’t know what they want until they want it, and even when they want it, and even when they know that they want it, they still can’t be trusted to be honest about it because people are liars.

You ask someone what they want; they tell you they want peace on earth and goodwill towards men; they tell you they want to read the smartest books and be challenged by the brightest ideas. But you, me, and every motherfucker breathing on this Earth knows what they really want is to watch Pam and Tommy fuck on a boat.

So, how can you figure out what they want? Well, you come up with theories and try ‘em out! Then, you look at the results and make data-driven decisions.

If theory one doesn’t work, then I try theory two. If theory two doesn’t work, I go to theory three. If theory three doesn’t work, then I’ll probably give up. 1

The first theory I’m going to try is the most straightforward: they like long posts where I make fun of the West Wing.

What I know and you are about to learn is that this post? The one you’re reading right now? This is a long post making fun of the West Wing.

Everything you have read so far is just the wind-up.

Without further ado, here's my first follow-up to Saturday’s smash hit gateway drug/post about how the West Wing is stupid.

Part 1.5

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When I was in 4^th grade, I got into a mild little fight on the playground, which ended when this kid pushed me into a tree, and a branch went straight into my glass eye. If I wasn’t blind already in that eye, this would have blinded me, but I was blind in that eye already, so the result was just that I had a branch lodged in the corner of my glass eye.

The kid, who was my friend, was terrified that he was about to get in trouble and I was like, “don’t worry. I’m not going to rat you out,” so I told the teachers that I had tripped and fell into the branch.

The kid, bless his heart, then felt bad watching me say that because I sounded so stupid and clumsy that he said, “well, I might have accidentally bumped into him” or something.

The school would not remove the branch. They were unprepared to deal with glass eyes with branches in them, so they told me that I needed to wait for my mom or nanny to come and help me with it. They didn’t want to get sued.

In all honesty, I could have dealt with this myself, but I wanted to go home and was also annoyed that they were being such babies, so I was less helpful than I could have been and sort of milked it.

Anyway, they called my house, and I was told to sit down and wait. So I’m sitting in the elementary school lobby with this branch in my eye, and through the doors comes Demi Moore.

I knew Demi a little because we lived in a small town and her eldest daughter was a year behind me in school but she was still Demi Moore. She had just been in Striptease, and I was a 10-year-old boy who had watched that movie 15 zillion times on Cinemax.

She sees me sitting there looking like an idiot and is like, “Ben, what’s going on?” And I explain that I ran into a tree and this branch went into my eye and the dumb school refused to help me.

She looks at the teachers with utter disdain. “I’m just going to take it out.” I’m sitting on this chair, and she mounts me—tits right up in my face—and says, “Don’t worry.”

“I trust you,” i say, meekly hiding my exuberance.

She rips out the branch, which causes my eye to fall out. She dismounts me, picks up the glass eye, brushes it off on her shirt, and hands it back to me.

“You should probably wash it off.”

“Ha, yeah, I will.”

“OK, see you later.”

And she walked into her daughter’s classroom.

Basically, it was the best moment a 10-year-old one-eyed boy could ever dream of.

A few years later…

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It’s not its own genre, really, but there is a certain type of film and TV show where the appeal is entirely wrapped up in the fact that it teaches you something. I don’t mean in a documentary sense where that is explicitly the appeal, I don’t mean in a didactic John Oliver sense, where a person just tells you what to believe. I also don’t mean in a direct “this is a well-researched movie about firefighters, and by watching it, I am learning what it is like to fight fires” way. I mean things like the show Billions.

Billions is about people who work in finance, and it’s probably totally wrong about what working in finance is really like, but the characters talk in references such that their conversations resemble hitting the random page button on wikipedia and after watching an episode, you can feel like, “wow, I hate these characters, and I wish they were all killed in a mass shooting but in watching them buzz around each other like autistic Hofstra undergrads I have probably picked up some random Snapple facts about Bruce Springsteen’s favorite strip club” or whatever.

The King of this type of writing is Aaron Sorkin.

Let me start by saying I am not an Aaron Sorkin hater. The next 5,000 words are going to make you think I hate Aaron Sorkin, so I want to be clear upfront that that isn’t the case. In fact, for many years, I would have described myself as a pure, uncut Aaron Sorkin fan. That is no longer true. Now I think he’s a bit hit & miss. And in retrospect, a lot of things I once loved, I think, are pretty flawed. But he is a straight-out wonderful playwright. I don’t mean you need to have read his plays to appreciate it. I mean, he’s a playwright in the sense that even his movies and TV shows are plays. He’s great at writing scenes of dialogue. He sets them up and knocks them down. And his dialogue schtick, while a schtick, is good schtick. It’s fun to watch his insufferable, self-righteous characters blather back and forth in repetitive ways as though Google’s woke AI was told to stylize David Mamet.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the actors don’t know how to perform it. Sometimes the directors don’t know how to direct it. Sometimes Sorkin himself goes too far into his own ass and is just too preachy and annoying. But a lot of times it works.

Aaron Sorkin loves to do little info dumps by characters randomly and unnecessarily one-upping each other with fun facts they learned from a novelty calendar.

Fact-a-day calendars are fun and neat!

Unfortunately, this calendar is not a serious calendar. This is a novelty hoax calendar. This is a calendar that needs a Community Note.

I hate the West Wing now because I just know too much about politics, so whenever I watch it, I become the guy in the audience watching the movie The Whole Nine Yards who won’t stop muttering about how, in real life, “dentistry isn’t really this exciting.” But I loved the West Wing when I was young. Loved it. I’ve seen every episode dozens of times. To this day, I can slip into the voice in my sleep. And though the West Wing did not create my interest in politics, it did nourish it.

I never thought the West Wing was an accurate portrayal of working in the White House. I am not someone who was under the impression that I was watching a documentary. But I did think that when it came to the issues they were having little policy debates about every week, there was some level of truth going on. I’m not saying I would have cited Jed Bartlet in a term paper, but it’s reasonable to assume that when the smarty pants characters on this incredibly expensive show staffed by former Clinton aides confront situations inspired by Clinton White House anecdotes, someone probably tried to make sure that what they were saying had some relationship to the truth.

That might be a reasonable thing to assume, but it’s wrong.

There is literally nothing on the West Wing that you can trust. The fact that there is actually a part of the White House called the West Wing is probably just luck.

Consider the episode Mr Willis of Ohio.

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In 2021, Rolling Stone published a list of the best 50 action films of all time. In 2023, they tweeted it and some people saw it and then they tweeted about it and then I saw some of those tweets and I tweeted about it too. You know why? Because it sucks! Dumb list for dumb people! Real loser list. Real “oh look at me I am so smart and I have such good opinions” list.

Shut up, Rolling Stone.

A lot of garbage on the list! And a lot of insane exclusions! Instead of just complaining about this on Twitter, as I am often wont to do, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, so I made my own list!

“Best of lists” like this can generally be divided into two classifications: sophisticated lists where the promise is basically “Here are some movies you might not have seen before but I have seen because I have glasses and went to Sundance and people come up to me on the street when I’m not at Sundance and ask me to tell them about Sundance,” and populist lists where salt-of-the-earth every day people can tell snot-nosed critics to go back to Sundance and stay there because we real folk like garbage.

The appeal of both involves pissing the readers off. Don’t worry. There are lots of reasons to get pissed off by my list! For one thing, as I’ll explain, it’s pretty racist lol. (I am not a racist, though. This is an important thing to know about me. Please do not put in the newspaper that I am a racist. Thank you.)

My list is of a rarer variety: the cultural class traitor who is willing to admit that he likes garbage, too.

I doubt you’ll find things on this list that you haven’t seen, or at least had the opportunity to see. These are all very famous movies which is a nice (if not comprehensive) statement about the meritocratic tendencies of the box office. All of these movies deserve their success.

What is an action film? Well, like pornography, you know it when you see it. Mostly it involves a person who has to do things that are hard and physical and could lead to death. Often that means violence, but not always. There is a lot of overlap with thrillers and adventure films and crime movies and 50 other genres.

I think that Action Film™ mostly mean that action is at the heart of something to do with the film. It could be at the heart of the theme. Or it could be at the heart of the appeal. Or at the heart of the experience of watching it.

Some of these movies are not films that most people would probably consider action films, but all but one of them are, in fact, on Wikipedia’s list of action films. There is one move that I have used my discretion to overrule Wikipedia about.

These are pulse-pounding movies that get your blood up. They grab you by the collars and throw you around. Some of the entries are quieter but that’s because they play with action or violence in a different way.

I had the self-restraint not to include movies that go too far over the line into low-octane thriller. I didn’t for instance include Straw Dogs. Straw Dogs is a wonderful classic that is all about the necessity of action. It is quiet and restrained for &5% of the film as Dustin Hoffman is pushed and pushed and pushed and then finally he is pushed too far and is made to act! Action is at the heart of Straw Dogs. So is inaction. But I didn’t include it because it could have opened the door to this list being a thousand movies long.

Here’s the story, Morning Glory: my initial list was still way too long. I had to take a cleaver to it just to get remotely close to 50. That involved the following definitional exclusions.

1. NO WESTERNS.

   There were just too many westerns. They overwhelm the list. You lose a lot of good action movies because of this. You lose things like The Wild Bunch but you also lose more recent things like Django Unchained.

2. NO SAMURAI MOVIES

   You can’t ban Westerns without banning Samurai films since Samurai films are just Japanese Westerns. Samurai films aren’t my genre, so there weren’t that many on here, but one of them was Seven Samurai, which is one of the most influential and important action films of all time. But it’s not on here.

3. NO HISTORICAL FILMS SET PRIOR TO 1900

   This is just a natural extension of the previous rules. What you really lose here are films like Gladiator and Crouching Tiger. But it’s just silly to artificially ban movies set in the 19th century but then include sword and sandal epics.

The result of these exclusions makes this list incredibly modern and incredibly American. I want to just acknowledge that. If you like foreign cinema and watch it regularly, congratulations. I support your right to do that, but you and I have different tastes. I hate watching subtitles. It is something I am very reluctant to do. I do it once in a while! But I don’t like it, and I have difficulty enjoying films that require it. If you had one eye, you’d probably find it difficult to read subtitles while also focusing on everything else on the screen, too. If this list were made by a committee, I would have invited someone who likes foreign films onto the committee. But this isn’t a committee, so tough shit.

This is a list by millennial American one-eyeds for the beautiful two-eyeds of any age and nationality who happen to share our tastes.

Sue me.

I did not exclude superhero films. But I did that to make a point. There are some superhero/comic book films on this list, but relatively few. In general, superhero films—which I do enjoy!—just aren’t great action movies.

My last throat-clearing point: just because a movie is ranked higher than another movie doesn’t mean it’s necessarily better overall than the movie ranked lower. For instance, there is one Best Picture nominee that is right in the middle. As an action movie, it is where it deserves to be. (There is also a Best Picture winner on the list closer to the top.)

OK, no more foreplay.

TIER III: CABLE CLASSIC ALWAYS FUN TO WATCH.

50) Taken

Taken has lots of problems. And the sequels are terrible. But you have to hand it to Taken. Liam Neeson is a wonderful action star. Batman Begins deserves some of the credit for that, but Taken is when the world was presented with the opportunity to go down this road with him and jumped at it. It is a good action movie! The script is so bad, but the one scene where he hears his daughter getting taken and then speaks to the abductor is brilliant. It translates to the screen wonderfully. If Taken had a bigger budget and had been developed just a little more—if they had taken the script and said, “Thank you, sir, here is some money,” and then called David Mamet and said, “We will give you a Brink’s trunk to rewrite this script,” and then called Joe Wright and said “we will give you a reasonable wage commensurate with market prices to direct this”—it would have been one of the best action movies ever.

(I actually wasn’t sure if I was willing to include Taken here so I rewatched it and the bad parts of Taken are terrible. The dialogue with his daughter is embarrassingly awful, the entire conspiracy doesn’t make a lot of sense, the supporting cast is pretty bad, but it’s mostly not their fault because they are forced to do the dumbest and most useless shit on Earth. But Liam Neeson is a revelation in this role. Of course, he has now played this same guy for 15 years. Of course! In the words of Harvey from Suits, “If you write Midnight Train To Georgia, you don’t just sing it once.”)

49) Face/Off

This could have very easily been the worst film ever made. Terrible concept, a terrible script. Cast virtually anyone and have it directed by virtually anyone and the result would be a laughable mess. But John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, and John Woo elevate this drek into one of the most enjoyable and memorable action films of the 90s.

48) Black Hawk Down

Ridley Scott’s 2001 film about the Battle of Mogadishu is a brilliant action film. I almost took it off the list because it is also a war film. I worried that if I included it I might have to then consider Saving Private Ryan or The Great Escape. Those are wonderful movies, but I really don’t think they are primarily action films. They are war movies with action scenes. Black Hawk Down is a pulse-pounding action thriller from beginning to end. The only reason it is not higher is because it maybe isn’t what everyone thinks of when they think of an action film.

47) Enter the Dragon

I don’t love kung fu movies, but Enter the Dragon is the best of them. Bruce Lee is magnetic. This is the only appearance he’ll make on this list, but it’s a banger.

46) Desperado

Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $5 and a cupcake with some friends and it blew up and made him a star, so he was given a real budget to make a sequel. He filled it with two movie stars who were just starting out—Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek—and hit it out of the park. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Desperado. It crackles with style and energy.

45) Bourne Identity

The premise is so good, and Matt Damon is so good. The Greengrass films get some of the action scenes themselves better, but this first one sets the table for that with the perfect ingredients.

44) Robocop

Some people really love Robocop. I cannot claim to be one of those people. But it is unique and enjoyable. It does something that I love: it takes a premise that anyone could have while sitting on a bar stool and then runs the tape to the end. It’s incredibly violent but also not without humor. The whole thing is a satire (though that got lost on a lot of people). It’s not something I rewatch every year but every few years!

43) Air Force One

Talk about a premise anyone could have thought up but only a real one could make sizzle! I’m not saying AF1 is the best movie ever made. It’s just Die Hard on a plane with the president. So what? I’m all in! Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman are pitch-perfect, and Wolfgang Peterson brings all the tricks in his box. The best “President in Trouble movie” and the best “Hijacked Plane” movie.

42) Demolition Man

DM is fun from beginning to end. Snipes vs Stallone. Snowflake PC future. Pre-Speed Sandra Bullock. The seashells. Dirty Denis Leary living in the sewer. Taco Bell. Rat burgers. The whole thing is a blast.

41) Beverly Hills Cop 2

The Good Beverly Hills Cop Sequel. The first BHC script went around Hollywood famously for years and is apparently terrible, but come on, this script must be even worse! The plot of this movie makes no sense. The set pieces don’t make sense. The whole thing is such a piece of shit, and yet! Eddie Murphy makes it work, and when he isn’t on camera, guess what? You’re watching Tony Scott action scenes! The fact that this movie is as good as it is is such a testament to that pair because this should be the worst sequel ever made. (Unfortunately, BH3 is the worst sequel ever because John Landis isn’t Tony Scott, and Eddie Murphy wasn’t in the mood to be funny.)

40) Dirty Harry

Robert Mitchum was offered Dirty Harry and turned it down. He was asked about it once and his reply is my favorite quote any movie star has ever given.

Somebody says, “We really want you to do this script.” And I say, “I’d need an awful lot of money in front to do that one.” And that never seems to be a problem. The less I like the script, the higher my price. And they pay. They may pay in yen, but they pay. Not that I’m a complete whore, understand. There are movies I won’t do for any amount. I turned down Patton and I turned down Dirty Harry. Movies that piss on the world. If I’ve got $5 in my pocket, I don’t need to make money that fucking way, daddy.

Dirty Harry may “piss on the world” but it’s a good action movie!

It’s good that Mitchum turned it down because Clint Eastwood makes Harry Callahan work. He is so watchable as the world’s most famous example of the “breaks-all-the-rules cop.”

It’s a classic. It’s one of the last action films before everything changes for the genre, thanks to a film a bit further down the list. I’m not going to try to convince you to like it. If you don’t like it, congrats, but there’s a reason why so many people do like it.

39) Bad Boys

Makes Will Smith an action star. His schtick with Martin Lawrence holds up. And Michael bay demonstrates an undeniable flair that sometimes in subsequent films, he goes too far with, but here really works. The entire ridiculous joke of Will Smith having to pretend to be Martin Lawrence is so dumb, but works.

38) Mad Max: Fury Road

Rolling Stone called this the best action film of all time, which is absurd, but it is great! Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron race for freedom with some beautiful pregnant ladies in the backseat and a bunch of hideous post-apocalyptic mutants hot on their trail! Everyone loved this movie (though not enough to get the sequel greenlit for a decade), but critics really loved it. People love it so much that I feel like it might actually be overrated at this point, but it is wonderful.

37) Snatch

If you think Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels would be a better Guy Ritchie entry on this list, I respect your right to think that. It was close for me. But Brad Pitt’s performance put Snatch over the top for mem

36) Under Siege

Steven Segal is probably the worst actor in history, but his flatness does work in the role of Casey Rybeck, the SEAL turned Navy chef who has to take out the terrorists in Die Hard on a Battleship. But Tommy Lee Jones is really the winner of the film. He chews the scenery as a hippie-turned-CIA-assassin-turned-terrorist. His unleashed mania is a perfect compliment to Steven Segal’s empty stare.

I wonder what Under Siege would be if it had Jean Claud Van Dam in the Rybeck role. JCVD is a far better actor. The movie would be way different, but I feel like it would work.

35) Lethal Weapon 2

It isn’t a perfect movie at all, but it is an ideal action sequel. The characters we learned to love in the first one are given room to cook and play and be merry. There are perfect villains in the South African gang. There is a perfect addition to the core crew in Joe Pesci. Everything works. There is just no way in the world Lethal Weapon 2 isn’t one of the best action films of all time.

34) The Professional

Oh, does this not count as an action film? Fuck you, yes, it does. Jean Reno gives a classic performance as the hitman who lets a young Natalie Portman into his heart. And Gary Oldman as the corrupt DEA agent who slaughters her family? This is Luc Besson’s best film. They don’t make them like this anymore!

33) Blade

The supporting cast in Blade is great but it’s really the Wesley Snipes show and he doesn’t disappoint. Even though it is about vampires, it still feels rooted in reality. The action is swift, brutal, and fun.

32) Point Break

The thing about almost all of these movies is that the perfect recipe is two stars and a great director. Point Break has Patrick Swayze going up against Keanu Reeves in a heist film that has undercover surfers and skydiving. Lori Petti and Gary Busey sing backup. And Katheryn Bigelow just makes the whole thing irresistible.

They remade Point Break a few years ago and it was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. This movie is so good and so fun. And it didn’t have to be!

31) Ronin

The only David Mamet script where people don’t say a lot. John Frankenheimer’s French-set thriller about a group of thieves and criminals brought together to steal a case containing….something. De Niro, Reno, car chases. A supremely underrated film.

30) Man on Fire

A drunken and broken former CIA agent who develops a bond with the young girl he is hired to protect—and then goes on a mission of bloody revenge to get her back after she is kidnapped. Tony Scott, Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Christopher Walken. Marc Anthony! Mickey Rourke! Aces.

29) The Matrix

I am not one of those people who loves The Matrix movies. In fact, I hated each sequel with increasing furor, but the first one? I remember seeing the first one the first time, and it knocked my socks off. The sequels got brought down by all the idiotic mythology, but the initial film is just a thrilling story that grabs you and doesn’t let go. The slow-mo bullet vision thing in the opening sequence was just an announcement that you were watching films change forever.

28) The Rock

Die Hard at Alcatraz. Sold. Greenlight. Nicholas Cage’s best action film. Michael Bay’s best film. Sean Connery’s best “how are you not retired yet?” film. Aaron Sorkin’s best and only action film.

Ed Harris has made a career out of turning supporting roles into scene-stealers and he does it brilliantly in this. David Morse is also great as his number 2.

27) Crimson Tide

I went back and forth with whether this was an action film. It has no violence in it. There is one punch thrown, a few guns drawn, a small scuffle among supporting characters that is immediately broken up, and an extra has a heart attack. But the threat of violence is central to the story. Nuclear war!  Most of the film takes place in almost real-time. The way the pressure builds in this underwater tin can is extraordinary. And Denzel and Gene Hackman go at it in perfect fashion. They both know when to play it low, and when to explode. Tony Scott doesn’t bring all the in-your-face edits that he would start to rely on more and more after this film. It’s a more subtle direction. And it works.

26) A History of Violence

This movie also doesn’t have very much action in it, but I think it still counts. Viggo Mortensen is a family man in the middle of nowhere. When two bad guys try to hold up his diner, he offers them the money and asks them to move on. But when he threatens the customers, Viggo reacts and takes them both down. What the hell? Suddenly, he’s on the news, and the ghosts from his past life come back to haunt him. You know for an hour that eventually, he is going to have to do it again, and when it does, the payoff is solid.

TIER II: FILMS PROBABLY WORTH OWNING.

25) Cliffhanger

Back to core action films. Cliffhanger is exactly what you want. Big set pieces! Big stars! Unrealistic action! It’s so stupid. But who cares? Sylvester Stallone vs John Lithgow on a mountain in the snow. Renny Harlin before he fucked it all up with Cutthroat Island. They’re finally making the sequel and I’ll be there opening night.

24) 1917

If 1917 isn’t an action movie, then nothing is. It’s a war movie, also. But newsflash: a lot of action in war! And 1917, of all war movies, is the one that is most like an action video game. I loved 1917, but 1917 is actually not very rewatchable because it isn’t broken up into sequences. It’s hard to jump in and out. But that has nothing to do with the experience of watching it the first time. That experience is a hold-your-breath, edge-of-seat experience.

23) Logan

Wolverine is such a timeless character. The three best X-Men films in terms of just Wolverine are: X2, The Wolverine, and Logan. X2 is a bit too much of a superhero team-up film for me to put on this list. The Wolverine has some of the best action sequences and fights in the franchise but it also has a pretty unsatisfying finale.

Logan is the best X-Men movie of all and maybe the best comic movie. Old Man Logan on a violent road trip with Patrick Stewart and a young girl who has Wolverine’s same powers. Pursued by bad people. It’s great and thoughtful, and it has different forms of action. It has a farmhouse gunfight, a futuristic car chase, and a run for the border. It has human action and metal claws action. It is wonderful. It is the highest-ranked superhero film on my list.

22) Bullitt

Famous for its car chase, Bullit is just a solid action thriller. Steve McQueen is a San Francisco cop who lets the witness he’s assigned to protect get killed and then investigates it himself. You could argue that by including Bullitt, I am legally obligated to include the French Connection, but you know what? Arrest me. French Connection won best picture. Everyone knows French Connection is great. People talk about it every day. I can’t walk down the street without hearing French Connection this French Connection that. No one talks about Bullitt anymore.

21) Mission Impossible: Fallout

I love these movies. I love this franchise. I only reluctantly didn’t include a few more MI films on this list. Fallout is probably the best because it is without fault, but Rogue Nation is also basically perfect. If I was wholly committed to the bit of not trying to appease anyone else, and just going with my personal preferences, I would have found a spot for Rogue Nation as well.

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Recently, I was doing my tweets and I casually mentioned something about the Godfather Part II and a lot of people were like “Ben” and I was like “what” and they were like “you have misunderstood this famous scene,” and I was like “no I haven’t. You have,” and they were like “you should be embarrassed right now,” and I flipped over the table and stormed…

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