Bless her heart, Julia Louis Dreyfus is descended from Gérard Louis-Dreyfus (also known as William Louis-Dreyfus), a billionaire heir to the Louis Dreyfus Group, one of the world's largest commodities trading and merchandising firms. (Check her out on Wikipedia.)

Whatever happens to the American health care system, it's irrelevant to her. If the system tubes, she'll just travel to wherever the "good" health-care migrates--like all of the elites will.

Garner is adorable at any age.

Support Your Local Sheriff is absolutely one of my favorites and it shows his wry humor at its best. (Bonus Jack Elam, Bruce Dern, and Walter Brennan reprising a kinder, gentler version of his "My Darling Clementine" patriarch...but I digress.) Back in the day before it became fashionable for everyone (conservatives and liberals alike) to bash George W. Bush--who by the way kept us safe after 9/11/01--I thought it was a good metaphor for his foreign policy.

But what do I know?

From what I hear, Burt Lancaster wasn't that copacetic as a co-worker. He was acidly critical and unsupportive. But I, too, love almost everything he did from The Killers to The Crimson Pirate to Local Hero and Field of Dreams. (I have 3 of those 4 on DVD. )

Perhaps my favorite moment, though, is in Field of Dreams when Ray Kinsella asks him (as Doc Graham), if he could "have a wish," and leaves the thought hanging.

Lancaster does this bit of business with his shoulders before he answers. I realized when I saw it that it's what a man does when he's going to confide a secret to a stranger. You don't do it when you're confiding to a friend and you don't do it when you're not confiding. My lips moved--"genius."

You don't learn to be an actor like that at some BS school like they do today. You learn that kind of nuance by living.

Two thoughts.

(1) Cynthia McF'ingKinney got a vote in this class?!?! What part of Planet Z is this class on, anyway? I'm guessing that the teacher's indoctrination merely supplemented what was happening at home. God bless the poor little guy/girl who had the third-grade courage to vote (even secretly) for McCain. At that age, I certainly would not have dared to do that.

(2) On the upside, I was born in the 1950s and educated with by a relentlessly right-wing, patriotic, faculty (at least until the late 1960s). My spouse, a bit older, was subjected to the same, if not worse. Result? Two people who completely disbelieved all of the biased claptrap we learned as children and embraced the leftist claptrap that we heard once we got to college. My point--I'm guessing that students who have digested a lifetime of leftist drivel are ripe for rebellion. I work with bright 20-somethings and if anything they seem to lean toward the libertarian. Just sayin'.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Were the movies bad causing the studios to double-down by throwing money at stars to try to fix them thus causing the stars to get full of themselves and pontificate about politics? Or did the stars get full of themselves because of enormous salaries and the power to dictate vanity projects and pontificate about politics and thereby cause the movies to get bad?

I like movies, too, but almost never go to the theaters anymore. (Barely even rent Hollywood releases. TCM is my new home.) I don't like Ben Stiller all that much, but my husband and I went to see the Night at the Museum sequel at the theater this summer just because we really, really wanted to see a film in a proper theater for a change. All of the trailers were for "whammy" movies, nothing but explosions and CGI. I swear that if you'd dozed off between trailers--but for the volume level, a likely prospect--you couldn't have told one trailer from the other.

Hollywood has been able to make a broken-down business model hobble along for longer than I would ever have imagined, so long that (cable) TV is now making a comeback and threatening the movies much as it did in the 1950s.

I don't know where the movies or the mainstream media are headed these days, but I like the trend. They're finally going to have to please their audiences rather than just themselves.

Best thing about Goldie Hawn is her squeeze, Kurt Russell. An awesome guy and a true libertarian. As for poor Goldie, I like some of her movies but when I think of her and politics in the same breath, I remember when she and a number of Hollywood libs made this big show about traveling to DC to visit the Congresspersons about some lefty issue. Goldie was being interviewed in a press conference when--and this is not made up--one of the reporters asked her who her Congressman was. She didn't know.

That's always summed up the Hollywood crowd's knowledge of politics for me.

Wow, "The Swimmer." That's an interesting and disturbing movie. I have only seen it once and I'm not sure I want to see it again, but it made a vivid impression on me and I think about it often. It's a great addition to a Guest Programmer's list because I'm sure few people have seen it, and all movie buffs should.

I got the feeling that a number of commenters hadn't actually seen the show but nonetheless felt free to slam it as representative of a Hollywood mentality. (What "Hollywood mentality" meant seemed to vary among commenters, but they all considered it a slam.)

I've watched the show from start to finish, in order, as it was broadcast. I've been both a liberal and a conservative in my lifetime, and my antennae for detecting bias are pretty well developed; I agree with Michael Rulle's observation that it lacks 21st-century left/right political sensibility. It certainly has a moral compass, but punishment doesn't always follow transgression--not in a mathematical way, anyway. It presages the fissures of the later 1960s, but it doesn't seem to view those through the commonplace rosy glow of the present day.

I like the show primarily because the characters act like real people. They are conflicted and paradoxical because that's how people are. If they seem "stereotypical" to some viewers--I found that observation utterly implausible--then that's because the viewer either hasn't watched very carefully or has viewed the show through the prism of a personal agenda.

Or possibly the characters don't seem credible to some viewers precisely because we're seeing them without any kind of spin whatsoever. Sometimes the show is hard for me to watch because of its unblinking honesty about the characters. I replay my own life in corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s and wonder if it could stand the same kind of scrutiny that Mad Men's characters are subjected to. In middle age, you start to see your own past with that kind of clarity and it invariably makes you cringe.

Reading your post, I was immediately reminded of a line from "High Fidelity." (It's in the movie and also the book.) John Cusack's character is describing a date with a woman he's dating while rebounding from a breakup with his real girlfriend, Laura. (The "we" refers to his co-workers at the vintage record store who he also refers to as the "Musical Moron Twins.")

"We agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films - these things matter. Call me shallow but it's the f****in' truth, and by this measure I was having one of the best dates of my life."

I remember thinking at the time, gee, what an adolescent idiot.

Thanks, Robert, for explaining what it's like to be the mirror image of those guys.