Benjamin Russell
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benrussell.bsky.social
Benjamin Russell
@benrussell.bsky.social
Librarian. Putting New Hampshire back into aNHedonia. Podcasts at FarcedPerspective.com
Well, if you can’t get someone to give you a Peace Prize, make your own!
December 3, 2025 at 11:40 PM
Drowning Pool is interesting (just turned 50 in July!). It misses Goldman’s touch and is perhaps more convoluted than it needs to be, but it has an astonishing final sequence. I maintain it’s a companion piece, oddly, with Fletch Lives, as together they help establish a set of Cajun Cinema Clichés.
October 12, 2025 at 11:36 PM
“Lara clicks through, completing the task again and again, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally, she calls for technical support, and a voice on the line asks her to consider an unimaginable possibility: maybe she is actually a bot.”

Won the short film Oscar this year, and I really enjoyed it.
A Woman Wonders if She’s Human in “I’m Not a Robot”
In Victoria Warmerdam’s short film, a series of failed CAPTCHA tests plunges a woman into a strange new reality.
www.newyorker.com
September 7, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Someone could refute this, but I don’t think that Elliott Gould’s portrayal of Marlowe in Altman’s The Long Goodbye has anything much to do with the character as he appears on the page, but the radical departure is the absolute key charm of that film.
August 21, 2025 at 4:05 AM
I assumed this was going to be a Stan’s Soapbox-pastiche cavalcade of nonsense until I got to It’s The Nineties, and then my heart skipped at the chance to find out what was going on with poor aphasic, time-traveling Jack.

To then be told you DID just make all of them up. I… don’t know how to feel.
August 13, 2025 at 11:52 AM
After so much love for “Your Name” the other week, I’d love to see an equivalent amount for the (in my opinion) superior “Weathering With You”. As a strict non-crier, the emotional climax of this movie absolutely had me welling up — quite the statement about the power of animation and voice acting.
July 29, 2025 at 12:20 AM
I’m sorry now I didn’t tag you when I participated in Record Store Day loot pride posting in 2023! I did the whole stand-in-line thing just to get it, AND it turned out a friend of mine did the same to get one for me because she knew I was a fan of both Aimee and the podcast.
I only noticed seven people staring at the dozen of us lined up outside our local record store at a quarter to eight in the morning. Their passing gawps of incomprehension made me wonder how they’d missed the phenomenon of fervent Black Friday early risers prior to this point. #PlaidFriday #RSD
July 24, 2025 at 1:27 PM
As a Silver Age fan, you may already be familiar with Streaky’s origin story, but I found this scan of the eight-page short from Action Comics #261 on Comic Books and Cats, and it’s a wild ride that the Palmiotti/Conner segment is clearly homaging.

comicbooksandcats.com/2015/10/29/s...
Streaky The Supercat Part I: Action Comics 261
A couple of years ago my wonderful wife qcait bought me three old issues of Action Comics featuring Streaky the Supercat for my birthday.  So I decided to write about them in here!  This will be th…
comicbooksandcats.com
July 22, 2025 at 12:05 AM
July 18, 2025 at 12:33 PM
Tell her that Babu Frick is included in this year’s Star Wars Lego advent calendar! What greater indication of respect is there than that?
July 14, 2025 at 3:56 AM
Someone forgot the prominent suprasternal notch fetishism inspired by The English Patient. Lots of thimbles sold as necklaces to highlight swoop-necked bone structure.
July 7, 2025 at 7:03 PM
I watched Sea of Love recently, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a “cop becomes romantically obsessed with his suspect” movie where I believed the set-up. Pacino really sells the compulsive attraction to Barkin — and the guilt. It’s a performance standard that other genre films fail to meet.
June 9, 2025 at 4:07 PM
Remember, of course, that Wells was a proponent of what was called the Parliamentary road to Socialism, and believed through elections and legislation, Socialsm could be slowly rolled out for all citizens. So despite Heinlein’s narrow, fear-mongering perspective, he’s not far off in his assessment.
June 2, 2025 at 4:58 AM