Agent Palmer

How proud are you of your home’s impact on film? Are you so proud of your city address that you’d write a book about your city and all the things that were filmed there?

Author Margo Donohue has done just that with her beloved Brooklyn. This isn’t just a list of movies, although it has that, too. It’s a history of film in Brooklyn which is not only rich in industry history, it’s basically the start of it all.

“Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?” isn’t just a small documentary series on Netflix about one ad campaign. This is a nostalgia fest of 90s culture, a deeper look into the Cola Wars, and a showcase of documentary-making about a court case.

In 1995, Pepsi launched their “Pepsi Stuff” campaign. At the end of the launch commercial, it displayed on screen that for 7 million Pepsi points, you could get a Harrier Jet. John Leonard took that seriously, and what happens from there is documented in this series.

R.I.P.D. is the perfect comic book movie. I know it got panned, but trust me when I tell you that a lot of that is circumstantial.

People generally prefer to complain rather than just sit back and enjoy something. If you can believe it, that’s more prevalent now than it was in 2013 when this was released, but it was still true then.

Are we as clean today as our parents were? As our grandparents? What about our great grandparents? Probably not. Are we healthier? I don’t know.

I can answer the first questions, though, because I just finished reading Suellen Hoy’s Chasing Dirt, which “is about us as a people, a people who developed and nurtured over a century and a half a love affair with cleanliness. This book is, in fact, the first general history of cleanliness in the United States.”

Twenty Twenty-Two. No jetpacks, no faster-than-light traveling, no flying cars (at least not mass produced and widely available or reliable). In short, this isn’t the Jetsons future we thought it might be.

Why does that matter? Because by any metric for arguably anyone born on the other side of Y2K, 2022 was the future. Well, the future is now, and it’s not living up to expectations, I can tell you that. So let’s look back on the year as it was, and ignore the things it would or should have been.