Soylent Green is one of those movies that most people of my generation just sort of know without having actually seen it.  That’s a shame, because it’s actually really good.  Spoilers ahead, I guess, although how you got this far without learning that “IT’S PEEEEEEEOPLE!  SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OUT OF PEEEEOPLE,” I don’t know.

Hey, remember that SNL sketch with the "Soylent Cow Pies?" That was pretty funny.

Matthew Wrather hosts as Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Ryan Sheely overthink guilty pop cultural pleasures, Dante’s Inferno (the movie based on the video game), the Jack Bauer cowboy/superhero myth, sexting, the Home Alone Syndrome, improbable sequels, and movie songs that tell you the plot of the movie.

Listeners from North Dakota: Please visit Paradiso restaurant (www.paradiso.com) and send us some pictures.

You know it’s been a slow entertainment news week when Edward Cullen’s personal hygiene makes the front page of Google News. What else? Madonna is adopting another child. Zac Efron wants to be more than a teen heartthrob.

Slim pickins. (Slim Pickens.)

How about this—has anyone even been to a movie since Watchmen?

We at Overthinking It thing that xtranormal is one of the coolest things we’ve seen online in a while. It lets you make any sort of text into a simple animated movie. Of course, we love movies, so what better way to kick off our use of xtranormal than with some of our favorite movie scenes, sweded Xtranormal style? Like this classic, from Good Will Hunting:

These are so much fun that we’ll probably make more -- look for them in coming weeks. Got your own? Think you can do better? We want to see! Post them here in the comments, or email them to us (or to me: fenzel at overthinkingit.com), and we’ll show them off on the site.

Let’s get started!

(DISCLAIMER: This is an article about porn. You may not believe this, but I’m not a huge porn fan. I’m totally not.)

The greatest fictional adult film director of all time, Jack Horner, had a dream: he wanted to make a real film. He wanted people to care about his characters and his story. Then, VHS came along and ruined the industry forever. By the end of Boogie Nights, Jack’s movies were stripped (ha ha) down to their most elemental form – people having sex in his hot tub, shot on a video camera in one take. It’s a minor tragedy, but it still feels sad.

This is pretty much what happened to the porn industry in real life. Back when XXX films had to be seen in theaters, porn producers (or as I call them, “pornducers”) actually put effort into creating high-quality entertainment to lure in audiences. (“High-quality,” by the way, is relative. The very best of 1970’s porn was still worse than almost everything that was coming out of Hollywood – not that I’d know.) Once porn became available on video, people decided that enjoying it in private was the way to go, for obvious reasons. Since there’s a lot more room on video store shelves (behind those saloon doors) than in adult movie theaters, and since it’s a lot cheaper to make a video than a film, the market was glutted with product. Hot, hot product.

Stringer Bell is tired of Alanis Morissette jokes, and so are we.

In 2003, I wrote the Urban Dictionary definition of Morissettian Irony. In the song “Ironic,” Alanismentions a bunch of things that aren’t really ironic, they’re just unfortunate in precisely the way you would expect. I don’t want to talk about the song specifically right now. The song is pretty kicked and tired at this point. We’ve all heard jokes and arguments along those lines more times than we can count.

I want to talk about two things that happened this week, and a new (old) way to talk about non-ironic situations that still quizzical moments, where you know a few meanings that relate to each other are bumping together.

Stringer Bell on The Office, after the jump —

It's about the bomb.

[This is the first in what may be a series.  Should I have started with a more well-known anime like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball or Pokemon?  Maybe.  But I just watched Paranoia Agent, and you should, too.  You can stream the full 13 episode series for free on Veoh.com.  You won’t regret it.]

[Also: this is a SPOILER FREE! article.  Hopefully it’ll make you want to watch the show.]

First, a story…

Back in college, a friend of mine asked me to take a course on modern Japanese literature with her.  Being my snarky self, I said, “Why should I do that?  I already know the answer to all the books.  If I took this class, I guarantee all of the essays would have the same exact thesis:

‘It’s about the bomb.’”

Whether or not I was right about modern Japanese literature, the interesting thing to me is how little this thesis applies to anime and manga.  There’s the odd exception, of course; Grave of the Fireflies jumps to mind, as does Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress.  (Grave of the Fireflies is about two children trying to survive through World War II; Millennium Actress is about an aging actress who lived through the war.)

For the most part, though, anime goes out of its way not to mention nuclear weaponry.  Never never never.  The most blatant example is the famed Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which the main characters continually use nukes but never refer to them by name.  No, they’re “N-2 mines!”  Nothing nuclear about ‘em!  Those mushroom clouds over there?  Just a trick of the light!  (In case you don’t believe me about the nuclear weapons taboo in anime, here’s an article about it on TVTropes, appropriately titled “Nuclear Weapons Taboo.”)

So I was shocked by Satoshi Kon’s anime series, Paranoia Agent, for two reasons:

1.    It is clearly about the bomb.

2.    None of the reviews or articles I read about the show acknowledged this fact.

[This is the first article by John Perich as a newly minted staff writer on Overthinking It (a fact we mentioned on the podcast a couple weeks ago, but didn't put in writing until now. Welcome, John—great to have you! —Ed.]

Two popular films released in the fall of 1999 contained minor subplots in which the protagonist blackmails his boss as a key to wealth and independence. These two films, Fight Club and American Beauty, live on opposite ends of White Male Angst Road. The former’s about nihilistic thirty-somethings, coming to grips with the fear that none of it really matters. The latter’s about depressed forty-somethings, liberating themselves with the joyful realization that none of it really matters.

But enough about their themes. Today we focus on two scenes in particular.

“… A Life That Doesn’t So Closely Resemble Hell.”

American Beauty first.

A few things make this scene unsatisfactory.

Matthew Wrather hosts a panel including Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, John Perich, and Jordan Stokes to Overthink:

• Series Finales (real and imagined)
• Battlestar Galactaca. Spoiler Alert: There will be no more episodes.
• The Blunders and Successes of SyFy
• Allegories of the Book of Mormon
• The Twilight Movie: The nuance of pornography, the subtlety of horror, the sexiness of melodrama.

Links Mentioned in the Podcast:

• Sandglass: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CNSAXO?ie=UTF8&tag=overtit-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000CNSAXO
• SyFy’s original Films: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sci_Fi_Pictures_original_films
• Battlestar Galactica and Mormonism: http://www.millennialstar.org/2006/02/12/battlestar-galactica-and-mormonism/
• Turbo Boost: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arL04K3HLMw

Playing as Ken takes a subtle mastery of the art of fighting, but very little skill at Street Fighter.

If you’ve been playing as much Street Fighter IV as I have (or any online at all), you should probably appreciate this. I claim no credit for it myself and have no idea who made it, but I thought the readership might like it. It’s a big, complex image, so I’ll have to commit a faux pas and thumbnail it.

And because this wouldn’t be fun without a little bit of extra overthinking, I’m going to talk a bit about what this means after the jump –