Agent Palmer

Of all things Geek. I am…

Somehow, A Pepsi Court Case Provides Refreshing Documentary Fodder

“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.

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A back-from-the-dead defense of 2013’s R.I.P.D.

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.

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Suellen Hoy Has All the Dirt on the American Pursuit of Cleanliness

Chasing Dirt The American Pursuit of Cleanliness

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.”

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Spoiler Free Review

Prey Highlights Man’s Folly in the Face of Technology

Prey Highlights Man’s Folly in the Face of Technology

Michael Crichton’s Prey is a parable for technological advancement gone amok. It starts with an introduction to “Artificial Evolution in the Twenty-first Century,” which allows Crichton to weave a better story and set the stage for Prey to read more like a play than a novel.

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First Season of ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ Scores for Good Sport, Entertainment Value

Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds bought a Welsh football club, or soccer team if you prefer the American lexicon. It just so happens to be the third oldest professional football club in the world, Wrexham AFC. Why Wrexham? Why Rob and Ryan? Those two questions and many more can be answered, to some degree, in Welcome to Wrexham.

The series Welcome to Wrexham is part business documentary, part travel documentary, part history documentary, and part sports documentary with a throughline of the human condition.

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