Joshua Grover-David Patterson's Blog

 Recently a Twitter buddy of mine noted that the three major forces behind When Harry Met Sally – Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, and Rob Reiner – are all still alive. And that the original film featured “interviews” with various older couples telling their stories.

And that Harry/Sally needs a sequel.

At first I was dubious, because, you know, leave well enough alone. But I did concede it would be fun to re-film the last two minutes of the film, so that an “older” Harry and Sally could now tell their st...

 

Whenyou’ve been on as many blind dates as I have, you come to recognize“The Moment.”

WhatI mean is this:

“TheMoment” is that very second, that very instant, that you know whena date is going to end well, or going to end poorly.

I’mnot talking about whether or not you’re getting invited up for adrink. I’m not even talking about whether there’s a goodnightkiss or a second date in your future. I’m talking about “TheMoment” – that second where you either relax and start to enjoyyour...

A couple of weeks ago some social media platform or another tossed me a video in which a person I didn’t know stated their unpopular opinions.

Granted, sometimes these kinds of things can be fun, since they amount to “this thing everyone likes I don’t” or “this thing no one likes I do,” both of which can be amusing to ponder, assuming they have a entertaining reasoning.

But one of his guy’s unpopular opinions hit a weird hot button with me – Prince didn’t release a great album after Sign O’ the Ti...

 I recently managed to see the long-in-the-making documentary Pennywise: The Story of IT, which covers the creation of the 90s TV miniseries. I won’t say that the documentary is the kind of thing that changes lives, but if you were a fan of the adaptation at all its well worth your time. They managed to track down and interview just about everyone involved who’s still alive and kicking.

Moreover, likely since the series is pretty far in the past, people are up for talking about the flaws, includi...

 I had a few people wander across my timeline recently talking about “going hard at what you love for a year” and while the discourse was respectful, I was amazed at how it also left out so many factors. Moreover, there’s a whole subculture of side hustles and “if you’re doing what you love you’ll be successful” that I think is, frankly, the result of a US culture of “you can accomplish anything if you just work hard enough, and if you didn’t get it that’s your fault.”

Which means I’m going to ba...

Endings are tricky.


As a writer who has written The End on a number of scripts and novels, I recognize this.


As a viewer, I’ve come to realize that sometimes perfect endings sometimes don’t have a whole lot to do with the middle.


Vampire Diaries ended this year, and while the final season had its up and downs, the last two thirds of the final episode came together perfectly.  If you’d been watching the show since day one, it was essentially 40 minutes of ugly crying, minus the commercials.


W...

I got into Prince just as everyone else was exiting the Prince train.


It was 1990, Graffiti Bridge was in theaters, where it was crashing and burning like no one’s business, despite the fact that it was a sequel to the very, very successful Purple Rain.


My world had changed a little bit since Purple Rain.  I mean, it came out when I was eight.  I knew the song When Doves Cry because even if I didn’t consume much in the way of pop culture, it was hard to miss.  And also my older,...

Back when I was in college, some major local store spent a month or two going out of business.


The first week, everything was 50% off.  The next week, 60%.  The next week, 70%.


And so on.


The point, of course, was that everything must go – the day the store closed its doors everything had to be sold or trashed, and it was better to get some money than no money.


I’m making up most of the details, by the way, because I was away at college.  But my parents would email me every week, t...

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine was lamenting the fact that bands don’t use the word monstrosity in songs any more.
I had to think about it.  She was referencing the 80s, because was talking about a local radio station that was doing a marathon of songs from 1986.
I thought about it for a while, trying to come up with an 80s song that used that word.  Finally, I said, “Um, Bohemian Rhapsody came out in 1975.”
It was a shot in the dark, but it turns out I was thinking of the ri...

Summer has always been TV catch-up time in our household.
 
We have a handful of summer shows, to be sure, but our big start-of-summer project is binge-watching all the things we put off during the year.
 
So, hey, here’s the stuff we knocked out over the last two months.
 
Parks and Recreation:
 
We burned this one off in a week, and honestly, I’m surprised it took that long.
 
It’s far too rare that a show knows that it’s ending, and it’s even more rare when they have an enti...