Todd Barry is my favorite stand-up comedian. I treated the release of his new album, From Heaven, with the same outpouring of emotion with which another man might treat some sort of sports victory, or perhaps a wedding day. You may know Todd as the voice of Frank Mankiewicz on […]

We at spunkybean are known to say that when we created this site, we felt we’d truly “found our people”; those so enamored of the many, many facets of pop culture, we just had to have an outlet.  I tend to say that I love it all–music, movies and TV–and […]

It’s Valentine’s Day, and we’re all thinking about love. Of course some of us are lonely and bitter, and we’re doing whatever we can to not think about you happy people and your relationships. Frankly, you disgust us. I think it’s a good idea to take a look at some […]

Recently, I was having a spirited debate with a friend over the movie “Some Kind of Wonderful”. He said it was an example of when John Hughes really started to go south, and I got defensive–I still had misty water-colored memories of that last scene, wherein Keith gives Watts the […]

Ben Cossar, through his intermediaries, approached me to write for this thing we call Spunkybean. There were certain tests I had to pass, of course. Actually, I think they could better be described as ‘rites’. I don’t want to talk about the specifics, but let’s just say, well, I’ve been […]

The new Entertainment Weekly has a feature on the “100 Greatest TV Icons”. Strangely, both the cover and article title claim it’s the “50 Greatest TV Icons”, though my copy very clearly includes numbers 51-100. This is where the problems with the list begin. Obviously, any list like this is […]