"There Is a Plethora of the Mundane": Dick Van Dyke Meets the Avant-Garde (Season 2, Episode 26 [March 27, 1963])

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Heading to Texas: P&PC at MLA's Annual Convention

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A few weeks ago, P&PC featured the poetry of Steve Pink's 2010 comedy Hot Tub Time Machine which co-stars John Cusack as one of three adult losers who get magically transported back to their high school days of 1986 and thus get an existential do-over. There's a great scene in the middle of the movie when Cusack is caught doing bong hits and mushrooms and held accountable for writing teenage angst poetry to the famous Guns N' Roses tune " Sweet Child O' Mine ." While the P&PC Office was aware of at least one more Cusack film that incorporates poetry, we didn't remember (not until Brian Spears pointed it out to us) all of the verse in the the other famous Cusack back-to-high-school flick, 1998's Grosse Pointe Blank , which was directed by George Armitage and co-stars Minnie Driver. In the film, Cusack plays Martin Q. Blank, a hired assassin who goes back to Michigan for his tenth high school reunion and falls in love with high school sw...
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