Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Film Twenty Three: When Pigs Fly (1993). Quirky is the word of the day in my reviews and apparently as all-too-common of a description of the films in this challenge. Sara Driver's indie ghost story fits that word to a tee. Minor key characters, particularly a fun turn by Marianne Faithfull as one of the ghosts, mesh with the supernatural as a jazz musician inherits a haunted chair that leads him on a quest to help the ghosts and perhaps assuage his loneliness. Like Baraboo , one of the first films I watched, despite being a slow character study, When Pigs Fly contains oodles of charm that makes up for the pacing.

Film Ten: Jurassic Park (1993) Somehow I have never watched this film in its entirety, even though I wanted to be a paleontologist as a kid. I was too cool to watch it when it came out in 1993, and I am unhappy I never sat down and watched it without commercials. My favorite part of this theme park thriller is Ian Malcolm's (Jeff Goldblum) cool under pressure proclamations as the Tyrannosaurus Rex chases them.

Late Night with Conan O'Brien first aired on September 13, 1993. I'm not sure when I first tuned in, but it must have been shortly after that, and it hooked me immediately. It appealed to me in ways David Letterman and Jay Leno did not. The dynamic between Andy Richter, Max Weinberg, and Conan, along with the strange skits that felt more like the odd, hallucinatory sketches from The Kids in the Hall than those of his late-night rivals, sucked me in. I raved about it to my friends who were much more interested in David Letterman. Leno was not cool to many of us because his jokes never felt like they were for us. Letterman was hipper because of his biting satire and relatability, while the newcomer Conan was tentative and unsure of himself as a host. His self-deprecating jabs and vulnerability gave him a different type of comedic edge that appealed to the underdog and the also-ran. I started taping my favorite skits and showing them to friends. I have hours of VHS tape of Conan...