Exactly. Calling it sci-fi is kind of specious: it's sword and sorcery. And Kirschner's "romance" explanation is right on. Broad-stroked romance landscapes—our heroes travel from the City to the Forest or whatever—have been replaced by dedicated planets: Swamp World, Winter Planet, Desert Planet, Forest Moon, City…

Sounds like bullshit to me.

Of course genre labeling forecloses not only on due consideration for literary awards, but also on the broader literary readership a work might otherwise garner, and the one may be due in no small part to the other. John Crowley is a good example (though he has received a share of recognition over the years): his Littl…

Totally agreed. And internally, the only indication we have of his being a replicant is the unicorn dream sequence in the director's cut, which feels out of place when it happens (unicorn dream sequence, really?), only to be justified by the origami match that leverages the replicant reveal with a heavy hand (gaff…

Once a roach surprised in my kitchen scurried to hide under the nearest object, which happened to be my foot. The smell the wafted up after I stepped on it is still one of the worst smells I've ever smelled. I'm sure its diet differed from the one's he's shoveling in the photo above, but still.

And one (or more?) of the exterior columns, I think for the building in which Sebastian lives, is multiplied and used in a scene in Legend—in which, I might add, unicorns feature prominently. Draw your own conclusions.

Star Trek displaced elements of the Moby Dick narrative at best (vengeance! a chase! an allusion!). That's not the same as Moby Dick in space.

Don't listen to the nay-sayers. It's The Great American Novel. It isn't too long, it isn't boring, it isn't a chore, and it contains nothing remotely "tangential"—indeed, all the enthographic, cetological, philosophical, etc. chapters are the point of the book, being Ishmael's attempt to "capture" the Whale, just as…

And they make little munchkin animal sounds.

More is less, less is more, often especially where character development is concerned, since real people aren't reducible to tidy explanations of character or motive, or their lives to plot, as some (most?) people seem to demand of them. You may want to know more, but that feeling may be a result of what makes this…

http://imgur.com/aMi31

Exactly. He's changed the past by virtue of being there in the first place (the past as quantity P is not the same as P + McFly—unless it's scenario 2 above), and he's for sure changed the field of available choices, and thus the lives, of anyone he comes into even the most trivial contact with, and they'd change the…

Okay, but what about the prep? In my experience, the colonoscopy is the easiest part of the process to endure, since, as you point out, you're pretty happily drugged for it and for a good while after. It's the prep-work I never want to repeat, and it's genius how from beginning to end (no pun intended) "it gets…

I saw his repeating Dodd's "processing" questions to her as lighthearted fun and nothing more, both the mood and context of it being wonderfully dismissive of the grave importance and utility it bore in Dodd's hands. I doubt Freddie was attempting to cult-bind her to him, a task I doubt he'd be equal to in any case.

I dunno. I think the ending, far from fizzling out, is deeply ironic, and the film's sharpest indictment of cult, in no small part for its calm, because it's Freddie's new-found calm achieved through his seeing through Dodd's bullshit and, it would seem, by his confronting and embracing his demons on his own (women:…

Many atheists, maybe even most of them, are agnostic. Their unbelief isn't a positive belief in any way analogous to religion, because their opinions are subject to change with the evidence as they understand it. Most people don't think it's very practical to take explicitly agnostic stands on things for which there's…

From a script authored by the same guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai.

MORE MONEY! MORE ROCKS!

Weird. I thought I was replying to EdSaid.