I have a weird empathy for Nixon, and the idea of him sitting in the dark watching The Collector, based on the incredibly grim novel by John Fowles, moves me for some reason.

Oh, he’s just renting the club from Graffiti Bridge.

I think these toys could be a good jumping off point for teaching kids about monetizing creativity and getting them ready for the economy they’re going to be operating in. Leave out the charity angle and focus on how some other kids came up with ideas for new toys and that other people paid them for those ideas.…

OK, Disney, get your checkbook out. I’m about to pitch your next billion dollar epic.

Well, this kills that last quantum of hope I had for this movie.

I know a guy who might be interested in this.

And, you know, blew up a planet. That must put a check mark in the evil column.

From my cursory glance at her “body of work” I notice she reviewed a lot of books that probably didn’t need them (Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror anyone?), and not a lot that did. She doesn’t seem to have touched the newest Jonathan Franzen or William Vollmann, for example, but did give four stars to Teas…

I would rather watch a Lars von Trier remake of Salo than that unholy mashup.

Thank you. I love Andy Daly, and those episodes of the Dead Authors Podcast are among the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

Let me guess the LA locations where dad hid the robot parts:

No one is actually surprised that this show is terrible, right? I couldn’t have been the only person who thought it was going to be a disaster when the revival was announced.

You make a good point there. Those Transformers movies are straight up, unmitigated garbage. I didn’t like Pacific Rim at all, but I actively hate the Transformers. And it’s not because I have fond memories of the cartoons; I had aged out of the target demographic when they ran in the ‘80s. They are just really shitty…

Good to know. I was thinking of seeing Sicario this weekend and sneaking in for the back 9 of Crimson Peak.

The more I think about it, the more I think the ghosts as real entities should have been dropped. If there wasn’t a real supernatural presence in this universe, but Edyth and Lillian thought there was, Edyth because she had survivors guilt over her mother and Lillian because of...you know, the film would have had a…

I watched Gravity on the tiny seat-back screen of an Airbus A-380 on a transatlantic flight. Stripped of the visuals, the major flaws in the script, the performances and the overall theme really stood out.

Huge HDTGM fan, and I can usually make it through even the worst movies if it’s for the podcast, but by God, the latest film, Perfect, is unwatchably boring. That’s the only one I couldn’t handle.

Yeah, that script was terrible. Del Toro is a talented turd polisher (Pacific Rim was garbage, too), but bad is bad.

I had the same information going in, and I had no problem with that. What didn’t work for me was that not a single character acted the way an actual human would. And I thought the ghosts were a bit on the nose, too.

Yup. Really pretty, really boring. And not a single character behaved in any way like a real human would.