If you think the cult of The Room exists solely to laugh at the incompetence of Tommy Wiseau, then I think you're missing a big part of what makes The Room so unique, what really animates the fandom, why The Disaster Artist was a revelation as a book.

He was a star football player in high school and got recruited by several colleges, and before breaking into entertainment, he spent years as a full-time boxing instructor. More importantly, though, he often refers to the lessons he learned playing sports as the most important in his life. I guess it depends on how…

Agreed on all fronts.

I think it's a perfect movie. Works equally well as a relationship drama (with two GREAT performances), a polemic, and a potboiler mystery.

Adam Carolla is about as progressive as you could expect from a straight white male "self-made" millionaire jock with a high school education.

Wouldn't it be more accurate for the title to be, "35 years after Rogue, every game still steals a little from DnD."

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Or shorter: We always ask, knowing what you know now, would you do it again? Was it all worth it? I think the plot exists solely to ask the main character in that question in a literal way that would never be possible in real life. I found it life-affirming that her answer was yes, despite the tragedy.

Does you opinion change if the daughter dies in a car crash at 25 instead? What if she dies from cancer at 45? How long does a life have to be before it is worthwhile?

To me, it wasn't the specific plot that resonated, so much as the theme. As a new parent, I spend a lot of time thinking about awful things that could happen while always knowing the back of my mind that none of us get out of here alive, that all of our time is limited. I know that one day, my time with my son will…

My impression was that even though we were only shown glimpses of Banks's life with her daughter, her experience was much more comprehensive, particularly by the end of the movie. It's not just that Banks exists in the present and gets peeks at the future; the more she learns of the language, the less time has…

My wife and I went to see it on a rare date night away from our 4-month old son, not knowing that feelings about parenthood and the death of children would be a big part of the movie. Needless to say, we spent a good 15% of the movie bawling our eyes out.

I thought it was pretty heavily implied that that's why he left her. I thought it was conveyed nicely without having to be spelled out.

I think the key thing you're missing to make emotional sense of the movie is that she loves her daughter. She has the option of not getting pregnant (or of adopting, or of getting pregnant with someone else), but then she would never have THIS daughter that she already loves and whose life she realizes is worthwhile…

I loved Snowpiercer, but it only works if you don't take the concept too seriously. It's an allegory with batshit crazy visuals and acting. The second you start treating the train as a realistic setting, or start thinking about how all of this stuff would actually operate in a "real" world, the whole thing falls…

But isn't the point of a POV shot to put the audience in the point of view of a character? In the literal action of the moment, Arya is standing over the douchebag, but by putting us in the douchebag POV at that moment, the director is giving us the momentary, vicarious experience of looking up at Arya as she is…

All of that said, Sidney Lumet has a great anecdote about Akira Kurosawa that he talks about in "Making Movies," which is great and everyone should read.

There are, literally, an infinite number of places you could put a camera when framing a shot. Unfortunately, you can only actually put it one place (or multiple places if it's a moving shot, yeah yeah), so you are forced to make a choice every time. Your only options are to make that choice arbitrarily, or to make…

In my experience, it's a combination of both. Most directors or DPs will have learned rules like this (low-angle shots make someone look big and powerful) explicitly, but after years of applying them, it becomes something much more unconscious/intuitive. I imagine it's similar to a basketball player who learns…

"Whereas Hanna so often comes across as an outlet for Dunham's self-hatred."