Uh, Robuttnik, the good Senator was being sarcastic. Very, very sarcastic.

In times of turmoil, she turns to warm grain products. What's so hard to understand about that?

"Nadir" count:
Two.

I dunno how your tastes run, but I recommend Iain M. Banks (the whole Culture series is great, also The Algebraist), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash is the usual entry point, but if you're up for a challenge, try Anathem), Octavia Butler (Lilith's Brood; Patternmaster series is also great, but more fantasy), and Philip K.…

This is buried on the third page of an article that's already two days old, meaning it's essentially a set of dry bones in the AV Club timescale, but this was a nice set of posts that points to the main blind spot in this article: it turns out that some, perhaps most, of what you liked as a kid was shit. If you're…

So we're saying Star Wars, as art and entertainment, is no better or worse than the Backstreet Boys or New Kids on the Block?

I had the exact same experience first time I watched the trailer. I was seriously upset that a really intriguing sci-fi movie turned out to be Transformers 3. It felt like I'd been yanked out of a much cooler parallel universe.

I've been seeing previews for two months now—mainstream trailers—where Jason Bateman gets shot in the face by explosive diarrhea. You see the brown squirt. In your standard, before-every-comedy trailer.

Whatever movie is chosen to define the 2010s should be about dicks.

I clicked over here specifically to see what a book had to do to get a D-. I'm still waiting to find out—I agree this review makes the book sound like an ambitious failure, but not the kind of catastrophe teetering on the very edge of F-dom.

George Meyer did all right with Col. Leslie "Hap" Hapablap.

Huh, we're on the exact same page, Merk. Treason rules and I can still picture that flipperbaby crawling across the ceiling.

@RagingBear: I ran into the same phenomenon a few years back. I grew up in eastern Washington. It's got a large Mexican and Mexican-American population and "Hispanic" is the standard catch-all (because, you know, calling every brownish person "Mexican" isn't the coolest thing on Earth)—so it confused me when I was…

I don't understand how Inception wasn't nominated for best editing. Four simultaneous stories, each influenced by the one above it, but proceeding at different rates of time.. and it's not even nominated? The King's Speech and The Fighter better have some fucking phenomenal cutting.

Oh right, I blanked on the other reason I seem to dig his films: he's good with settings. They're always distinct, and even when he's filming in very common locations, like 2012's LA or Day After Tomorrow's NYC, he captures the details of these places more sharply than most of his big dumb action peers.

Roland Emmerich
I mean, I'm sure out in the real world he has plenty of fans. But I doubt he does around here. At least my disgrace will be well-hidden.

This sounded interesting enough for me to check Netflix, where it turns out it's available. Maybe we will soon be a two-man cult.

The appeal (one of them, anyway) of Sunshine is it's got so much problem-solving. Life-threatening situation crops up, someone finds a solution only to discover that's caused a new, often worse problem, repeat. That's also one of the reason Tremors is fun.

I like the occasional slice of ham, but Sheen's performance in Legacy was so typical it allowed you to guess exactly what his character would do through the rest of the movie.

Juanito: "Grounds for Divorce" rules. Think it was used in the trailers for Burn After Reading, which is how I discovered it. But that's all I've heard; you got any suggestions on which album to check out first?