Rebecca is Hitchcock basically acing classic Gothic style and storytelling. Love it.

My Christmas movies wound up as Wreck-It Ralph and Monsters University, which I'd never seen before but I enjoyed both of them. (I rather failed in trying to make the Christmas movie Thin Blue Line. I can't judge a room.)

Boardwalk Empire has been having probably its best season to date in the fourth season. It's been a rocky show at times with some mismanaged calls and dead-ended arcs, but I've always found there to be enough going on that there was enough I still liked about it.

I feel like the only really emotional stuff in The Motion Picture is with Decker and Ilia's tragic ex-romance that rapidly blossoms into transcendental transhumanism (although Spock's guarded path towards emotional awareness may also count.)

Well the 'x will remember that' was often deliberately illusory, I remember getting that notification for a character who gets shot in the head two minutes later (one of the ways WD uses its mechanics to lull you into a false sense of security.)

You see the problem here is that you love the Office and don't think much of Fringe, which is fine, but you feel the need to frame this defense with swagger about how important the former program is (which nobody denies, as the issue is not if it's important but if it's good.) It's kind of an obnoxious line of…

They did not. Actually haven't talked to that guy in particular in like ten years.

Well what I hear of the author of the comic book he does not sound like the most progressive person ever, to put it mildly (or less mild, he's apparently an arch-conservative who feels white masculinity is under attack or something like that.)

In the eighties, so people have to use actual chessboards for their chess-playing computers.

In that case you had a pretty great year.

I imagine if he had any WW2 analogies in mind Japan's fanatical military leadership may have been it, but yeah, that works.

Oh, I've known of a surprising number of Trekkies who love that movie. Hell, there are some who only like that movie, but they tend to be a bit weird Gene-Roddenberry-is-first sort of people (once knew of a Trekkie who was very disappointed that Gene Roddenberry's "The God Thing" - a premise which would reveal that…

Lots of stuff is incredibly influential. That doesn't mean I am obligated to find it funny, and it's really the worst kind of argument in favour of something being funny. Nobody laughs because something is super significant, like it's some dinner party where people are pretending to like Schoenberg (oo Schoenberg burn.…

Yeah exactly and I'm not a Gaiman fan at all. I feel what I liked about Wolf Among Us is it's a fantasy tinged noir story, more than the specific ties to the fairy tales.

Very probably. Hell, even Herzog's documentary about Kinski is darkly funny and it says some pretty horrible things.

The insane ones are the people who convinced Ricky Gervais he had a career in comedy. Hell I almost stopped watched Louie when he showed up to wreck it a couple of times.

13 Assassins was great. I thought Goro Ingaki was particularly good as the eerily sociopathic Matsudaira, and the need to treat this obviously sadistically unwell man with utmost deference was the scariest thing about that movie.

Mission Hill is an incredibly depressing series, it just seems to speak to a very specific 'wait what the fuck am I doing with my life' ennui.

You have a point about art installations. I once saw an art installation video that was literally sound clips of the original Star Trek arranged randomly as actors mimicked the words (while standing on a soundstage that looked like an asteroid) while on a loop.

Yeah I think the important thing about an inscrutable film is how entertaining they are as films. I don't have a bleeding clue what happened in A Field of England and I don't care because it was a pure trip; Computer Chess was a fascinating snapshot of computer history - besides whatever else it was. But if a film is…