CUJO might have been one of King's better books if it weren't for the awful passages where he writes from the dog's perspective. The rest is fine, but those parts almost made me put the book down.

Yeah, I really didn't like Insomnia either. I haven't read the Dark Tower books, but even I could tell that Insomnia was doing some really heavy-handed "hay guyz look at this world I done built!" business. Plus, his satire of the anti-abortion movement was waaaay too obvious and preachy.

It's not just fatherhood, but family life in general that seems to give King the willies. Fathers are wife beaters and drunken child abusers; mothers are controlling and manipulative; acrimonious divorces seem to the be the norm. For every happy marriage in King's writings, there are two dozen nightmare families. This…

In the book, it's Dodgson.

"The Fugitive" is an example of a movie I can always pop into the DVD player, no matter what mood I'm in, and enjoy myself. It's as good as blockbuster thrillers get.

You know, Chartex, you SAY "not-genius," but when I read the words "gun-toting 11-year-old crime boss" I can't help but think, "That sounds kind of awesome."

Wait, somebody else knows and loves "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken"? I thought I was the only one! It's one of the only examples of my parents' kitschy tastes in entertainment actually turning up something worthwhile.

I'm pretty sure over half of my female friends love the hell out of "Steel Magnolias," and the rest of them have at least seen it and liked it.

Good call on The Incredibles, above. I've never seen it on TV and I don't own it, but I remember going to Fry's one day on an errand and seeing it on one of their display TVs. I ended up standing there for almost an hour, watching it through to the end, before going about my business. Great, great flick.

Oh man, I just saw the stray apostrophe in my original comment. So, so ashamed.

Yeah, it's objectively impossible to underrate "Mission to Mars" because that implies that one is ignoring the film's positive aspects, of which there are none. It rips off everything from "2001" to "Apollo 13" and does so in such an inept and BORING (let's not forget, its boring-ness is its biggest problem) fashion…

Man, you guys weren't kidding
I hadn't seen a single episode of "Heroes" before last night, when I came across it by accident and decided on a whim to leave it on, just to see if it was really as bad as everyone around here says.

I dunno, it left an impression (to me, anyway) of "trying too hard." Sort of like something you'd do for the first draft of a creative nonfiction piece for a creative writing class, before the workshopping process. I didn't hate it, but it felt a little over-earnest to me. Just my 2 cents.

Not pretentious, necessarily, but a bit unpolished. No offense to Zack, but his choice to list birth and death dates after the names of everyone named in the article WAS a bit much.

TWfS - Really? The Virgin Spring ignores questions regarding God's existence? Isn't the problem of how a good God can allow evil to happen the whole point of the film? I'll grant you that he ends the film by deciding that God, though inexplicable, is still ultimately good, which just confirms his premises; but I think…

Hey, be nice to the Music Box. Mere days after I was complaining that I had never seen a Kurosawa film on the big screen, I found out they were showing "Rashomon" there. They also did a screening of MST3K: The Movie. They're good people.

I actually thought that the monster reveal at the end of the book was pretty scary. SPOILER Just the thought of a character burrowing into the body of a giant spider to squish its heart with his bare hands, while another character chases down its gigantic, pulsing, luminescent eggs to squish THOSE … well, I don't…

I second the video games. I've never played the Silent Hill series (and something tells me I shouldn't, considering I'm getting creeped out just by these comments). But I loved/was scared by the RE1 remake for the Gamecube—that little girl who got turned into a monster by scientists grafting her parents onto her body…

Matt Martinez - I can't believe those editions are real. Good Lord, the covers are hideous. HIDEOUS! Too ugly for the human mind to contemplate!

Don't forget King's "From a Buick 8," which, while not a wholly successful book, has Lovecraft's fingerprints all over it and is extremely effective in parts.