Eastwood never resorted to sentiment in "Flags"? Now that's a laugh. Maybe not during the actual combat scenes, but once the film starts spending most of its time in America as the characters go around promoting the war, it turns into a big sludgy mess of sentimentality. The whole arc for the Native American soldier…

"Hyperbolic"? I do not think it means what you think it means.

Really? I didn't know that part was fabricated. It was one of my favorite episodes of the series too. Bummer…

Count me among Malick's detractors on The Thin Red Line. With its hushed (and ridiculously pretentious) narration and its nature footage, it committed the classic error of aestheticizing war. Not the experience of combat itself, really, but its whole portrait of the war was this poetic, grandly elegiac thing, where…

Ugh
So, let me see if I did the math right:

Yeah, this was one of the least necessary remakes in recent memory, and from the looks of it (brief flashes at the end of the trailer), I think they screwed up the climax at the swimming pool. I'll probably go to see it though, if only because it was filmed in my hometown.

You always remember your first. Mine was "The Mole People." Just thinking about it takes me back to that summer vacation, watching it late at night in a hotel room with my dad while my mom and sisters slept, laughing at the John Agar cracks. I would give my left nut for every MST3K episode ever made on DVD.

Agreed. The moment the movie grabbed me was one of the first shots, where Plainview is chipping away at some rock with a pickaxe in the dark. Something about the strange lighting and the brief sparks in that shot was absolutely mesmerizing to me. And of course there was the Jonny Greenwood strings as the camera pans…

Agreed on Chapter 1 of "Broom," Miller. I picked up the book at a friend's house to pass the time while she was doing something else, and the first chapter completely hooked me. Unfortunately, I don't think the rest of the book lived up to the opening. Probably should have just been left a short story.

Nobody's brought up FUTURAMA yet?
My first exposure to the show was the first-season episode where the crew is talking about why there are no videotape recordings left in the future, and Prof. Farnsworth says, "No, there wouldn't be. All videotapes were destroyed back in the 24th century during the second coming of…

Yeah, TWBB would be one of my answers too. It's even more remarkable considering I didn't like "Magnolia" and don't feel much need to check out "Boogie Nights" and "Punch Drunk Love." But TWBB grabbed me by the scruff of my neck from the beginning and didn't let go until the lights came up and my friends started to…

What's taters, precious?
I know this is a serious movie, and it's supposed to be pretty good … but every time I read the phrase "inserting a potato into her vagina" I can't help snickering. Maybe it's the incongruousness of putting such a funny-sounding word as "potato" so close to the serious descriptions of…

@ Colupe: Wrong. The first half hour of "Weeks" was amazing, granted - maybe even better than much of "Days" - but then it takes a big fat swan dive into Stupid Land the second that they turn the protagonist into some sort of super-zombie. Then it becomes just another action-horror schlockfest, on par with the…

JVS: David Foster Wallace. Definitely David Foster Wallace. Though, personally, I prefer his nonfiction, which is the real deal. I might even go so far as to call him the foremost writer of our generation (meaning 20-30 somethings), in the same sense that, say, Nirvana or Radiohead would be the bands of our…

I knew someone in high school whose name was, no joke, Jenna Tellier. If you don't get it, say it out loud fast. I think she turned out okay, though. But at school she was rumored to be a "lady of easy virtue," probably thanks in no small part to that unfortunate name.

Yeah, why the sudden hate for "Lobstertainment"? It's not great, but I didn't hate it.

Obscure screencap
I am probably the only person on these boards that recognizes the B-movie that (surprisingly apropos) picture at the top is from: "The Brain from Planet Arous." Unless Mystery Science Theater lampooned it. My dad actually owned (and liked) the movie itself, and made me watch it as a kid.

Pixie Alamo.

clap

Actually, that's just a cardboard cutout of Michael Cera.