SPOILER SPACE

Yeah, if Rashomon has a flaw, it's the actress playing the wife. Mifune's a good enough actor that his over-the-topness works, but the wife's big scene where she savagely mocks the two men is like fingernails on a chalkboard, no matter how many times I watch it.

On Saturday I finished up season 1 of Downton Abbey. On balance, I liked it, though I have little patience for the on-again-off-again romances and sisterly backstabbing that the show traffics in so regularly. It's a good show, but it may not be for me.

I've been saying for years that he needs to do a horror film. The sequence in Black Swan where Natalie Portman is running all over the place and freaking out (starting with Winona Ryder stabbing herself in the face and culminating in the Portman/Kunis make-out) is as effective as any horror movie I've seen.

I kind of hated Kat, but the way she went out was good enough that I can forgive her.

Yeah, Buzz, you're crazy. Of course, I might want to defend Tim just because I basically used to be Tim at one point in my life.

Yeah, Thomas is an asshole, but O'Brien's the one that makes my blood boil. At least Thomas has the excuse of having to deal with being gay in an era where open gayness makes you a total pariah. O'Brien just seems to make everyone's lives miserable for no good reason.

What about characters that other characters most love to hate? I'm thinking of Zoidberg from Futurama and Jerry from Parks & Rec.

WAAAAAAALLLLLLT!!!

Punch-gutting? Does that mean one of the dwarfs punches a hole in the stomach of one of these teenagers? Because that would almost make this worth seeing.

I know that books like these are ostensibly predicated on the concept that the comedian's spouse is perfectly okay with their dirty laundry being aired in public, but every time I hear about a book or a standup act that digs into this sort of material, I just get sad. Marriages go through rough patches and married…

Cool story, bro.

Wait, people were pissed off by the ending of MMMM? Why? *SPOILER* I guess it does away with some of the ambiguity ("is she freaking out the entire movie for nothing?"), but the cult people were so scary that there was no question in my mind that they were, in fact, going to come for her. The ending just seemed like a…

They must find it interesting, otherwise they wouldn't waste so much time dicking around with it. I've seen my fair share of iPhone users sitting around and talking at their phone like they're American tourists in Japan asking where the bathroom is.

I think Life Is Beautiful gets a bad rap. Just because the director is obnoxious and eventually revealed himself as an egocentric one-hit wonder doesn't make the film itself bad. I still don't remember how the Academy justified its nomination for Best Picture instead of Best Foreign Film, but I'd be comfortable…

Don't even joke about that, @ComradeQuestions:disqus. Sounds like she's (?) got enough to deal with as it is without that emotional wrecking ball.

I got depressed and slept for most of the weekend! During my waking hours, though, I did some writing and watched a LOT of That Mitchell & Webb Look. Underneath the absurdity of the sketches is some pretty smart media criticism, I think.

And yet Apple gets the last laugh, because its brainwashed cooler-than-thou acolytes actually are impressed. Or pretend to be.

I could not believe my eyes the first time I saw one of those commercials. It was like those sexist Super Bowl car ads from last year, minus any remaining subtlety. I seriously thought it was a satire of that marketing strategy at first.

True, silence is not the answer. However, demonizing one's opponents with offensive language is not the answer either. There's a bitterness behind Savage's jabs that sticks in my throat. Firebrands have an important place in any movement, but if Savage wants to be an efficacious spokesperson and figurehead for gay…