Thanks for the kind reception. I was a sickly kid growing up and my days home watching movies pretty profoundly shaped my pop-culture preferences and, really, my entire personality as well. I was lucky to have a mom who wasn't very rigid or overprotective concerning the kind stuff she would let her kids watch. I…

The first time I ever watched toe original trilogy was when I was sick. I was an asthmatic and had a pretty bad attack the week before my fifth birthday. I was home on the couch, mopey as shit, and my mom came out and said, "I was saving this for your birthday, but I think you need it now."

I understand where you are coming from PB, but I think they could have a lot of fun showing us what the characters have been up to in the years since the show went off the air. Its hard for me to imagine that you could get the most talented ensemble cast in television history together again and not have something…

Woah, really? Damn. "Summertime Blues" is a great song and they're a band that never really got their due. RIP.

I don't know Tom, I think SimpleGreen is on to something when he points out the Others' strength/speed discrepancy issue. In addition to all the Ethan business he discusses, there was Mr. Eko's description of the others to Michael (something along the lines of, in hushed tones, "You cannot handle these people."),…

I don't know Prankster. It came off to me like the film detoured into a very interesting direction with the culture of fear angle, and then auto-piloted back into the anti gun-nut culture angle. He does say that the number of guns isn't the cause of our violence (something I'm not quite sure I agree with) and then…

Well, not all of us were complicit. Some of us impotently protested and wrote nasty letters to the editor. So there.

I thought Bowling was a little incoherent. He finds out that Canada actually has more guns per capita than the US, does a lot of really interesting stuff about the culture of fear we live in… and then proceeds to go back to bashing Heston and the NRA. Not that they didn't deserve to be bashed, its just that his…

Didn't get to finish my thought. Sorry for the typos. Anyway, someone on these talkbacks early on compared Topher to Warren from Buffy S6. It was a pretty apt comparison. Both seemed juvenile, arrogant, and pathologically indifferent to the gravity of their actions. Topher still does contemptible things, he's just not…

I think Topher spends his nights in the server room for the same reason he programmed Whiskey to hate him: he hates himself. Despite all of the rationalizations he puts forth to justify his job, he's troubled by the nature of it and the bad things that have flowed from it and feels responsible for (Alpha's killing…

I was an outsider in high school. I played Magic the Gathering in the school library with my friends. I wrote movie reviews for the school newspaper. I wore a Ghostbusters t-shirt. And I cannot identify at all with this movie. I guess other people had different outsider experiences, but I found it to be a…

Yeah, Whedon said that the scenes that were flashbacks were somewhat fudgeable, since they were uploaded memories and our memories are often inexact. However, since all the Mad Max stuff with Felicia Day and co. was not a memory, I think we can assume that those scenes will play out as depicted.

I don't know Garfield, I saw Whedon at Comic-Con this year and although he does a good job of covering it with a lot of self-deprecation, he has a bit of the blowhard in him. Not that I begrudge him it; the guy is good and should be proud of his work. He can blowhard to his heart's content for all I care. He's earned…

Yeah, Epitaph 1 really took the whole conceit of the show to an entirely new level. One of the reasons I was initially "meh" on the show was that this organization has the ability to wipe peoples minds, create entire new persons out of whole cloth, grant everlasting life and they use it to… help the American elite…

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein is essential reading if you want to learn about the origins of the modern conservative movement. It's also just a fantastic read.

When it comes to determining which party is dominant at any given time, events matter much more than any particular ideological strategy. A few years ago books were pronouncing the death of the Democratic Party and counseling them to change strategies and adapt to the "center-right" preferences of the people. Than in…

A black celebrity acted like an ass? We better run this by our black President.

You can tell that's the real America because of the three exclamation points. Real America hates Obama and loves Jay Leno. Other things real America loves:

So a few months ago, there was some Dateline interview with Swayze that they were airing promos for left and right. I was at my mom's and she said, "Isn't it so sad?" I copped a holier than thou, "Who cares about this tabloid garbage", kind of response to her- y'know like you would about the latest goings-on with the…

Best nature's revenge movie: