It's the parody paradox - you can't make a good parody of something (and I'd say "Shoes" is a pretty sweet parody of sibling rivalry and teenage vacuousness) without implying that the thing is worthwhile (otherwise, why bother parodying it). She's a heightened stereotype but also a character - much like Cher from…

Does anyone else remember Positive Pals - I think they were on Newgrounds, maybe?

It actually took me a minute to remember what the final minute of the video looked like. I only remembered "shut up" and "betch."

As I write this, Community has been tentatively renewed online, the "new site" has assumed obvious superiority, and you can comment on Savage Love now.

Not to mention that there were totally fewer words in the English language when Shakespeare was writing. He had a serious handicap. Which is why his work is intrinsically inferior to Melville's, who used more words.

Rewatching Scott Pilgrim after The World's End, it struck me what an astonishing action director Edgar Wright is. His shot selection, and the way he maintains visual continuity with complex fights, is truly incredible. The Beehive fight in The World's End - where multiple characters are fighting simultaneously in…

You can tell which scenes are improvised because they're funnier in themselves but don't really fit with the rest of the movie and only achieve coherence because of the editing but to facilitate the editing they're visually unexciting and also they have small-but-noticeable lapses in continuity from one shot to the…

I appreciate the fact that the X-Men movies have a different aesthetic compared to the Marvel Studios releases (which are high-quality but somewhat interchangeable, despite my love for The Avengers), but their willingness to play so fast and loose with the series' mythology is grating (the original movie lost me when…

At least Jackson has the mercenary-artist sense to keep multiple versions in circulation, thus ensuring multiple revenue streams. But since I've placed the Hobbit movies alongside the Star Wars prequels and the fourth Indiana Jones movie in the "shit my kids can watch on their own time one day" closet, I'll…

If you must know, it literally would have killed me to Google that.

I hung out at a party with a guy who wanted to study sociology because so could understand how people's minds worked; when I told him he might be thinking of psychology, he told me he already knew all there was to know about psychology, but he wanted to know how people's minds worked. Guess he posts on Reddit now.

Well that would be great, but there's always a sad outcome with stories like this.

I've transcended my biology by not pooping since 2004. All my food tastes like excrement! Self-determination, baby!

The Usual Suspects came out during that window after "Seven" where mind-fuck crime movies were both popular and respectable. Then he made X-Men, which I don't love but was the first well-made, well-received movie from the Marvel Universe; then he followed that up with X2, which is a stone classic; then they made X3…

I heard it's going to be 150 minutes long, and the last half-hour is a fight scene between good mutants, evil mutants, and the government!

Which horrific stereotype would we rather see reinforced: The gold-digger pretending to be a rape victim for profit; or the wealthy, powerful gay man as a voracious sexual predator?

Video games improve hand-eye coordination and make you a better person!

"I will not be talking about this SUPER AWESOME NEW X-MEN MOVIE THAT EVERYONE SHOULD GO SEE at all until this firestorm blows over, SO JUST GO SEE THE MOVIE THAT I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT AND THEN BUY THE DVD TO HEAR MY THOUGHTS ON IT. Thank you."

Here's my issue with Wizard Birdpoop: He's a tiny character in the Hobbit, expanded (like everything else) to a giant role in the movie. By contrast, he was excised from the movie The Fellowship of the Ring, even though he had a small but important role in that novel (he facilitates Gandalf's rescue from Saruman). …

I can absolutely get behind Tolkien, the buttoned-down English professor, talking with all dignity and authority about, say, Elves and wizards, and even Ents or Tom Bombadill. Yet for some reason I can't imagine him talking about Gwaihir the Windlord without getting all worked up and flapping his arms like wings and…