The lesson here seems to be "don't read books, because you'll wind up passionately hating otherwise OK, reasonably entertaining movies."

If the movie had just ended with him hiding out in Tim Robbin's cabin, powerlessly watching the world end, it might have been a decent movie. But the obligatory-yet-illogical ending (their force-field generators got the flu?), the son surviving - it went from a movie teetering on the edge of adult horror and kid's…

While I instinctively dislike the Razzies for lazily picking on low-hanging fruit based not on the actual movie, but on the TMZ-score of the actor and/or director, OTOH, at least it gets them in the papers (and really, the Oscars do a whole lot of that as well, just in the different direction). Sure, there are many,…

That sounds… insane. I know that the Gary Ridgeway "I killed hookers because I figured it would be easy to get away with killing people like that, which got my rocks off, and boy was it ever!" idea lacks a certain romanticism, but… Maybe some otherwise-anonymous nobody killed a (rather small) number of hookers…

It was fine, though as a movie the last act felt a little underwhelming. That is, I could see how it could have worked as a book where you spend a lot more time with him and who he was and who he had been pretending to be, but at movie length, it felt kind of like a shrug.

Or even that if they immediately go back to crime, they clearly aren't rehabilitated, so logically they should never leave except via mass jailbreak. I know the cliche is the naive yet "well-meaning" liberalish doctors are so easily fooled by "real" crazies that if the Joker says he's sorry he must mean it and is…

Maybe bad timing, but after recent news that the Academy is mainly old white guys, the continual "Hollywood's golden age was better" push just seemed a bit off-putting. As Noel said about the Grammys - the Oscars seem more a "support the faux-royal aspect of our industry" than "pay money to see the movies people are…

If he's busy doing this, how will he have time to stretch out the Rosie Larsen mystery to three seasons?

I've only seen Lost in Rio and I had a hard time with it. It felt like I was supposed to find the main guy charming in spite of all his dickishness, but that never quite happened, so all I had was annoyance. I made it about 45 minutes before I found something less tedious to do.

I'm waiting for the T-Dog spotlight episode.

Well, that brand of tale always offended me as it seemed like such a desperate attempt to evade responsibility; if it's not humans being humans that cause evil, but a supernatural monster, well, we're all pretty much awesome and nothing bad that happens is ever our fault. Rather than acknowledge our weaknesses, limits…

What I like about Beholder is that it's actually kind of cruel to the audience. We all want to believe that we're sufficiently pretty to… someone… somehow, and that if we could just find the right colony of pig-fish men we'd be hotties. Even models and such complain about imperfections and body issues that seem insane…

Appros of nothing, I've been going through the old, streamlined 70s and 80s SNL episodes, and while there is occasional good stuff (well, not in the 80s so far, but eventually Eddie Murphy will arrive), the hit-miss ratio is so, so much worse than rose-colored nostalgia had led me to believe. The skits where the whole…

As a kid I was fascinated by airplanes and explosions, so when I saw the poster to Airport 77, with the 747 underwater, to me that was everything that awesome could be. I really wanted to see it (my parents of course did not), so they gave me a choice of a new book about modern jet bombers with diagrams and stuff or…

Akira was a big deal because non-anime fans had actually heard of it. This is not the same.

I keep wanting to pronounce that with the first syllable rhyming with "plan". I know "wander" is spelled like that, but I just keep looking at the word and it just seems wrong somehow. So I get a kind of precious, twee feel that feels totally unearned, which really shouldn't be possible.

Sometimes if you play to the cheap seats, you can pay the bills and be then able to write about your favorite B-movies.

You know, as "I know of something ridiculously obscure that's like what you like, only much, much better" posts go, that's actually pretty impressive. French metal?

Yeah, it's just… there's more than one? It's like learning there's a third Belushi brother, who's also into acting, but isn't as good as Jim.

Well, the "totally in it for the money" tour worked well for the Who, aside from the whole "dead John Entwistle" part.