That's understandable.  I hope I can say this without sounding like I'm saying that you're a kid, but when I was a kid, I couldn't stand that section and I skimmed it like a motherfucker.  Now, I enjoy it a whole hell of a lot more than, for example, much of the bone-dry Helm's Deep section.  Different strokes, I…

I guess I can see why it was cut from the film (as well as why the Elves were completely changed in a way that robbed them of virtually everything I'd liked about them in the books): working with the shorter running-time of the film, as well as the fact that, in a medium like film, a villain that is an inert gold ring…

At the risk of outing myself as… well, as exactly the sort of nerd that I am, I've read The Lord of the Rings several times in my life, including very recently for the first time as a real adult with kids and shit, and in each reading, the hobbits' detour through Tom Bombadil's neck of the woods is among my very…

[stabs butterknife into own throat]
[dies quickly]
[regrets nothing]

Methinks we'd not be lampooning Donahue's sensitivity to Minaj's trolling if he were the head of the Anti-Defamation League and Minaj had showed up to the Grammys with an entourage of fake Hasidic Jews.  And that's apart from the more general point that criticizing religious leaders for being insufficiently cynical is…

Congratulations:
Your defense of Mission to Mars is the stupidest thing the human race has ever produced.

nothing much to add
But I'm really loving this feature so far. I especially like the non-glibness. God bless Rabin, but it's refreshing to read something reasonably straightforward from the Clubbers every now and then.

wow,
I love this review. That's really all I have to add.

docs as journalism
Here's a question that's interesting, to me at least: with newspapers and magazines on their way out, and internet media outlets generally a little too seat-of-their-pants to really dig into stories, does anyone see feature-length documentaries becoming the future of long-form journalism?

durian
I had very fresh, perfectly-ripe durian once (we needed a machete to get into it), and I wouldn't compare the texture to anything like a banana at all. It was more like an EXTREMELY under-ripe avocado: hard and strangely rubbery. The taste and smell were exactly like rotted white onion- sickly sweet and…

I'm sorry
…but there's only one correct answer to this question, and it's Bruce Lee. That's the baddest ass badass who ever lived.

Isn't it…
…"choad"?

I love both of those "goofs." Before I realized they weren't intended to be part of the movie, I thought of them as fitting perfectly with the movie's winking tone, and I still do. When I bought PWBA on DVD and they were gone, I was genuinely crestfallen.

truce!
Spot-on about the stop-motion, D'Angelo. Realistic effects wouldn't have fit at all. Part of what's funny about that scene, as well as the dream sequence with the dinosaur eating the bike, and the blatantly-artificial driving-at-night scene before letterboxing removed the visible rail tracks beneath the…

hey
This was my favorite AV Club review in a long, long, long time. Charmingly self-deprecating, disarmingly honest, and neither relentlessly ironic nor smarmily, combatively pretentious (AHEMikeD'AngeloAHEM).

@Glengarrious: No. You're wrong. D'Angelo's point wasn't, "Hey, some folks like this scene, and I don't, but hey, that's just me, and I'll explain why." He wrote that people who defend this sequence "suffer from a basic misunderstanding about just how cinema—and the human visual system, for that matter—works." In…

Exit Poll!
"More than that, though, I think these folks suffer from a basic misunderstanding about just how cinema—and the human visual system, for that matter—works."

That's a great observation. I also think it's likely no one would try to use a weaselly euphemism like "non-consensual sex" rather than the less-euphemistic word rape. It doesn't make a huge difference, ultimately, but it's worth pointing out.

That's a reasonable way to look at it: even if the victim forgave him, the criminal justice system isn't about appeasing victims (although that's not unimportant). Society has a need for consistent application of the law, and for justice. After all, it's not as though murder victims are exactly clamoring for the…

damn it…
eventually I'm going to find out whether this movie is a deliberate ripoff of Dead Space or not. I swear it!