I feel like we've basically come to place where filmmakers have figured out how to very successfully have their cake and eat it too when it comes to war movies. You can Portray war as the most awesome, badass, hoo-haw, honorable thing ever just as long as you film it in desaturated colors, play some very serious music…

What you are describing creeped me the fuck out in regards to Mystic River. Lots of people argue the moral of that film is intended to be nuanced, unclear or unsettling - however it really came across to me as a 100 percent sincere statement of "Family trumps all else and if you happen to murder an innocent childhood…

I think the show did a great job of slowly maturing April in the first three seasons. It is perhaps the best example I've seen of a person maturing in nuanced ways while also retaining their core personality. But I feel like past season three, April has basically regressed back to her starting point, except that we…

Your comment is accurate but Bill pales in comparison to the absolute king of turning everything into a dick waving contest over ratings : Donald Trump. Trump's twitter account at its height was basically a constant stream of Trump picking petty fights with other middling celebs and calling them "losers" because they…

I think the percentage of apple users that are smug about it now are probably only slightly higher than for 'fanboyism' of any other brand/product. The time period where I personally found apple smugness to be just intolerable was during the period before osx came out. Apple had a few key apps such as Final Cut that…

As the films have gone on they have slowly developed the typical Hollywood action disease where the power and threat of bad guys works via in inverse relationship to how many of them there are.

It's Not just scientists. Basically any biopic of any interesting individual apparently needs to make the assumption that, if said interesting individual ever had sex with someone, that relationship is something that must have been super meaningful and basically a symbol of their entire life journey. I'm reminded of…

Well considering that on Thursday we met his "travel agent" (death/Scrooge's third spirit), I think this scenario might be how it actually ends. I can't see him killing the character off on a truly negative note, but I could see him obliviously (and cheerfully) sailing off into the sunset with the "travel agent."…

The av club review of the Mulaney pilot was basically titled "The Mulaney pilot is terrible - but that isn't necessarily a bad thing!"

You are definitely right that it mostly comes from the books, but Tolkien at least occasionally acknowledges that good and evil are sometimes hard to distinguish.. If I'm remembering correctly, both Morgoth and Sauron were both beautiful and charming when they wanted to be. I believe the book's mouth of Sauron is…

Also, Jackson manages to follow his rule described in the article above by cutting back to the same shot of an unconscious Bilbo every third cut.

One of the few things that bothered me on first watch of the LOTR trilogy was how obviously evil gollum was in that scene even before he found the ring. Even in the book, the ring corrupts him almost immediately, so he needs to be a character who at the least has poor self control and who has trouble keeping his dark…

Agree that the obsession with continuity has been overall been basically a cancer on storytelling. The ironic thing about it is that people so want every story about X or Y super hero to tie together and "make sense" that, in order to do that, impossibly convoluted solutions are devised to make it happen. solutions…

I'm not sure what this says about me other than I am slowly becoming a humorless killjoy but in many blockbuster type movies these days I have to consciously force myself to ignore this sort of thing or it bothers me. I play first person shooters all the time, don't really have a problem with violence in movies in…

As an individual who wishes to maintain his sanity, I haven't actually watched the last couple of episodes. So I apologize if this is inaccurate but:

The thing that always annoys me in these types of discussions is that people always rush to shout down the perceived ideological counter argument before it actually happens. Lord know that if you have an article on any news site on a divisive political issue, the first comment has a huge chance of being "I can't wait…

The French girl from pan am can play her wiser sister. This is basically sold at this point.

Though it's a close call, overall I do also fall into the Colbert camp. Although unlike Stewarts show it sometimes has almost no politics, when Colbert does want to rip into somebodies ideology he can do it better than anyone, period. Some of his word segments in particular cut into their targets with a level of…