Well, as they say, 'sleep and death are brothers'. The use of the term 'organism' seems to allude to the fact that the child is governed at this point by its biological needs and is unable to step outside them. It's almost as if the child still regards sleep with suspicion, as though they might never wake up and hence…

People who are looking for a new way of looking at things and aren't novices? That's not a defence, since I haven't read the book, but I do like Thomson and I get the feeling that this review is criticising it for not being things it's not trying to be.

And what about Nikto?

@avclub-a64f770db8dc668f93db5788517d1bc0:disqus I was perhaps being disingenuous on the matter; I was trying to ask a slightly obvious question to hear the film studies answer from the ground up, rather than asking for an introduction to the subject. For what it's worth I agree that intent/affect are inextricable from…

Do people in this area discuss the affective fallacy at all? It seems as though this type of criticism wants in one breath to be saying that everyone is affected in this way and then in another that only people who know how to read a film can see this stuff. The line between, 'we're all experts' and 'you can learn…

Hey, this guy's right: it's not a pile of adolescent crap after all!

If we're calling him 'Lord Macbeth' I think we might not be taking the details-oriented approach

Ricky Gervais is this character that this really annoying guy called David Brent came up with and everyone thinks that Ricky Gervais is actually an excuse for David Brent to act like the piece of glutinous shit that he really is and have people give him millions of pounds and world fame for it. It's a bit like The…

I don't think it sucks, but it hardly rules.

What a refreshingly worthwhile list.

I like Leonard but I found this B.R. Myers piece very enlightening since it discusses the limitations of his style: http://www.theatlantic.com/…

I agree with you on that missing something. I admire the movie a great deal but it's difficult to love. If nothing else it's unique.

History has something of a 'white man in power' bias.

No, his arguments are sound. We are wrong for liking it.

But Low and Heroes are qualitatively different records from Ziggy and they're certainly a lot more radical given that a lot of the material isn't even really rock music. The Slider and Electric Warrior are pretty obviously cut from the same cloth. It's more like saying you like Aladdin Sane more than Diamond Dogs.*

To be clear, what I meant was that he seems to want to judge allegory as more or less successful based on the literal closeness between the figure in the narrative and the thing it allegorically represents. By this reasoning District 9's 'equation' suggests that the victims of apartheid are like squishy aliens in that…

I'm troubled by this criticism of the film because it suggests that the reviewer doesn't understand what an allegory is.

Congratulations, I agree with you.

Sorry about the odour.

You'd have thought his motorcycle would have been damaged in the accident. Unless we're to believe that this is some sort of magic motorcycle or something.