Good point. I might argue that every alien race, if it's humanoid and sentient, should have layers because otherwise the potential for good storytelling is limited. Still, I do like the ending of The Abandoned because it subverts expectations.

Maybe there was potential in the J'H, but I just didn't need to see another warrior culture get fleshed out into something more. And I sure as hell didn't need a lesson on drugs (they make you feel good, Wesley!) Klingons filled the warrior niche really, really well. Qo'noS's cup overfloweth with great characters…

My thought process as I clicked on this review:

Just not more bleak dystopian sci-fi.

Exactly. That's my biggest problem with Skyfall, but more than that it's my biggest problem with the reporting on James Bond. It seems like every time a new Bond movie comes out, throughout the Brosnan and Craig eras at least, there are stories about how THIS time, the women are every bit as (adjective) as Bond…

Off… the… internet? What madness is this?

Still doesn't explain why Blofeld doesn't recognize Bond in OHMSS (or why MI6 doesn't assume he will)…

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

He's so good, and yet it's so hard to like someone so overexposed.

Surely they wouldn't want to remake it per se, but I wonder if this is an indication that bits and pieces of it will find its way into NuBond #4.

I really like Thunderball actually. Other than the final act, which is admittedly slow, I think it's one of the smarter, better-written Connery films, and the female characters are particularly outstanding. I think SPECTRE reached its zenith in Thunderball, with the swanky meeting room and Blofeld's face still…

I think Colm Meaney comes out really well in the acting category, too. No surprise that he and Rene have had perhaps the best non-Trek careers of the DS9 cast, and each has played a fairly wide range of characters over the years.

It's a good movie, but challenging. I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen this summer in Austin, in a refurbished one-screen theater, paired with the thematically-similar Pan's Labyrinth. I think Beehive was one of Ebert's favorite films.

Is he a bit off more than a particularly vain, demanding A-lister on the backside of his career would be when surrounded by nobodies in a lousy horror, which I think is how "Shadow" makes the production feel? I think the movie would play the same way if that were the story. I just hate that Orlock is essentially a…

I'd place the "genesis" of alt country much further back, into the "cosmic cowboy" period of the 1960s Austin scene at the latest.

"The vampire in Shadow of the Vampire is the actor who plays the character in Nosferatu"

If you loved Nosferatu, as I did, don't watch Shadow of the Vampire. I got lured in by the good premise and by my abiding love of Cary Elwes, but in execution it's a hatchet job on the Murnau film. The vampire of the original movie is not the charming, music-loving type who can pass as normal, but an eerie,…

I think it's possible that that was meant to look somewhat unnatural due to the fact that he's not able to do it because he's a good horseman, but because he's an elf and has some sort of vague unearthly power about him. If they'd shown Eomer doing it, and it had looked as strange, it would have been a lot more…

I'm a big defender of the LOTR movies from a story perspective, but you're right about the lame creature CGI. The cave troll in particular is crap. The computer touch-ups on the landscapes, though, are actually quite well-done I think.

That's very interesting. I always wondered why CGI has seemed to get worse over the years, and this seems like a plausible explanation.