The year after Daredevil, 2004, featured exactly as many superhero films as 2014. The next year had more superhero films than 2015. Things have ramped up the last two years, but the number of releases this year is roughly the same as what we got in 2008.

If someone announces every morning when they wake up that they'll die before the next time they wake up, they're guaranteed to be right, some day.

The greatest disappointment is that all the other NATO leaders didn't leap to Montenegro's defense, as required by Article 5 of the treaty. WTF, dudes?

Go read CLIF's note again. There is nothing there that merits the way you're infantilizing him, or the way that Dan saw free to portray him as a chump whose wife has obviously been lying to him for their entire relationship and is now relieved to give up the ruse by making up a medical condition that keeps her from…

That's what I was thinking. The differences are in the level of risk (arguably, voluntary asphyxiation might be more dangerous than skydiving or mountain climbing) and the direct association between the action and the harm (injury during skydiving or rock climbing is usually incidental to the instructor's actions,…

"It looks like she left him [puts on shades] breathless." YEEAAAAH!

Looking at Dan revisit the CLIF letter, I have to wonder: why the heck is it impossible for people to just apologize for being jerks? All Dan can get out is a grudging "I was too harsh" quickly followed by "Get over your dreams of orgasm from intercourse! That's over!" Which isn't exactly what his doctor friend said.…

In theory, you might be able to create a document defining the parameters of the breath play ("not more than XX seconds at a time"), safety precautions to be taken (safe handsignal, I guess? safe word's probably useless while someone's smothering you), an acknowledgment of the danger of this type of play, and a waiver…

With Crowe and Cruise flanking him like that, it looks like he's in an extremely well-lit hostage video.

It was real influential in terms of combining CGI with real stuntwork, to go seamlessly from goblins crawling up and down the walls of Moria to our heroes fighting stuntmen goblins, and then back to them fighting a CGI troll, all with a minimum sensation that at any point you're watching a CG cartoon.

It's a better story than the book, but it's still a pretty bad story, in which Clarice has to be diminished for Lecter to do his semi-hero thing.

The Fast and Furious series is important, but the original movie is only really important in retrospect. It was a decent hit, the #14 movie of 2001, but then again other action movies did as well or better at the box office (Rush Hour 2, Mummy Returns, the Tomb Raider sequel). At the time, it didn't look like much…

"This other kid's so busy smoking weed and screwing Demi Moore I can hardly get him out of his trailer"?

Dacascos worked a lot after Brotherhood—I don't think his run as Chairman Kaga's nephew was really a full-time gig—but he never broke out of the B-movie rut. In part, I think any boost he got from Brotherhood just came at the wrong time, a moment when action themselves were diminishing right alongside all other…

"'Brad Pitt and Robert Redford as different generations of spies' could've gotten made by any asshole off the street."

It can be two things :)

Yeah, if they'd had any idea that Bloom was going to be a star, they might've invested a little time in making Rayburn an actual character, instead of the anonymous guy who starts the mission going sideways.

Wait…Legolas was pulling a Bill Cosby on Bilbo near the end of the Hobbit? That wasn't in the book! (Although it would explain some of the looks between those two at the Council of Elrond…)

I agree, although I tend to think of it as "Tony Scott used whip-around camera work and overwhelming music cues to trick Hollywood into making a character-driven movie." Scott's stuff was too much—particularly that one spinning shot where they're having coffee up on the uncomfortable-looking roof of a building for no…

I didn't say it was, or that it was inappropriate to write about The Fast and the Furious, since the series goes on to be very significant for the action genre. Still, every time Tom puts one of these articles out, the topic of which was the best of the year comes up, and I was just putting my two cents in on that.