I thought I was at the time, being in high school. But I obviously got over that and am back to doing the cartoon thing.

I generally grade bad episodes of non-serialized shows on a curve, in this day and age. Since it's trivial to skip those episodes, and only slightly less trivial to figure out which ones to skip, in practice it really just makes the show shorter, unless you're a completist. You can't just excise them from a discussion…

Yeah I always thought Batman TAS was considered the gold standard. I never saw JLU because I wasn't really doing the cartoon thing anymore by the time it came out. I'm surprised to see that the consensus isn't just that JLU is the best, but that it's obviously so. I may need to check it out.

Normally I would agree that a show beginning its 11th season should start thinking about winding down. On the other hand, I can't think of any other show whose best season is its 10th.

Can someone help out a person with no facebook? What are the left and right wing takes on this incident? Is it the usual "This attack comes from Islam itself and this is a Holy War" vs. "This attack comes from extremists and we need to avoid reacting by persecuting Muslims"? Or is there a more specific angle?

Ah yes, another person who was shocked when Hannibal, clearly the most popular show on TV, was senselessly cancelled.

We started our movie project with a simple theory: there's money to be made in Batman villains.

Their primary appeal is that they inject every dish with as much butter (who am I kidding, margarine) as it can physically take while still retaining its basic shape. Nothing's very good or distinct, but it hits you right in that fatty sweet spot so beloved of gluttons.

Van Hammersly one of their funniest? That's one of a handful that I find completely bewildering and not even slightly funny. I always get the sense that it's sending up something I'm not aware of, like I'm missing a piece of context that makes it funny. The fact that it seems to be a popular one makes me think that…

I think that's a baby boomer thing. Many of them have internalized that you should always publicly deny and denounce drugs, even if you know no-one's fooled. I saw some confusing Black Sabbath liner notes in this vein. Sweet Leaf was about a brand of cigarettes, huh? Tell me another.

So you're arguing that there is something intrinsic to Swift's music that elevates her from the kiddie acts I'd been grouping her with? I can't claim to have done exhaustive research, but I don't hear it.

Seems to me that, though there were always syrupy pop songs, the primary pop music conversation was at least about people in their 20s, writing songs about topics that might be of interest to someone beyond high school age. Now your Taylor Swifts and your Justin Beibers occupy the center of that conversation. Why…

My problem with Taylor Swift and things like it is not that it exists. Middle Schoolers need some dumb, silly shit to listen to that speaks to them and that's fine. All else being equal, some of it might be kind of cute or fun. It's that the conversation about music in our culture is dominated by music written for…

It's strange to see a movie this adult in the same style as My Neighbor Totoro. I've always liked that Studio Gibli doesn't confine itself to one age demographic.

Elijah Wood's performance was a big part of it. I also found their way of conveying Frodo and Sam's relationship heavy-handed to the point maudlin. Though Gollum was a great technical accomplishment, and all due credit to Andy Serkis' committed and physical performance, I found him too sympathetic and I tired quickly…

Completely agree about Gollum. The giant, glassy frog-eyes, the pot belly and especially that intermittently muttering, moaning or screaming voice. You really got a sense of the degraded state of this creature. Jackson Gollum is far too sympathetic and they hit the dual-personality angle much too hard. With the…

Well, that same company did the Hobbit and adapted a number of Tolkien songs with great success (to my mind). They also shoehorned in a terrible folksy theme, but credit where it's due.

Expect that Bakshi only went halfway through the Two Towers, so there's this hole in the story if you sting the two together. Maybe they could've cut down on "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" time and given us that Shelob scene?

Counterpoint: Jackson's films, while successful on many levels (the first one is basically perfect) completely botched Frodo and Sam's story once they broke off from the Fellowship. As that is meant to be the heart of the narrative, this is not a minor issue.

He never did the Hobbit. That was Rankin-Bass, who then went on to semi-finish Bakshi's Lord of the Rings. It was weird. For everything good about the Jackson trilogy, that Rankin-Bass Hobbit is still my favorite onscreen Tolkien. And though I admire the work Andy Serkis did, the cartoon Gollum blows his out of the…