No, I think it was just muddled. There's really no ambiguity at all about what happens in the story, and the way the plot plays out undermines the strand that criticizes religious hysteria.

No, I don't have a typo. 20 women were convicted, of whom 13 were executed, and 6 men were convicted and executed. Giles Corey, a man, was killed after refusing to enter a plea.

13 women were killed, and 7 men were killed. Of those convicted but not executed, all 7 were women. So even if you want to totally ignore the intensely patriarchal context of Puritan society, by sheer numbers this was an outburst of societal opprobrium directed chiefly at women.

I guess that's right, although you could also cast the blame on the Puritans for not tolerating the father's unspecified religious dissent. There is support for your reading in the father's speech towards the end of the film. But what gets me is that their actions after the witch starts attacking them aren't…

I have a couple of problems with that. First, the family's religious hysteria is shown to be rational, because agents of Satan are in fact preying on them. Second, I didn't get the sense that it was the hysteria that led to the family's destruction; it surely made things more unpleasant, but basically the witch killed…

The good: period details seemed impeccable; the score was strong and very creepy; the cast was excellent.

I wouldn't say not scary at all, but it's not especially scary. And I'm a pretty easy scare.

I disagree. If you say "the average American wagers X" when in fact the average American does not wager, your statement is incorrect. It would be like saying "The average American pilots 0.03 commercial flights each year." Actually, the average American does not pilot any commercial flights, so attributing that action…

An infelicitous sentence from the story:

Getting into Humbert's head and translating the prose to the screen. The prose is why it's a great novel. If you can't do that (and you can't), there's no point.

I did think of Pnin. It's been a while since I read it, but as I recalled the narrator's perspective is actually somewhat important, particularly towards the end of the novel. So you'd run into some of the same problems (but less so) that these directors encountered in adapting Lolita.

Yes, the Irons recording is really excellent, and Lyne's poor filmed adaptation is a fair price to pay for the definitive audiobook version.

Related topic: is there any Nabokov novel that's a good candidate for being adapted to film? Lolita is certainly a bad choice—only Pale Fire is obviously worse—but it just seems like any adaptation is going to have to lose what makes Nabokov one of the greatest English-language authors, i.e. his blindingly brilliant…

I think it's unfilmable, and I hope no one tries to film it again. Kubrick's is far worse, but both are bad.

They sound good. That's about all there is to it. I'm not sure how backup vocals could "fit in" to the "meaning" of a song in any event.

Strongly disagree. The live version is better than the studio version, precisely because of the strong backup vocals.

I'm pretty sure you did that on purpose, but I won't rise to the bait.

First love song by David Byrne? What about "I'm Not In Love," featuring such romantic lyrics as "Some day/I believe/we can live in a world without love"?

This is probably true, but the bar to get a comic book movie made these days seems to be very low.

Y'know, I don't think her Phantom Menace gig was really competing with Thor for her time!