@avclub-5bbc67c39fbdf1c74e28b86c595f6e4a:disqus Good grief— no one's arguing with you about what happened in situations that you were in. You're just being very presumptuous about telling everyone that they should interpret someone else's situation as being more like your own and therefore not really so bad, even…

@gloriana232:disqus Absolutely— there's no reason to take that snotty bully's snap judgement of Sally as accurate, even if she means it as a compliment. I sure didn't see Sally's hesitant half-smiling reaction to mean "wow, she's totally got my number"— more like "I don't understand why she just said that about me, it…

@avclub-c2b1b8ce8d74964b7ca641283ddc2e8b:disqus I love the idea that Lex Luthor started out as a cheerful young airhead lying his way into totally undefined jobs in the flakiest strongholds of capitalism, with no goal other than to look successful and to gaze adoringly on the object of his affection: some terrible…

That's really well written, Mr. Pontecorvo. Your talents are wasted on that poker game.

I guess that was the AV Club's way of telling me that maybe I need to space out my reading a little, and stop habitually opening 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 browser tabs by clicking every link I thought might be vaguely interesting. The resulting chorus of 7-Up couples sounded like crazed robot clowns piling into a car with me…

@avclub-fb3deea8bff8902a6a092a4b532b4a68:disqus I guess based on your comment about the fishbowl story, we obviously have different standards for human behavior, but seriously… "the level of the characters' despair does not remotely justify their actions"? You really can't imagine that people in that situation,…

No shit. If a character tells a story to another character and they're obviously deliberately trying to make a point with it, that's not "unsubtle symbolism" on the part of the writer— it's people talking about shit that is related to what's going on, which is a thing people do. I'm having a hard time imagining how…

That King-Kubrick conversation is mentioned here, but with a bunch of other context that makes Kubrick's belief system sound a lot more complicated than that. He was not a hard-headed materialist by any means.

@avclub-db0c35ce2663c0e8c4b3f38642a49748:disqus Barbie's phone call about the incident was brief and one-sided, but it sounded nothing like any of the scenarios you proposed. And I'm pretty sure some of the interviews I've seen about the show have stated flat out that he's just working for a loan shark or something…

I don't think the idea was that Junior's personality suddenly changed. His girlfriend had a line to the effect of "Yes I do know you better than anyone else, that's the problem", which implied that he wasn't really the cuddly nice guy he was acting like in that particular post-coital moment.

What's your basis for saying that? It sure doesn't fit with what Brian Vaughan has said about the character. And from what I've seen so far, Norris is playing what's in the script.

To prove that I have no life, I am now going to write an Internet comment defending the quality of the fake bisected cow.

@avclub-f6f154417c4665861583f9b9c4afafa2:disqus I think there was still an implication in 28 Days Later that there's a person in there somewhere. When Cillian Murphy is attacked by the little girl at the gas station, she's screaming semi-intelligibly, something like "I hate you." And during Brendan Gleeson's…

I haven't read the book for a while, but I remember thinking that the interview style worked awfully well until about two-thirds of the way through, but then kind of fell apart as the last few characters started narrating their parts in a more familiar thriller style full of second-by-second action descriptions that I…

@avclub-64070488d259ab27e18091dc01340e3a:disqus I've seen plenty of people asserting that that's how it works, but I've never seen any evidence. Sure, people who already have real or perceived grievances against other groups of people will tend to exaggerate their differences, and will tend to take offense at others'…

@avclub-e57f718840a576abbb40a7d046c4e3b0:disqus Not that it'll make any difference to you since overgeneralizing about everything is what you like to do, but: I'm a guy, not 100% straight but in practice mostly so, and although it's not as if I've had to fight off hordes of eager women (you're right of course that…

That's true, but if that's where you draw the "won't bother" line then how have you managed to be interested in SF/horror movies at all? I mean, I'm sure there have been a few of those in the last 50 years that have included some (full) male nudity, but off the top of my head I can't think of a single one.

I never thought the movie was particularly over-the-top or confusing or uneven in tone, but that's probably because I had previously read the novel it's based on. Colin Wilson is an odd duck. His fiction is often very pulpy and lurid but not at all in a modern thriller style— when he digresses about his theories on…

I kind of agree in principle, except that your comment is pretty ridiculous when applied to someone making a flip remark on a message board about DVD releases. You can't seriously believe that some guy with a Confederate flag on his pickup gives a shit about whether some Yankee thinks he would appreciate Harold and…

That's a really bizarre response to what I wrote. I didn't mention Iraq at all, and I can't figure out what the hell you mean by "your naive My Little Pony take on Martin," since I certainly didn't say that he says all violence backfires. I gave specific reasons why Dany's situation is not the same as Tywin's, which…