@zerocrates:disqus I'm pretty sure it's got to be A (or A+B). That wasn't an "Oh my God, we thought you were dead!" look— she was really scared.

Holy shit, did I ever pick the right episode to watch mildly stoned. I mean that in a good way.

I forgot to say that one of the things that made me happy about True Blood early on was that they were keeping at least one foot on the inexplicable-magic side of the line. At some point in the first season Bill tells Sookie that there's no point in letting science study vampire physiology, because they're just not…

That's all really interesting, thanks— glad I nitpicked!

Like I said above, if you get a chance to see The Artist Is Present (though I'm not sure if it's generally available; it was an HBO documentary from last year), do. That relationship is a big part of it, and it's really something to see and hear about them spending years living in a van together, traveling around and…

Your last sentence is definitely true, but you owe it to yourself to watch the Abramovic documentary The Artist is Present. Abramovic's stuff is in one sense like a caricature of conceptual performance art— except that's like calling Tolkien a caricature of D&D, because she was one of the original people that all the…

Sure, silver has been considered magically special for a long time, but "a weapon against all sorts of supernatural creatures" is an exaggeration. If you can find any reference to using silver weapons against vampires prior to the 20th century, it's news to me; even for werewolves it's a modern embellishment. The more…

Of course there are lots of different versions of vampires in folklore, but the idea that they give a shit about silver isn't from folklore at all, and it wasn't even one of the things Bram Stoker made up; it's from 20th-century fiction and movies. The mirror thing goes a lot further back, so it wasn't about the…

Not to mention that most shows don't bother to cast actors with such solid pizza-throwing skills. Cranston allegedly nailed that roof on the first take.

I promise I'll stop talking in a minute, but I forgot to say that the role of the Nigerian gangsters in District 9 should also make it obvious that it's not just about "apartheid sucks." Nigerians are one of the major immigrant populations in South Africa who are currently in a somewhat prawn-like situation, so…

@avclub-d7f43e1fb2d4977c86163d9b0cb07814:disqus That's an oversimplification. Blomkamp has said a couple different things, but none of them were that he "doesn't care about the political content at all."
From the AV Club interview: "…the whole film grew out of a love-hate relationship with Johannesburg, really. And…

@avclub-0f0d67e214f9fef69b278e3d08114da9:disqus "Was the solution for apartheid for black South Africans to return to their homeland? Well no, because South Africa IS their goddamn homeland. But if you grant District 9 its apartheid allegory, that solution is implied…"

I don't know… I'm not any bigger asshole than I used to be, and while I haven't spent much time ranting about Dowd, I do find a lot of his reviews pretty annoying in ways that have nothing to do with whether he liked the thing or not. Actually, I take that back: I'm annoyed by the way he writes about things he didn't…

I think Blomkamp clearly loves what he's doing, so rather than "he uses the language of action movies" I would say something more like: he makes the best action movie he can, while also trying out some ideas that he thinks through in some detail within that context. District 9 is like what you would get if you…

I don't know where you're getting that. There's an adult alien who has a supportive relationship with a child, sure, and they exhibit purposeful behavior… but beyond that, there's no basis for saying what their psychology is. And it's never explained why, from a population of what at first seemed like 100% dazed…

@avclub-ffc65e983f9490e53bd8419504a79cf8:disqus "Hilariously seriously"? I'm not the one telling people they're watching the show wrong.

@avclub-4422aa7d02d6bcd90458cf33a9a4d140:disqus No, if you really want to put me in my place you're supposed to say: "If you looooove Ted so much, why don't you MARRY him?" Man, kids these days just have no respect for tradition.

If you're going to ask leading questions in the form "has it really X…", it'd be good to check first whether anyone but you is actually saying X. Otherwise you're just pursuing a straw-man argument.

@avclub-78c86aa171e1ab86948a7e10c471fc63:disqus I know it's impossible to argue meaningfully about whether something was or wasn't funny; all I can say is that to me, there was no big laugh there at all. I wouldn't have bothered with over-thinking it if it hadn't felt like such a weird, strained, ineffective thing…

@avclub-10002631234370cc43d1ef36d9fd2f5b:disqus Whether he's paralyzed is open to question (although he's not moving anything below the neck in that scene), but not whether his neck is broken. He was in a Halo brace— that's what they're for. It is literally drilled into your skull, to keep your head from shifting and…