Saying a creative work was "good by accident" isn't saying much. All artists have a mix of good and bad ideas, and all rely on intuition to some degree. It's not unusual for intuition to serve you up some great ideas when you're working with limited time and resources, and then if you later have some extra time to…

Shit yeah. That blindsided me— I totally expected either 1. innocent patient victim is eventually rescued & everything is fine, or 2. she's rescued but at the cost of someone else's life, or 3. she rescues herself. I didn't notice that when the little boy entered the picture, he became the patient victim and she…

Yeah, it's really not about the amount of time spent talking, it's just the attitude. I've seen (and sometimes committed) examples of mansplaining that are fairly concise; it's the attitude, not the quantity.

That's worth doing anyway - I reread it every couple years - but the Wikipedia article is misleading. The characters want their language to work that way, but Le Guin doesn't show that it is effective, and I wouldn't call it a major theme of the book so much as an obvious thing lots of utopian movements have tried to…

What do you mean by "the Whorf-Sapir stuff"? I don't remember The Dispossessed as giving any credence to the idea that people's view of the world is totally contingent on the word choices available; the utopians on Anarres have tried to build their ideology into their language, but it seems pretty clear that that…

Where the hell can I get my hands on La Commune?

It's a great, great movie. A couple things the review doesn't mention:

It's also not just any 3.5-hour biopic, it's a very moody and dreamlike one with no yelling, fistfights, or cocaine. I really love it, but I would expect it to be an endurance test for lots of people.

I also knew Harvey & Joyce a little bit, and it was really strange watching this because I had last seen them in person in the early '80s… so the portrayals of them at that age by Giamatti & Davis looked and sounded to me just about exactly the way I remembered them, whereas the actual people who were now 20 years…

To be fair, about 80% of the violently angry comments here are from Jordo.

The Chicago movie that we did get is… fun, but I couldn't help feeling that they were doing a fluffy Fosse-lite thing, and that he would've made both the characters and the dance scenes a lot more interesting.

It's convincing because all the interactions between the characters, and their attitudes toward their work, are convincing. I've been part of a lot of theater productions (though no musicals), and Scheider portrays a stage director really well in terms of what he does, totally aside from the character's personality.…

To be fair (though there's not really much reason to be fair), most of the "no-planes people" are arguing that a plane didn't hit the Pentagon, not that planes didn't hit the WTC. What the point of that is supposed to be, God knows.

He's playing the villain and being a genuine asshole too. The "You'll never see Hank again" stuff was cruel in a way that didn't really have anything to do with protecting Skyler— I mean, his idea of how to protect Skyler involved making himself sound like the scariest fucker in the world, but he wouldn't have been…

Just because Buchanan writes coherently is no reason to credit him with intellectual honesty. He started his political career with Nixon and never stopped publicly defending Nixon as a man of principle, when he was close enough to him to know better.

I would really love to see an Alvin Maker series, especially if it paid almost no attention to Alvin, and just had William Blake wandering around the country meeting random people. Rigorously worked-out alternate histories are all well and good, but Card's "throw all your favorite characters and trivia into a big…

@avclub-c1bac1d55ebcc415d61552acbfbb219d:disqus I'm pretty sure Al Qaeda has put the kibosh on any faithful adaptation of The Running Man.

@avclub-57321d2ab73d45595165d77091712f05:disqus It's definitely a flugelhorn— at least that's what he's shown playing; whether it's a flugelhorn on the soundtrack, I don't know, I can't distinguish its sound from a trumpet.

I didn't like STID very much, but calling it a "beat for beat remake" of The Wrath of Khan (if that's what you meant) is a little silly. It uses part of the premise of that movie, and has one scene that's an obvious reference, but the story doesn't unfold the same way at all.

Even if it was about nothing except Samuel Jackson's scam telemarketing shop, those ten minutes would be a great movie.