@avclub-0f0d67e214f9fef69b278e3d08114da9:disqus For a woman whose breakout role was a movie about time travel, Mary Steenburgen seems impervious to time itself. There's probably a portrait of a decrepit-looking Steenburgen hidden in an attic in London somewhere.

For years, Donald Pleasence owned this title. Respectable character actor, in a ton of movies throughout the 80s, almost all of them awful. I would also add McDowell's Class of 1999 co-star Stacy Keach to this list. Great actor, but clearly has a problem turning down roles in sucky b-pictures.

It can be tricky judging an era by the music that topped the charts. A guy named Frank Moriarty wrote a pretty convincing book that the 70s was the decade in which all these transformative pop genres bubbled up from below without the charts noticing for years—punk obviously, but also reggae, prog rock, and so forth.
I…

@avclub-7757c9e5178fdb7d4d39207ff91840c3:disqus Smacked them with rolled up comic books?

We've reached the limits of my memory—I don't remember that subplot at all. I envy you your fine retention—do you eat a lot of fish or something? Yoga? Anything I should be doing here?

Thank you for helping me with all of that. Yeah, I now remember how elusive Arawn was—I never had a clear picture of him in my head, which is why I have a hard time remembering the things he did directly. One of my complaints about the Lord of the Rings movies is that they actually show Sauron, the flaming eye—in the…

As I mentioned above, Taran Wanderer is the most adult book in the series; the first three books sort of prep kids for this mature book. You're right, Taran's colorful sidekicks aren't in it, and again I may be remembering incorrectly but that scary wizard guy with the finger isn't the main villain—Taran's antagonist…

That wizard was the scariest villain in the series, and that book was the most adult. Even Arawn, the Horned King, and the other bad guys (there was a witch, right? In the third book?) didn't seem as dangerous as the guy in the fourth book.

I remember my reactions to Eilonwy changing over the course of the series; at first I thought she was this annoying girl, but by the end I was intrigued by her and was glad to see she and Taran would be together for their adulthood. Maybe I just grew up a bit while I was reading the series. And as for Taran's…

It could mean you're gay, or it could mean you're cool like gay people are cool.

Straw Dogs was not a movie about dogs, either distributing or made of drinking straws. You should have seen my grandpa's face.

^This. The average male does not want his clothes acknowledged in any way.

And Modern Family. And he was the voice of Oswald the Octopus on a kid's show. Let's face it, this dude's the Da Vinci of our times.

His real name's Michael Weiner. True fact.

A friend of mine once proposed that bronies are God's way of reassuring people like him and me that we are not the biggest geek losers in the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence.

A 50K advance can be seen as a pittance from certain angles—like Rusty says below, there's the agent's percentage, then there's the problem of being a full-time writer without health care (not Pollack's problem for his entire career, but still), plus you may be talking about a project that took a year to sell. So we…

That's how we did it in MY alchemy class.
Edit: Crap, responded to the wrong comment.

I thought it would be the guy he played on 1600 Penn a few weeks back.

Saw it several times—I was working in a crappy movie theater that played it for something like two or three weeks. Keach is the kind of actor who can star in loads of these B-or-below-movies and still keep his fine reputation. But yeah, I could probably quote this particular movie line for line, though I have never…

I liked The Illusionist too—even Jessica Biel didn't bother me, and I've never cared for her in anything else. My favorite thing about Illusionist is that the bad guy, played by I believe Rufus Sewel, keeps yelling at everyone that Eisenheim is tricking them, can't they see it, it's all some plot he's carrying out,…