That was the best episode of TV I've seen this year, at a minimum.  Amazing stuff.

I didn't say it would have altered the larger course of history.  As I pointed out, the crush of people pouring into the New World was irresistible at that point.  Just that it would have altered how things happened, since British policy at the time was largely about keeping the peace on the frontier at the expense of…

The point is that the talk of "tyranny" gets seriously overblown.  Americans had it quite good.

One of the main causes of the Revolution was Britain drawing a redline between the Thirteen Colonies and the newly-acquired French colonies west of Appalachia, in order to keep peace with the Indians who lived there.  In the long run that wouldn't have held, because of the crush of new people moving into America from…

The colonies weren't really facing especially problematic levels of taxation (and for all the talk of "tyranny", America had a higher average standard of living for freemen than England did).

@avclub-b9a25e422ba96f7572089a00b838c3f8:disqus: Yeah, Aang wasn't that powerful, but the series was explicitly about him becoming a fully realized Avatar.  Korra is introduced to us as, basically, 3/4 of the way there, and there's never any discussion that she needs to work on those three elements.

I think the show kind of wrote itself into a corner, to an extent, by beginning with Korra already knowing three of the four elements.  To compensate for that, she's not nearly as powerful with any of them as Aang was.  The basic concept of the Avatar is that they're demigods who are singlehandedly capable of…

I actually find this part of the setup kind of annoying in one sense, because last season ended with the Federation/Klingon Alliance in a seemingly pretty strong position, and the Dominion winning something of a Pyhrric victory and looking surprisingly vulnerable.  How that got switched around seems like it should…

The main plot of the first season is a resistance cell plotting to free America from the socialist NHS, forced down the nation's throat by tyrannical British East African-born imperial Prime Minister Barack Hussein Obama.

Wouldn't the US pretty much be like the other Commonwealth member states at this point, or at least, one of the Dominions circa the early 20th century?  What "freedom" are they fighting for?

Well, hardly anybody watches documentaries, so in theory I can see the appeal of the idea.

Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter is the best Canadian film ever made, in my opinion, so I've always been disappointed at his slide into irrelevance in the 00s.  A lot of the time it seems like he's trying to sell out to be more popular, but isn't sure how to do that.

Yes, it follows Robespierre, Danton (or D'Anton, as he's referred in-text) and Desmoulins.  I'm about 150 pages into its 800+ length; we're almost to Bastille Day.

Having previously read Hilary Mantel's two books about Thomas Cromwell, I'm slowly working my way through her other major work of historical fiction, A Place of Greater Safety.  Jesus, this thing is long.

He did that in There Will Be Blood.

The ending to that movie pissed me off so much.

My personal theory is that after audiences rejected Sandler's attempts to transition into more serious work, he decided to prank them by producing only the laziest comedies possible.  So far, America has been very slow to get the joke.

Shailene Woodley (too “conflicted with press obligations,” with Divergent and with not wanting to talk to them about a spanking movie).

the writer seems to have mixed up "first year college student" with "mentally handicapped".

I'm still really not sure what sort of commercial prospects they expect this to have, at least in theatres.  Erotica is something people tend to peruse when nobody else is looking; I don't know how many of the middle-aged women who made this a bestseller are going to go to a movie theatre to see it.