Well, if you enjoyed it, you enjoyed it, Samantha. That's fair enough.

Yeah, but the point is, I don't really feel any inclination towards fascism when watching Starship Troopers. I mean, none. There are other movies that do it for me, absolutely — take Dirty Harry, or any other good cop movie in a similar vein — so I'm not saying that I'm immune to it, but Starship Troopers makes the…

Oh, I'm not accusing him (or you) of anything. I think it's reasonably valid to say that even if a movie is intended as satire, it can have a propagandist effect if people don't understand it's satire, but love it just the same.

Well, without knowing what this potent counter-argument is exactly, who knows? Thing is, I think that satirical elements are pretty obviously a big, vital part of the package. If your friend says that they're not real or are intended as a smokescreen of some kind, that strikes me as a pretty bold statement…

Yeah, I think his point is that if you're completely oblivious to the implications of the content, you're buying into it on some level.

Violence, Kitano style
There's a great scene in… uh, I think it's in Hana-Bi, I don't remember exactly off hand. Anyway! Kitano's walking to his car in a car park, and there are three young punks leaning against his car and generally being, y'know, young punks. We get some shots of Kitano looking at them and them…

"Fragmentation grenades arent made to blow holes in walls and will fail comicly when applied to this task."

Ah, the mysteries of walls
"Enemy hiding inside a nearby building? Use a grenade to blow a hole in the wall and expose him. Why more games don't permit this degree of property damage is a mystery."

The Crossing Guard? Oh, man. I like the film for other reasons as well (the least of which certainly isn't Jack Nicholson's welcome lack of excessive, uh, Nicholsonisms), but Morse's performance is really the thing that most made an impression on me the first time I saw it. He's thoroughly believable.

Oh, those mixed feelings I get
Harlan Ellison:

Well, not quite. As I recall, they were in some panel or another together, and for whatever reason, Ellison told Gabe to fuck off, and Gabe, having a pretty well-honed sense of how to really piss people off (not that you need that skill with Ellison) then told him that he really enjoyed his work on all those Star Wars…

Was Sherlock Holmes ever entertaining?

Sherlock Holmes franchise
"Warner Brothers have given the struggling auteur/boy toy the keys to the "Sherlock Holmes" franchise."

I never claimed to have played Street Fighter. I mean, I have, actually, but not when it came out, and when I did, I didn't get much out of it. Ditto for the sequels. I don't really give a shit about Street Fighter, actually; it's not my cup of tea. But as a game journalist, I do happen to know a thing or two about…

father of fighting games
"By the way, Bloodsport started Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, those video games."

Allow me to wax pedantic
"…at each other's throats over how much of the article to cut and reshape under Wiki's "Neutral Point Of View" standard…"

Haven't seen the remake of that. I saw the original as a kid and really loved it. I thought it was awesome. I saw it again a few years ago, and, uh, somehow the awesome had gone away. I mean, the presence of Benny Hill being very much Benny Hill is by itself enough to make me wish I was watching something else, and…

Here's another one
One of my favorite awful, awful remakes: Get Carter.

Silly AV Club!
Data's not a cyborg, he's an ANDROID. Completely different thing. Why, EVERYONE knows that!

My pedantic nature rears its ugly head
If you'll allow me to nitpick like the fucking sad nerd I am — none of the games mentioned are MADE by Eidos, they've just published them. Not the same thing. (Not that Eidos doesn't bear considerable responsibility in the products' quality — I understand that they're not the…