Somewhat related, I also have an issue with the concept that Edison was starting something new in mass entertainment with this. It seems to me, quite the opposite, this was basically a last hurrah of a prior form of mass entertainment - executions. Up until the late 1800s in many places in the country an execution was…

Regarding the silent Ben Hur, pretty sure a couple of horses were also put down as a result of a crash in the chariot race. Some of the Silent Epics had a much different approach to big action scenes than what you see today - the approach being pretty much "Lets just do it for real."

Probably not from a ratings perspective, but I think the office letting a bunch of the big players go could actually be a great opportunity. If Toby, Dwight, Andy, and a few others were not to come back for example, it would really allow them to focus on Jim and Pam realizing that in a lot of ways their life has…

I liked the Mummy a lot but unfortunately the Mummy Returns was basically the prototype for the now entirely adopted by Hollywood "terrible overblown sequel" strategy. The formula is to take the original movie, rehash it in a manner that is 20x as convoluted and nonsensical and self-important and then have the…

Community is a strange show. Taken as its own, independent thing, I love it. But I find pretty much everything that Harmon himself says about it pretentious or douchey or otherwise insufferable. I mean there are lots of artists who one knows or suspects are kind of asses, but generally it's easy enough to separate…

I'm pretty damn liberal myself, but there is definitely a trend on this site with stuff like this. It's annoying knowing that whenever one of these shows delves even tangentially into class/gEnder/whatever politics that the review is just going to become pointlessly centered around that one issue and if the reviewer…

It did seem like an odd thing to feel the need to literally spell out, especially for a show that usually dosen't care about being obtuse or esoteric or whatever. There are a lot of things about this show that could confuse a new viewer, but even the laziest of viewers would have understood what the apple was supposed…

I am a bit the same way. Generally I can take anything but even READING about, say, soldiers in Vietnam who were forced to crawl through mile long enemy underground tunnels - which were too tight to even attempt to turn around in - meaning you needed to crawl out backwards - makes me start to feel panicked.

Anytime Rabin discusses hip hop you need to be prepared to try to parse lots of ridiculous hyperbole and weird star-struck writing.

I actually think a bunch of the cast leaving the office could potentially be one of the best things to happen to the show in a long time cause it would really allow the show to explore this. For example, if JIm and Pam find themselves as one of the few remaining employees of the original office, with all the seemingly…

I've occasionally wished that a meteorite or something could crash into the New York Post's writing headquarters so that somebody could publish 'hilarious' puns about how they all died.

Sometimes I wonder if we are going to enter some sort of bizzaro cycle where republican presidents in practice are actually more liberal than democratic ones and vice versa - but no one ever acknowledges it.

The "real" content isn't just basically an ad, in many cases it is actually an ad. I work in a field that sometimes overlaps with this stuff so sometimes I see the pitch material they send out to product makers. Basically, the pitch material will say "want your product to appear in our best new perfumes for Christmas…

The ads for this really strongly give the impression that this film was made by a group of people who became really obsessed with the effects tutorials at videocopilot.net and somehow convinced some people with money to make a 2 hour long movie based just on seeing those effects over and over again. In particular,…

One of the close up shots of the dwarves was said dwarf caught in a spiderweb, so that would suggest they do get to the spiders at least in this one.

I've never seen this (that I recall anyway, I was aware of the raisins as a kid) but assuming that the temptations recording mentioned is the same one from their first Christmas lp, that song is the shit. Not that there is a lot of competition in the "best Rudolph the red nose reindeer song" debate, but that song…

Essentially all culture is cannibalizing the past. Most of our "old" celebrated culture like Shakespeare is itself pretty direct cannibalizations of previous works. I think if you were to generalize in very very broad strokes, you could say that during more innovative eras the work that is created cannibalizes the…

On a somewhat but not entirely unrelated point:

My comments regarding film not being "readily available" and sort of economically dangerous was regarding pretty much exclusively the motion picture side of the equation. (And again, even then, not so much regarding the big boys as consumers, low budget films, etc etc…) Of course I do agree with you that in terms of…

Seemingly all of tlcs programming at this point is driven by the mission statement "here's a circus freak show for you, except we are going to pretend that this is very empowering."