Music: Another Statistic Provo, Utah-area band (featuring future member of Neon Trees) who broke up in 2008. Absolutely brilliant spacey post-hardcore/emo rock with duelin boy/girl vocals who switched off drum/guitar duties depending on who was singing. I got a 4-song demo e.p. by them that is perfect.

A girl up in Canadia sent me a mixtape consisting of punk/hardcore/emo stuff that included Sleater-Kinney, The Damned, The Weakerthans, and for some reason, Talking Heads and Radiohead. I wasn't complaining.

I 100% concur with the entirety of your first paragraph. The only thing I'd like to add is that "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" is perhaps THE single greatest movie title of all time. It's just so fucking evocative and perfect. I can't stand how the box set tries to retronym the film as "Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The…

Apparently, you have to love Raiders in order to hate this theory. What, do I gotta draw you a picture?

We (me and all my siblings) were tickled to the point where it was definitely inappropriate and possibly borderline abusive. We've all got fucking weird trust/intimacy issues now. Don't tickle your kids, parents. They don't like it.

I remember being so confused — like, was this supernatural or just a human killer? Learning it was another Lois Duncan story with a slasher thrown in for no good reason clears a lot of things up.

How to design dialogue:

It's like they just cycle through the same material over and over again.

Were Garfunkel & Oates actually good? I looked up like five songs in a row by them the other day and they were ALL explicitly about sex. I'm not a prude or anything (it was funny the first 2 times), but it really started to feel like a crutch and it struck me as very schticky: "Aw, cute white girls sing crude fuck…

I actually dislike that they're getting access to these high-profile filmmakers. It kind of neuters their ability to make more honest criticisms. They're already practically on the payroll of Marvel Studios at this point, for how in the tank they are for those films. You just KNOW the HT for Civil War is going to…

One imprint I think Scream left on the genre was that it did for slashers what 28 Days Later did for zombie films — it gave the killers the ability to run fast. Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees were slow, hulking, lumbering behemoths in no particular hurry to chase down their victims. Ghostface (whoever was under the…

Speaking of no lasting legacy, anybody remember the made-for-TV movie I've Been Waiting For You, an obvious ripoff of the Scream/IKWYDLS slasher revival? It just popped into my head for the first time in years.

His character from Only Lovers Left Alive would Swift-kick this vacuous ninny right to the curb.

Something something so gradually I didn't even notice

You could say a lot of those bands are heavily indebted to the Descendents, so if you like them, hell yeah

Jam harder like a Magikist
Rock harder like a Magikist

It's actually a little bit clever that it borrows from 60s psychedelia/garage rock a little bit, while lyrically it's about how the hippies completely sold out and got themselves co-opted the minute they figured out there's profit in counter culture. Also their cover of "Why Can't We Be Friends" was fun.

I didn't mean to imply there were no jokes. It's more something about the attitude with which she delivers them. There's real pain and grief in these punchlines. She seems to be reacting as a human first, and a performer second.

Captain America always seems like he's punching a time clock to me. There's never any sense of wonder or escapism in his action scenes. It's like he's cursed to be the super soldier. Maybe some of Spider-Man's aww-shucks enthusiasm will rub off on him in the next one.

I thought that was for copping feels in the dark?