Their problem, I think, was that they made Dirk into even
more of a dick than he is in the book. He might stiff people with the odd pizza
bill, but I’m not sure book Dirk would go so far as to [SPOILERS] hypnotize his
friend into giving him all his redundancy money and then going on holiday with
it.

Chelsea Hotel by Leonard Cohen (Joan Baez, wasn't it?)

Come now - Alan Rickman would knock it out of the park, surely.

I had heard somewhere that he pulled a Peter Jurasik - he was asked not to do anything overtly 'alien' but he went for it anyway and everyone liked it so much they went with it.

Does anyone else find the film weirdly hobbled by the fact that Tony Shalhoub's character was so clearly supposed to be an acid casualty, but they (presumably) had to hack out all the drug references to get a rating, so he just becomes this inexplicable idiot? Does this get mentioned?

When I read this, it occurred to me that there would be a rather beautiful piece of metanarrative in having Paul McGann be the Doctor who did this one terrible thing nobody likes to talk about that made the Time Lords go away for ages.

Mark E Smith. LIke Steve Martin he's existing way past the prime of his art, but the Fall literally changed my life.

I have heard (not particularly verifiably, but more than once) that
dramatic actors have been known to get quite bitter about some comedians' ability not only to switch to dramatic acting, but to do so with out any of the
luvvie-ish rigmarole of motivation-seeking and angsty getting-into-character
rituals that they…

It's the tension that creates the alchemy of the film, I think. An unrestrained Vincent Price would have played the guy as a cackling pervert, but toning it down means you can never be sure that he doesn't, at heart, feel he's doing the Lord's work…

I had my copy of 'Slugs' confiscated when I was overheard reading bits of it out loud to my mates.

I sometimes deliberately drop things so I can say this.

As is Sanchez banging on to everyone who will listen about
poaching an egg in soup , if only for his delivery of the words ‘sausage roll’.

So settle back on a chair, sofa, or a beanbag if that’s how
you choose to live your life.

So genius hacker guy assumes that because an organisation is called "Centipede" it's probably doing research on Centipedes, and that's fine. Oooh, this is not good….

I think there was an ‘MI9’ that was responsible for helping to spring POWs in World War II

@i@avclub-4d17298d67ec9460263f96b7813ee02a:disqus 
Weak leadership and bitter post-Thatcher squabbles allowed the Tories to fall into the hands of just the weirdest bunch of politicians in the Anglophone world – a bunch of ugly, shrill caricatures who ranted about discipline and old fashioned moral values while forever…

In fairness, while ‘conspiracy’ is overegging things a bit, there was certainly a concerted effort by the Blair government to associate itself with British Youth via pop music, Oasis and Blur were courted heavily and went to parties etc., and bought wholeheartedly into the ridiculous attempt to creat the ‘Cool…

If you're talking about books about the bard, I've got to give a shout out to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Ted
Hughes' epic, beautiful and utterly, utterly bonkers attempt to
link Shakespeare to pagan cults, Sufi mysticism and god knows what-all.

The shortness of Macbeth being in a roundabout way, according to a theatrical chum, the reason why it's considered unlucky by actors.

@avclub-6997a8bd0e1042b70b60c5c879a1780e:disqus Chemistry? Delenn and Sheridan? Really? Mira Furlan, being a considerably better actress, does her best to sell the whole thing but I'm pretty sure Boxleitner's wierdly asexual gosh-darn-it-I-think-you're-swell approach to being a romantic lead would have needed the…