Just a guy made of dots and lines.

Look at Nathan Rabin, he's doin' funny, he's doin shtick!
Nah, not really.

Eh.

The River hate is easy to explain. Whenever any show is trying to sell its viewers on a character or a concept, it can easily slip into trying too hard. River Song, with her multiple cornball catchphrases, her smug anti-charm, and her overly contrived pose of false badassery, reeks of a kind of desperation, of writers…

Surprised that no one's mentioned the nod to Logopolis on the beach - the Doctor exchanging words with the astronaut from a distance, like Tom Baker did with the Watcher on the bridge, too far away for us to hear their conversation, with both the astronaut and the Watcher serving as harbingers of death. A nice touch,…

"It was June of 2002 and we were the first class to graduate after 9/11, and what does he talk about? The poor in Africa."

To put it another way: saying Weird Al is nice is like saying Jay Leno is "the hardest-working man in show business." Even if this were true, it doesn't make either of them funny.

The measure of a good entertainer is not whether that person is super-nice, but whether they are, y'know, entertaining. Doing a find-and-replace with someone else's lyrics, and turning out a shitty novelty song? That might've been amusing in first grade, but pushing thirty, there ought to be a higher standard.

"So-and-so is the nicest guy" is the compliment of last resort for shitty entertainers.

The appeal of Weird Al Yankovic is that everyone who likes him first heard him when they were eleven, and their brains were too mushy to distinguish between good stuff and crap.

Next on the Hater: The Hater
Know what I find unbearable? The current writing on NBC's "The Office"! I wonder who writes that?

You're going to die friendless and alone like Weird Al Yankovich.

@Pantaloons: No, "Antichrist" is not a feminist critique of a misogynistic society; it posits a world in which there are male forces and female forces which are naturally at war with one another, and in which the female force is scary and irrational and demonic. That isn't a "feminist" critique of anything.

I think Von Trier's a misogynistic asshole, and, more than that, an untalented hack who's reputation is largely built on shock shlock. But there's nothing wrong with bashing the US without ever having been here. What special insight is he supposed to gain by actually hanging around here? Is he not allowed to fucking…

"There's nothing wrong with Shadow. He's a standard passive protagonist."

Similarly, we can know that Lady Gaga is an Objectively Great Artist because she has won a Grammy.

The other thing about Gaiman is - and maybe I'm being harsh here because this is a problem with 99.9% of genre writers - he cannot fucking write. His dialogue is contrived, his prose is florid and purple, his characters do not in any way act like any human being you have ever met would act (just one egregious example…

American Gods is not a good book. It's a collection of unused Sandman ideas shruggingly tossed off and thrown together into the sloppy semblance of a plot. There's nothing really compelling at work there - the protagonist is a cipher, as others have pointed out, and the conflict seems forced and silly, a thing…

James Bond faces his most stubborn foe yet: gonorrhea.

Cookie, that's just so crazy it just might work!