It isn't that I didn't *get* the sex jokes as a kid, more that now they resonate more. I caught "The This and the That" episode on TV a few weeks ago. I probably hadn't seen it in a decade; when I was a kid watching the show, it was still funny, but in a more abstract way.

@electriceel - "Peter Benchly's Creature," right? Man, I miss the days when the networks would throw money on feature-length monster schlock and send it afloat in prime time. You expect it from SyFy, but there's something more amusing when its coming alongside, say, whatever your regularly-scheduled late-90s…

Ah, the Glimmer Man! When Steven Segal found religion (specifically, one that requires you take no living creature's life) and tried to reconcile it with a career of gratuitous on-screen violence. The book "Virtual Tibet" has more great stories about Segal circa this era, but this interview goes a long way toward…

In Gladiator, the camera jerks around a lot while violence is occurring, and the disorientation is the primary effect/focus (also, I agree with fastandsloppy). Braveheart's action scenes are just montages of blood and impalements; the disorientation is mostly the result of a single-minded focus on gore and Mel…

It's all vaguely eugenic: Snape must repress his romantic and sexual feelings in the service of preserving the perfect romantic relationship of James and Lily Potter, both of whom are markedly more attractive then he is. After they die, he must sacrifice his life to ensure the survival of their offspring, who goes on…

@Cookie - in my experience in real life, "hardworking" is a term that administrators and educators use somewhat euphemistically in a certain tone when they want to describe students positively without taking into account their intelligence.

I've enjoyed Bloom's insights before too, but those HP articles - man, they just seemed like he was trying to pick a fight with, as he described it, "35 Million People."

A Google search reveals that "Harry Potter" is the fifth most-popular search after Harold Bloom's name, and in at least one of a few screeds he wrote against the books, he did mention their unacknowledged heritage as one reason to dislike them. The main thrust of his argument appears to be, though, that the books just…

@Enkidum - from what I understand from a friend who got her masters' in English, there is an academic cohort that recognizes how much the series borrows from England's boarding school literature.

The characters are growth-stunted psycho-dwarves posing as high school children. When they graduate, they move to another town to begin high school (and their grisly murder spree) all over again! Or at least they will in the season six gritty reboot…

The only movie I've ever actually come close to walking out on was Hollywood Homicide, one of the most crushingly mediocre movies I've ever watched. I did, however, get quite angry at Gods & Generals when I walked back into the viewing room after intermission and realized there was, essentially, an entire movie's…

I watched Inglorious Basterds in a theater full of old people. They were nearly cheering by the end, watching them Nazis get killed. Fun thing was, I talked to a few friends who went to different showings in different towns and reported the same thing: high mean age of the audience, enraptured by the violence.

OK, I'm going to take some opposing opinions here: I actually think Order of the Phoenix is the most-developed book in the series, thematically at least. It has all these ideas about what constitutes legitimate authority floating in it - Umbridge's presence at Hogwarts, Harry starting secret defense classes in absence…

Googling from northern Iowa, at a computer that is not my own:

Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows 2 will likely make for a very entertaining piece of cinema, but for reasons of atmosphere, not story. I feel like the criticisms leveled in this thread against Order could be applied to most of the series - characters' actions rarely move the plot ahead, rather, a mystery is introduced,…

As far as maintaining tension, I loved how Scream 4's scenes in the house near the end applied the 'is it a sequel or a remake?' idea to our expectations about who the killers might be in regard to how the first one ended.

Bring out the chimp…

Acknowledging the profit motive inherent in all commercial productions, it is possible to engage Star Wars (escapist though it is) on an intellectual level without totally undermining it - for example, by dissecting the influences of film serials and Kurosawa.

Vell, LaBoeuf's just zis guy, you know?

http://kotaku.com/5815846/t… has a summary, and a link to the official written decision.