By the way, that famous Margaret Mead quotation, while very nice, is completely apocryphal. It doesn't appear in any of her published writings and was quoted for the first time years after her death. Even her own institute doesn't know where it came from:

How ironic. His attempt to return to television is so formulaic, it could have spewed from the Twitter feed of the laziest Hollywood hack.

You've got to admit that Time did, in fact, pick the greatest living American novelist to put on their cover. (Of course, that was back in 2000, and it was Stephen King.)

I saw it around the same age, and I don't recall having any trouble following it, at least not in general terms. I thought it was pretty cool at the time, and still do. (Any ten minutes of Dune has more genuine ideas in it than most science fiction movies do in their entirety. It's when you have it sit through two…

Evidently MacLachlan was seeing through time, and caught a glimpse of his future career.

@Mikey B: Agreed about the Lawrence of Arabia references. It's actually a pretty amazing idea to put a T.E. Lawrence figure at the heart of an allegorical version of a modern oil crisis. Once you've got that central premise, which is really strong, you can hang almost anything off of it—mysticism, ecology, imaginary…

My wife, who hasn't seen the movie, just saw the shirtless photo of Sting posted above. Her comment: "Wow. Does he still look like that?"

This first did not seem the proper way.

No, no, that's not what this comment thread is about at all. I can't believe how wrong you got it. Just sit down, I'm embarrassed for both of us.

Franzen's email address
OprahFan@aol.com?

I love Random Rules. I mean, I love Random Roles.

Man, I'm just so tired of all these Star Wars!

@Not Really a Fan: Not sure if this is still the case, but back when Redbox first started, most of its employees were busy buying armfuls of DVDs from Wal-Mart and Target:

@Jonathan: Don't you mean "spoken Foer?"

The trouble is that significantly more readers on this site will be tempted to check out a movie with an F rating, rather than, say, a D. If Rabin had simply given this movie a C-, I'll bet that 90% of us wouldn't have even clicked on this article.

I've always liked Roger Ebert's explanation of his "zero stars" rating:

Redbox is also a great way to catch up on what's being released directly to video. Just a glance at the kiosk reveals an embarrassment of riches: Asylum ripoffs, hip-hop action remakes, horror movies featuring CW starlets—it's like a window into this country's secret soul.

I think that Shalmanezzer has a point, actually. As far as I'm concerned, the dreaded F should be reserved for movies that have a genuine shot at being judged one of the worst of all time. Nothing I've seen about Flipped, either in this review or in the consensus elsewhere—it's up to a 56% (!) on Rotten Tomatoes,…

I was in the third grade when I first heard "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys, on the car radio while I was being driven to school. Halfway through the first chorus, they became my favorite thing in the world, and they've pretty much stayed that way ever since.

As soon as that first organ chord sounded in "Intervention," I knew that I was going to be listening to this song for the rest of my life.