Ah, then I am obliged on that first part.

Actually, Colton Dunn hosted Rooster Teeth Entertainment System, so while he's not just one of Burnie Burns' friends, he does have a prior association. Alan Ritchson is playing the muscular jock antagonist, so I'd say that casting outside the RT pool was rather necessitated in that instance.

Since Spacey has very pointedly stated that he dislikes public speculation about his sexuality, consider me Queen Victoria on this.

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is actually weirdly conservative (they supported the anti-LGBT 'propaganda' law, for one), so those bedfellows wouldn't be as strange as you might think.

I mean, Mandela was a terrorist. He was thrown into jail for leading Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC's armed wing which pursued a bombing campaign against the South African government and was also accused of torture and summary executions by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Oh God, and she's the only female listed in the main cast. Guess it's not just Hollywood that has a diversity problem…

Yeah, I get that there's no room for girls in the Lazer Team, but if she's going to be an accessory can she at least dress semi-appropriately for fighting aliens or whatever? No one brings a bare midriff to XCOM.

Being the same in quality and just being the same are two different things. Law of diminishing returns, and all that. I love District 9, say, but it sure would be a disappointment if the director just tried to make the same film twice over…

I got a little exhausted by the hype about Blue is the Warmest Colour which put me off from watching it, but I had heard goods things about A Single Man and I'll be sure to check out your other recommendations. I still find the lack of quality in Netflix's LGBT section to be exceeded only by its Horror section.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of gay people who have never slept with their own sex, or even intend to. In fact, 'conversion therapy' against children is usually predicated on, "How can you be gay if you've never slept with another guy/girl?" Gay sex may be what homophobes find the most icky, but the fact that…

Yeah, it feels almost an abuse of system that the main beneficiaries of crowdfunding seem to be established names. Sure, they're a known commodity and thus a safer investment, and maybe they can finally make the games or films that they weren't able to in the corporate world. But when people of an established track…

Oh, it's definitely not all bad; it just wasn't quite the entertainment revolution it was bigged up to be.

It sounds almost exactly like a big-screen version of Video Game High School: publicly-funded, cheesy as all hell, plot recycled from a thousand other underdog stories, nerds vs. jocks, an improbable ratio of homely men to hot women, serviceable special effects, etc.

"If you subscribe to the old auteurist line of movies being both expressions and entertainment objects, that a genuine curio, not entirely successful, but both too self-consciously silly and too personal to dismiss."

So Harry Potter is racist - not racially insensitive, mind you, or even racially ignorant - but actively racist because it (a) has a white-majority cast and (b) uses an allegory for racism that also applies to white characters?

Over two million people voted No in Scotland. I presume that they're all "small minded anglican middle englanders"?

So I'll grant you "middle class", but I'm not really seeing "racist" - even if the series never really did justice by its minority characters - or how a book written by a female author and featuring Hermione Granger as a main character is "sexist".

That's more a case of a TV show ruining a character than vice-versa. Rose was fine until New Who decided she was going to be the memetic avatar of the cosmos…or something.

I actually really disliked Jim. His UK equivalent, Tim, was a bit of a smart-alec but fundamentally a loser to balance it out, whereas Jim was basically just smart, attractive and well-rounded which made all his eye-rolls and asides come off as unbearably smug.

Season 3 was definitely when the show started to feel like it was wearing thin. I think people overlook its structural weakness because it had some great episodes - perhaps even the best of the series - and it came right before the disappointment of Season 4. But I just noticed my enjoyment beginning to ebb, and since…