I'd like to open this space to speculate on what the "more perks" could include.

While you're waiting for the biopic, I highly recommend John Seabrook's book The Song Machine, which has a lengthy bit on Lou Pearlman and his boy-band engineering.

Fortunately, he's going to escape to Haiti!

Whither Izzy?

I just like to say Snodgrass.

I agreed with your post right up until the last sentence. Over the last 15 years or so we've seen an increasing mainstreaming of "nerd" culture, to the point where it's more and more socially acceptable for adults to have an enduring interest in things like science fiction and comic books. It's been changing since…

A close corollary of event fatigue is stakes fatigue—if you have the fate of the world on the line every movie, it starts to seem meaningless. If everything is epic, nothing is.

Incidentally, it's not too late to wish the U.S. Coast Guard a belated happy birthday. You may know the Coast Guard from its appearances in The Guardian and The Finest Hours.

I, for one, look forward to the introduction of an solipsistic political party where members are mostly confident they exist, but are pretty unsure about everyone else. Policy positions will be debated in light of the possibility this is all the dream of an autistic child or something.

Of course, the unusual part of that equation is being like Bill Maher, not being less dickish than Bill Maher.

Raising Kaine?

Despite the fact that the plot seems kinda creepy in retrospect, Overboard is still a great movie. It's a fine trick to make the main character seem manipulative and decent at the same time, and Kurt Russell is just the man to do it!

(9 ÷ 11) x 2, aka The Fantastic 1.63 repeating

Beam me up, Scotchy?

I'll defend Sleeping Beauty, including both princess and prince. I think that one of the most potent ideas in the movie is the power of a curse—once that curse is made, the movie unfolds with a sort of dread certainty. Even though the princess is the daughter of a king, they're all powerless to counteract the curse.…

Those of us who enjoy spending hours reading random Wikipedia articles have different standards for fun . . . and this counts!

*sings garbled version of the National Anthem; saves the Queen's life*

When I saw this was a Random Roles interview, I immediately scrolled back up to see if it was conducted by Will Harris, and was quite gratified to find that it was. I don't know of anyone who does better interviews of actors than Will.

It's not Merleau-Ponty jokes that keep me coming back, but the fact that the A.V. Club is the kind of website to slip in Merleau-Ponty jokes into a Guardians of the Galaxy article that brings me back.

All quiet on the Western Front . . . thanks to these noise-cancelling headphones!