Except for the recent bit where he's now a Nazi.

Depends on whether you're talking about the first Die Hard movie - in which McClane's vulnerability is definitely the point, though perhaps in a way that allows it to sail over the heads of a lot of people watching - or any of the sequels, in which that ambiguity is completely gone.

And by lately, you mean in the last fifteen years? Has he done anything worth watching since The Sixth Sense?

Yes and no? It's definitely an over-simplification to call the Captain America films a power fantasy - if anything, they're a horror story about how the fantasy of becoming powerful, even for the best possible reasons, can become a nightmare when you realize that no matter how powerful you are, you'll always be under…

He started a war under false pretexts that got thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and has destabilized a sizable portion of the world for decades to come, gutted Americans' civil liberties in a way that still hasn't been rolled back, presided over the legitimization of torture and…

I don't know how true this was elsewhere in the world, but in Israel it took a while for a full awareness of the extent of the Holocaust to sink in. A lot of survivors weren't eager to talk about what happened to them, and a lot of people who weren't there were not-so-secretly judgmental of victims of the Holocaust…

A lot of museums these days have apps, especially for school groups (remember that picture from a couple years ago of a group of children sitting under "The Night Watch" at the Rijksmuseum, all looking at their phones, that everyone was so scandalized by? Turns out they were completing an assignment related to the…

A couple of ebooks - Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (on the back of Fargo, obviously), Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie, and The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin. I also bought some physical books recently, and the post office notification I got yesterday suggests they may have arrived. They include Yoon Ha Lee's debut…

Pretty sure you can't turn an immunity agreement into an NDA (not that those are considered strongly enforceable, anyway). Otherwise, all prosecutors would do it and then you'd never get defense attorneys pointing out that a witness's testimony was gotten in exchange for immunity.

And fifteen years later, he's still maintaining that story, even as the case against Syed breaks down around him? Given that the most compelling alternate theory of the crime is that he's the murderer, you'd think it would be in his interest to get ahead of that by pointing the finger at the cops or the DA. The fact…

Wilds testified that Syed is the murderer. There are only two realistic reasons why he'd do that: either it's true, or he's lying in order to cover for someone. In the latter case, it's hard to imagine him keeping that story up for fifteen years unless that someone is himself. (It is, I suppose, also possible that…

I think I've mentioned this on the site before, but if you're looking for an interesting handling of the "everyone turns into a raged-out zombie but we're not calling them zombies" premise, you should check out Elizabeth Knox's novel Wake. It's very clearly inspired by King - not just something like Cell but also Unde…

From a legal standpoint of course you're right. That's why Syed's conviction and jail sentence are a travesty. But I was responding to a commenter who talked about this process eventually leading to proof of Syed's innocence, and the truth is that we're never going to have that. If, for example, the cell tower…

As I understand it, there's very little chance of finding Syed innocent. What everyone is saying is that there's not enough evidence to convict him - which, obviously, means that he shouldn't be in jail. But that in itself is not enough to prove his innocence, especially since his closeness to Lee and Wilds's…

Don't forget the family of Hae Min Lee, who, no matter what the truth ultimately is, have not gotten justice in any way.

Given that the presidency is basically a lock for the Democrats at this point, they're wisely turning their eyes to the House and the Senate. Obama's point in talking about legislative gridlock is to get out the vote for the down-ticket races and try to shift the balance of power so that Clinton can actually pass…

I've basically come to the conclusion that the only thing justifying the continued existence of the Bond films is the fact that they introduced the world to Eva Green. Everything after Casino Royale has been kind of a letdown, but her presence in that film buys this geriatric, increasingly boring series a lot of…

Hey, Game of Thrones ended last week. Your value to us as TV exporters is basically nil at this point.

There's an argument to be made for The Abyss as Cameron's most complex and human movie. Certainly the relationship between the leads is a much more interesting romance than he's written anywhere else.

It's also the 40th anniversary of the Israeli raid on Entebbe to free the kidnapped passengers of an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris. It's one of those events that you read about and can't believe that they happened in reality and not in a movie, not least because of the amount of good luck required to pull…