I've seen the first five and except for the Cuaron one (the third), they are all uniformly competent, but the later David Yates-directed ones are more competent than the first two Columbus ones.

I don't know. Katniss doesn't have to kill innocents because the innocents are — relatively speaking — the weaker ones in the arena. She just has to wait for them to get taken down by the stronger/fiercer opponents, i.e. the putative bad guys. I think the true tension in the book isn't between killing and not killing,…

Twain did put aside the manuscript for Huck Finn for a long time because he lost inspiration, but it was far earlier in the narrative. I think it was just after Huck fakes his own death and hides out on the island before meeting Jim? I don't remember exactly, but most of the meat of the novel (all the strange…

eh. If you read much of his work, you'll notice that he can't write in a linear fashion or shape his work into a coherent whole. His writing style is so strange: you can tell he wrote in spurts of titanic enthusiasm and steam, on whatever theme fascinated him at the moment, then stuffed it all messily into the…

Pretty much at all ages, women read more than men. Even as children starting out, girls tend to read more and read more fiction. As they grow up, the gap widens and by teenage/adult years, it's pretty much set in stone.

I'm a librarian and I get asked about the Hunger Games all the damn time by latecomers to the bandwagon, and most of them are dudes.

You can't be late to a puppy parade… with each passing minute, the puppies get older and less deserving of your attention.

Pnin is the one last major Nabokov I've yet to read (except for Ada or Ardor, but the less said about that, the better), but have you read Speak, Memory? It's actually my second favorite book of Nabokov's, before Pale Fire. It's a Nabokovian memoir, vignettes gathered in the hand like a collection of beautiful sea…

It has a goofy charm — descriptions of it as a throwback sword and sandals kind of deal are correct — but I thought it had major problems with pacing, inadequate characterization and the action scenes. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but it's not very exciting or good… I guess it depends on your tolerance for…

So it's the "Go Fish" of AtS? That was always one of my favorite things about Buffy, that it could switch in tone from comedy to melodrama and back again so swiftly, but perhaps not so seamlessly.

I never like that sort of aimless, unfocused storytelling that is "more realistic" than a more focused narrative, so MM is not for me. Also why I eventually gave up on The Sopranos.

He's also doing a web-series co-written with Warren Ellis, called Wastelanders. Ellis says: "WASTELANDERS is where Joss’ sense that too few people followed the example of DR HORRIBLE meets my obsession with the QUATERMASS serials, which were half-hour episodes. Short-form genre serials of the kind that tv just doesn’t…

I just want film critics to do their jobs and BE critical. My favorite movie critic of all time is Pauline Kael, and I've probably read every word of hers I could get my hands on, and when she laid into a movie, it wasn't to knock it down a peg or two, it was to elucidate where it went wrong. I mean, this was a lady…

Have always had a weakness for the Addams Family movies, especially the sequel. I love this exchange:

Nope, one of those idiots who automatically writes off almost all movies coming out in theaters today because they are almost uniformly terrible, especially the comedies.

He also needs to take back his John Carter review too — the movie was not good verging on great.

Thank fuck for this grade; there have been too many shockingly positive reviews for this movie, all starting with something like "surprisingly non-offensive," that I feared for my sanity.

Kids today. My cousin of college age today had a classmate who was out of the closet in middle school. All the popular girls would coo whenever he and his boyfriend held hands.

But they are not arching their backs and slathered in vaseline, legs spread open… what is the point of mentioning attractive women unless you post the most sexually titillating pics of them?

No, like 7 eps or so? I loved the show — it was really stylish and Gugino and her co-star Robert Forster were really good in it. It was not quite as good as Soderberg's movie, but Gugino > J.Lo, so I was seriously bummed when it was canceled.