See, I thought the premise of the joke was that the Oscars are so white (and so, uh, clueless about it) that they'd choose Dash as their new director of diversity, a la Fox News often using her as a go-to for diversity, as if her views are a representative sample of persons of color. The joke, it seemed to me, was on…

I'll probably get hissed at for this…

My understanding is that neither group was invited, per se. Both groups applied to have panels featured, and both were approved after a voting process—despite the organizers of Level Up, the anti-harassment panel, expressing their concerns over the intentions of the other panel, and growing evidence that the the…

I think he's great as Devon Banks on 30 Rock, great as G.O.B. on Arrested Development, great as Bojack. I get that this place is all about the reflexive snark, but the comments here (the ones that aren't just references, any way) seem to be largely less about snarking on the failed series he has been in and more…

Yeah, and I wouldn't really describe him as a capitalist, as the story does—at least no more than the vast majority of Americans. He's basically as anti-establishment as you can get and still be successful in the U.S.

I'd say here it's about a 50/50 split between people who loved it and people who hated it, if the comments on the Top 25 Horror Films of the Last 15 Years list from last night is any indication.

Yeah that list has almost 1900 comments right now and I'd venture to say that at least half of them are just people saying "X sucks" or "X is great," with the same films (It Follows, for example) popping up again and again.

Robin Wood has a whole schema set up in which the central assumption is that "progressive" horror films involve evil that is human in origin and can be stopped, and "reactionary" horror films involve something monstrous that is supernatural in origin and can't be stopped. Wood incidentally is one of the critics that …

It seems to start with a flawed premise—that because The Babadook and It Follows "are both relentlessly creepy films about a supernatural evil that can’t be stopped" and they both did well that we're one film away from a trend. That ignores how several other well-received recent films fit the same bill, and for that…

I'm glad I'm not the only one!

Thanks! I know about a couple of key departures from the novel that actually add some ambiguty to the film (what Eli means by "I'm not a boy" and the nature of Eli's relationship with Håkan), and I have to say I think that ambiguity is for the best. Given my rose-tinted view of Eli and Oskar's fate, I'm guessing I…

They're playing with his emotions.

Yeah. It was kind of like Orphan in that I saw what they were trying to go for, but it just fell apart so quickly and became unintentionally funny.

The thing that bothered me most was finding out not only about the Raggedy Ann doll, but also that it's on display in the couple's "museum" that they charge X amount of dollars for rubes to see. That got me to look into the couple; they have a long history of fraud and—even by the low standards set for paranormal…

Wasn't the boy who had been killed by his mom after the witch had possessed her? I think it's his toys they find, including the pop-up box with the mirror.

"Thriller" or "psychological thriller" often gets subbed in for horror when people want to avoid horror's outside genre status. I think that's changing, overall—horror garners much more respect in academic circles than it used to, for example—but it still has that elitism, as you say, working against it.

I got dragged to it on a date. At the time I said the doll was scarier than the witch, and they should have made the movie about it. Then they made a movie about the doll, and I was proved wrong.

I had the same problem. If I had seen it without the hype I probably would have ultimately thought more highly of it. As is it ended up being slightly disappointing, even though I thought it was good. It didn't help that I had seen some publicity shots (or deleted scenes?) that were genuinely creepy, and I kept…

Right, which is why the hopeless romantic in me wants to believe he'd ultimately join her as a vampire—like he had to stay human for them to relocate, but then he could "be like [her]," as Eli asks him to do earlier—to see the world through her eyes. She points out that he already wants to kill the bullies for…

I'd add a couple of those, myself, along with Ils (a.k.a. Them).