Seriously, it's three distinct parts! The statue should be the easiest thing to do in the entire temple. My childhood is filled with cries of "Why are you putting the head on first?!" and "You have the base backwards!"

I loved The Blindside parody. It almost made the movie worthwhile…almost.

Just started reading Carter Beats the Devil by Glenn David Gold. I'm at the 50 page mark and so far it seems to just be a biography of the fictional Charles Carter. I imagine it will pick up very soon, though, as you can't have an old-time magician story without something cool happening.

I honestly don't know whether or not I liked In Cold Blood. I found it interesting, fascinating even, but uncomfortably exploitative. I know it basically created the True Crime genre, and I find the genre to be interesting, but I'm just uncomfortable with aspects of the work. I am deeply interested in anything having…

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is one of those books I absolutely hated when I first read it and then the more I ranted about it to people, the more I found myself thinking about it. Finally I reread it a few years ago and I appreciated it much more the second time around.

I loved Take Shelter. If I had been in charge of Oscar voting for last year's awards, Take Shelter would have won so many things.

@avclub-9cd818ea56273170b63f339aa6f34bca:disqus Drive was fine. A bit over-hyped in my opinion (although I saw it when it was on DVD so it had already been months of people talking up the film). I thought it was a bit more style than substance. Honestly, I got nothing from Gosling's character other than "quiet…

Yeah, I would have liked it much better if the characters hadn't been connected the way they were. I was annoyed mostly because I had to stop reading for a bit after *SPOILER* Andrei revealed to his daughter that he knew Leo *SPOILER* and, as I went about the rest of my day I realized that the ending was going to be…

I'd rather them be genuinely chatty than fake chatty for the sake of trying to earn the tip. The tip comes from good service. I don't need a conversation but if you want to talk at least fucking mean it.

I have the "knocking stuff over" story covered: I work in a museum and recently we were taking down part of the core (permanent) exhibit that had been up for something like 8-10 years. One of the artifacts, a vase from 1867, was stuck to a glass shelf with museum wax. The museum wax had basically fused the vase to the…

I'm kind of the same way on Gosling. He's very pretty but, with the exception of Crazy, Stupid, Love I don't really like a lot of his film choices. I wish he'd make something cerebral like The Believer again.

General top three: 1. Joaquin Phoenix 2. James McAvoy 3.Joseph Gordon-Levitt

"They're coming here! And they will rape and pillage and rape again!"

I didn't know that. The scene clearly had sexual overtones but I ended up trying to think of it in the context of Hollywood rather than "this actually happened". Knowing that, it's pretty fascinating that they put those references in a film made during the 60s.

Finished reading Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. It was pretty good although toward the end it went from interesting commentary on the Soviet political machine to standard detective novel, so that took away a few points.

My general description of Birth of a Nation: A three hour spirited game of "that's the most racist thing I've ever….no, wait…THAT'S the most racist thing I've ever seen…no,wait…"

I don't care what people say about The Town. It has one of the best car chases of recent years. Affleck's transitions between the quiet of the security cameras and the chaos of the robbery are fantastic.

That sucks. I'm sorry.

Started watching Black Adder for the first time. I'm a little sad no one told me how great of a show it was before now. As a history person it's entertaining. So far my favorite moments are when they show Edmund's mother and just how dejected she is about life as a women during that time period.

I felt like the pacing of Atonement was really different from how I read the book. So everything that went quickly was slowed down to a crawl. Plus, he left out my favorite part from the book but that's a personal bias.