benjaminsapiens--disqus
Benjamin Sapiens
benjaminsapiens--disqus

"allowing actors to inhabit a character they otherwise physically could not"

Nyong'o said that she didn't want her face to be seen on screen. Being African onscreen means your looks get judged in ways that even white females don't have to deal with, which is why she wanted to act but no appear in person.

They're also great entries into the genre that they're playfully paying tribute to, ie. Chinese kung fu films ("wuxia" if you're getting fancy). The fights in these are just magnificent.

Hang in there guys, only a few more days 'til "Hail, Caesar!" comes out.

A proper sequel to 'District 9' would have featured extraterrestrials who are actually an Earthling species who fled into space after being ousted from Earth by invaders but who are now returning to resettle the planet to take refuge from terrible persecution. In the process of resettling their native world, they

I have to respectfully disagree with both you and the author. This film may be superior to Cameron's in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to the masterpiece that is "The Legend of the Titanic." https://www.youtube.com/wat…

It's basically getting sorted into houses, Hogwarts-style, except with something along the lines of a Meyers-Briggs personality test rather than a magical hat, except that the test is administered by the testee choosing one of several objects (like they do when they're finding the new incarnation of the Dalai Lama)

It's sort of a balancing act. Bob Hope is God commented below about "Upper-middle class East Coast white liberals "finding themselves"," and that's the sort of indulgent tripe you get if you go too far in that direction, but if you go too far in the other you either get melodrama, or misery porn, or grimdark

Hella sweet fleek!

The best/worst part of Backstrom was that it was just Dwight Schrute played straight. With the actor who played Dwight Schrute.

Those goddamned season arcs were the worst part of Moffat's Who.

The Hunger Games were genuinely good books. The endless slew of copycats are terrible because they imitate what that series looked like and fail to include any of what mattered. They get the aesthetic right and the themes, superficially, look the same, but they completely miss the point.

I mean, it was aimed at children, and they also made the battle droids annoying (instead of mindless killing machines which were completely useless they became sentient, goofy mooks who were completely useless and also annoying), but I still can't fathom why a thoroughly competent director would turn A) include Jar

The Clone Wars series is magnificent because it managed to salvage the trainwreck that was the prequel trilogy and turn it into something wonderful - but I'll be damned if they didn't also manage to turn Jar Jar Binks into something even more unbearably annoying than he was originally. How? How do you accomplish that?

And considering the borderline-genocidal treatment the Roma are receiving in Romania today (it's terrible even in allegedly liberal democratic countries like France, but it seem particularly bad in Romania), the director's premise that nothing really changes which he makes the theme of this film seems very apt,

On a related note (it gets brought up in that segment, because Carrie is there), Princess Leia momentarily lapses into a British accent for that one scene with Tarkin on the Death Star ("I recognized your foul stench …"). Apparently it was her first day of shooting, and Lucas' script was so overblown that the only was

I think it would make a hell of a lot more sense for a First Order stormtrooper to have a central London accent than for a friendless maybe-orphan on a desert backwater populated mostly by aliens to have one.

I thought Arthur Dent was the role Martin Freeman was born to play. But I have to agree about Zaphod.

One of my biggest regrets about The Simpsons is that Lisa's new friend from "Lisa's Rival" (Allison Taylor, voiced by Winona Ryder) was never really seen again, since it looked like she and Lisa were going to be friends.

A.V. Club commenter El Santo is also Webcomic Overlook El Santo! They are one and the same!