I think E.T. was a better Spielberg film too, though unfortunately he developed habits that would haunt every goddamned film he made after. I was almost surprised that Spielberg didn't make the forced laborers in Schindler's list glow in the dark and give the evil Kommandant daddy issues.

Apropos of @tjfrazier:disqus Kissinger also put a hit out on a certain Chilean general - the guy who refused to mount a coup because he believed in democracy.

Tom Lehrer was one of those few people who can make the idea of nuclear death funny enough to laugh out loud.

Language nerd here. Both words are (of course) Slavic, and the only real difference is the conjugation and the way we transliterate them. In Cyrillic you'd write Работа but to me the Russian "a" always seems to sound an awful lot like the "o" (both are what we call in English "short" sounds). And yes, the work…

I would like to hear what Greg Afinogenov thinks — one of the things he mentions here is the filter of what the USSR was like as presented to the US.

When I worked in a library at the University of Rochester I ran across a collection of books called "Soviet Science Fiction" It was a hardbound set of about oh, 10 volumes. I think it was a translated magazine a la Asimov's.

Ha. Ya know, the big roundhouse kicks that you see in most movies, as you probably know, are almost never used in real competition be it MMA or anything else, and you certainly wouldn't do it in a fight. I actually tried a flying kick once in a tournament. Same double-kick that the Karate Kid made famous. That was a…

That's a cool spotting! I was watching a later episode of DD and noticed again the angle with the Chrysler building and the Empire State — I was trying to place it as I was just sure it had to be someplace near the railyard in Queens.

Very cool. I saw a few exteriors that looked like the Hell's Kitchen of old, (not that old; hard to get my head around how different it looks now from say, 1990) but I knew that couldn't be it.

Certainly true. Tyson would ring that bell. Heck, he'd take your goddamned head off.

There was that but Tyson wasn't what you call a long-haul guy. Note that in just about every winning fight he went 4 rounds or less.

Speaking as a New Yorker, (though not native) I want to know if anyone else recognized locations? I know, it's sort'a dumb, but as I live close to Hell's Kitchen and see them filming in Queens and Staten Island I was just wondering what other people notice.

Also the way politics works, it's as much about doing favors as getting them. I live in NYC, I followed a lot o the DAs campaigns (they are elected here, BTW) and Robert Morgenthau was a lot of things, and ruthless could be one. But he was also a damned good DA and knew how to make his politics and morality (or…

Thanks! I always wondered why the sound always seems to miss the actor's lips and the voices sound off.

Question: how come even when the actors are clearly speaking English they can't seem to sync the dubbing right? Did they dub over everything? I can tell the Chinese actors are speaking Cantonese(?) or something, but the Western actors appear to be speaking English and it looks like the sound is always messed in these…

Speaking as a sometimes-martial arts teacher, there's a bit of physics that's pretty straightforward.

As I recall his death was pretty mundane tho. Brain swelling is usually either an allergic reaction or from something like meningitis, or a head injury. There wasn't a visible head injury so the thought was an allergic reaction to one of the (effectively) over the counter drugs he was taking. It was unusual at the…

Yeah, I get some of that from the interview. But it's just fascinating that while he has a (healthy) disdain for artistic pretension, it's almost like he felt that the only way to make high art was to take music theory and learn to be a composer like Beethoven, you know? It's weird.

Funny to see this — I read the interview with Gene Simmons and I gotta say at least he's honest and reasonably self-aware.

This. Snyder is a director who seems so focused on visuals — how cool everything looks. In 300 for instance, the guy was really into all these visual set-pieces. But there really aren't any characters in the movie (some of that is down to MIller, though). In Watchmen he got all the visuals right but lost track of what…