He plays a soldier, right? Like seemingly every other performance of his. He played one in Lions for Lambs, which I'm pretty sure was just An Inconvenient Truth but for war, and minus the powerpoint.

I disagree. I say, put one up for every victim to celebrity idolatry. I'm in no way convinced it will stop people putting other people on pedestals like Cosby. But it's a start.

This is old news. The new thing is trying to get some Americans into our own movies. Stephen Root may have been the only non-Brit with more than two lines in Selma (exaggerating, but slightly).

Well…I was willing to entertain the notion that he was sincere for a little while. I do try to give the benefit of the doubt to people.

Not in politics, my friend.

The show with the most ludicrous premise since Flash Forward, which compensates by being as respectful and boring as Flash Forward was bonkers fun.

Mostly appeared in movies I have no interest in seeing?

Argo was a perfectly fine thriller with a ludicrous ending. Zero Dark Thirty was obviously the better film but Argo had a happy ending, while ZDT leaves you with the feeling of, my god, what have we become? Typically speaking, the Academy awards the former group more, and then in twenty years people just joke about…

And with that, sir, you have outed yourself as a troll. Good day to you. And here I was going to post a remark about the Taken movies.

And ample product placement. The film is just as implicated in consumer capitalism as its characters and there's ultimately no escape is I think the point.

With Uwe Boll seemingly gone, both those guys move down a rank. Is there a worse working "name" director than McG? I'd argue that Michael Bay is better.

Look, you're probably right. Then again, the alternative was having him make another movie…

Every Tom Clancy adaptation, for one. Back when they based them on his actual books, anyway.

I've not read the book, but from what I hear, he seems to draw conclusions other than "privatizing the whole goddamn system in stages" that Republicans and corporate Democrats are always pushing. Using a platform to advocate ideas for education that counter that is hardly a bad thing.

Probably it still becomes a movie though. No way Fincher would touch this one with a ten foot pole, though, so it'll go to the person best suited to handle this material: McG.

This is a shame. I really would have liked to see how Tom Scharpling would have handled all his roles.

I generally enjoyed the book, though it did ask for quite a lot of suspension of disbelief, and it had a shitty non-ending. Swapping a Northeast landscape for a Southwest one, though…hats off.

I'd be shocked if that were true. Austin is managing epic growth about as well as your typical Sunbelt city did after WWII.

Heh. Last time I was in Austin it felt as inevitably watered-down as every cool place after rich white people find out about it. Also, while people say it's not really Texas, the "solution" to clogged highways there—additional quasi-highways built aside the main highways—is as Texas as it gets. Everything is bigger…

I wonder just how likely this was to happen in the first place. The Bond producers seem to avoid actors who regularly star in big mainstream movies, which (regardless of their quality) is what Elba does. Obviously there's a small sample set at play here, but you have two guys who had been big TV stars with some…