Ha, good catch with that X-Men story - I didn’t follow the comics a lot back then but I do vividly remember that one for the creepy horror imagery (also, they really emphasized the brutal torture of Spider-Man, who ended up more or less like Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Jesus). Kulan Gath didn’t just enchant everyone who…

I recently got it in my head to research what various mid-century appliances looked like, because I had just reread The Brave Little Toaster which was written in 1980 and describes some of the appliance heroes as being older models. The titular brave toaster (who isn’t that old, so probably mid to late 70s) is a…

“Because of Iroha’s elegant use of language, it’s effectively used as alphabetical order in Japanese”

I have an embarrassing but possibly entertaining story about my brush with The Amityville Horror as a kid: https://letterboxd.com/hob/list/movies-i-was-very-scared-of-as-a-kid/detail/#item-2872909240

Strong agree on The Grin of the Dark. I had been a big fan of Campbell’s 80s stuff and then somehow lost track of him, till I realized a few years ago that he’d continued to put out wild things like this. Besides everything that the reviewer mentioned— and Campbell’s obvious deep love of movies of every kind— it’s got…

Both of your guesses are pretty far wrong. I won’t go into details of what de Rais did, but let’s just say he did it all.

The only Traven book I’ve read is THE DEATH SHIP and it’s great. A big part of the book that Vago’s summary doesn’t mention is that it’s about people who got screwed by the formation of modern bureaucratic states and immigration laws after WW1: the narrator and other workers on the death ship are legally unable to…

The same person used at least one other pseudonym that sounded similar but was written differently (Richard Maurhut), so whatever kind of personal meaning or inside joke was behind it, it doesn’t seem like it was spelling-based.

“...why did they call it ID4 in a lot of the marketing?”

That’s life for the vast majority of actors, including the vast majority of great actors.

I wrote a longer response but you know what, it’s not worth it. This isn’t a serious discussion-- you either don’t know much about Marinetti’s history and the very explicitly political and explicitly fascist ideas he built into his movement, or you’d like to whitewash it for whatever reason. Yes, there were…

If they’d just been about creativity and pushing artistic boundaries, then yeah, that would’ve been a beautiful thing. But they weren’t just about that. They were also about saying that war is great, and that might makes right, and that any people who aren’t into technology and violence— especially women— are terrible…

Seriously? I don’t know how you could get “avant-garde artists deserve to be killed” out of an observation that these avant-garde artists were not just artists but also fascists, at least many of them, and that the no-pasta thing in particular may have been a nod to Mussolini’s preferences. And that Italy possibly…

Yeah, it’s a little odd that the article just says Marinetti was “accused” by a food critic of being kinda fascist. He was openly fascist! He thought Mussolini was insufficiently Futurist for not wanting to tear down all existing Italian institutions, and for being into classical architecture and not making Futurism…

Exposition and background science stuff can be fine, some amount of that is a natural part of technothrillers, but in The Andromeda Strain it’s done to a hilarious extreme where he’s like “He typed a command into the computer, and got back this printout” and then there’s like a full page that’s just the computer…

Crichton definitely had a lot of dumb ideas and terrible opinions, but if we’re gonna do this, I will stick up for Andromeda Strain - not as a plausible idea or a well-written book (it’s got some decent horror writing, but dear God, those infodumps), but as an example of effective sciencey hand-waving to allow…

Couldn’t be more eager to see this. I’m biased because she’s a friend of a friend and also because I’m a morbid weirdo, but I really think Gfrörer is staggeringly good and it’s cool to see her getting into longer-form stuff. I can’t think of many other cartoonists besides her and (in a very different style) Eleanor…

Of course there’s plenty of room for more explicit references to colorism, but I think we were absolutely meant to be thinking about that during the dialogue where Ruby was grilling Leti about her plans. Ruby says that if Leti isn’t here to mooch off of the family, then she’d better go uptown and get a job. Leti is…

The only way it vaguely makes sense is if you assume, like you said, that it “doesn’t have a correct state” - any part of the blob can be anything. One of my favorite brief effects gags in the movie is when Arnold slams the T-1000 face-first against a wall, and instead of trying to turn around, it just re-forms with…

Marge and Norm live in Fargo. Abby and Meurice live in Blood Simple. Mattie lives in True Grit. Everyone lives in The Big Lebowski except Donnie. Everyone lives in Raising Arizona except Smalls and the bunny he blew up. Pretty much everyone dies in No Country for Old Men and Miller’s Crossing. Honestly except for Brad…