You know how ensemble action or caper movies always have the "round-up" scene, where every character is introduced in a short vignette, sometimes with an infodump voiceover, that tells you everything you need to know?

Commenting to acknowledge the undeniable truth of this statement.

Wikileaks, American Revolution edition: [en.wikipedia.org] #olderthantheythink

He's far from a great actor, but I can't help but love Statham. Even when he's in an absolutely horrible movie—and he's done a lot of those—he just radiates this intense sincerity. He never looks like he's just showing up to collect a paycheque, all his performances come across as "you paid for a Jason Statham…

If you're really convinced that this sort of treatment is unfathomable from our law enforcement, you need to look up the accounts of the treatment of the Toronto G20 detainees—many of whom were not actually involved in the protest, nor actually charged with anything. I'm not saying that Matheson actually did receive…

"Harrison Ford in Harris tweed." Brown already explicitly spelled out who he pictured for the role.

Is that a Rocketeer reference?

Didn't The West Wing do the exact same thing a decade ago? [en.wikipedia.org]

The way that sentence is formulated, I got confused too. But read it again: it's a list of roles Lee didn't get.

They're making a 300 movie about the Athenians? About bloody time the guys who actually defeated the Persians got their due. Lousy, glory-hounding Spartans...

You know I really liked that cover when it first came out, but if I hear it in one more movie trailer, I'm going to put my fist through the floor.

If it's the "Captain America outsourcing torture" storyline, I'll grant you that was a great disservice to the character. And even as an Ellis fan, I know he tends to write the same character archetypes over and over again. He's hardly alone among comics scribes for that failing though.

Old-school Yellow Peril villains might be thankfully out of style, but their modern equivalents persist (Lau from "The Dark Knight" comes to mind). The genteel East Asian corporate raider of the current comics is the kind of "evil foreigner" villain modern Hollywood seems to like these days, but with the Chinese…

100% agreement—the first had good character moments too, but the second really shined. I only hope Whedon can convince the studio execs.

The R-rating only tends to come out for extreme violence against human beings, e.g., dismemberment, torture, gore, all that fun stuff. You can get away with pretty brutal stuff if you avoid red blood and major human body trauma. And if you cut back on the F-bombs.

How many of the "older, common inspirations" Mass Effect and Babylon 5 share were adapted into an audio-visual medium? I thought as much.

I couldn't stand Miranda because she was a walking bundle of Informed Attributes. The game kept trying to tell me how smart and hot and what a good leader she was—mostly from her own bloody dialogue—and I couldn't see any of it. She acted pretty petulant and contrarian for really dumb reasons. As soon as I recruited…

You only need to sacrifice one to get a drink from Mimir's Well.

I think "Palmer Eldritch" was the first "weird" work of fiction I've ever encountered, but I think I understand its central metaphor now. Unlike PKD's "The Divine Invasion", which still confuses me.

It's true—it's kind of hard and usually illegal to get a heart transplant from a living donor. KALI MA!