So is every villain in the DC reboot a thorough bastard out to harm children? Is there any bad guy we're allowed to feel the slightest bit of sympathy for? Or at least one with grander schemes than picking on toddlers?

Are you trying to cripple the man?

I remember there was a great issue of Stormwatch PHD where three of the female team members were talking about how annoying it was that villains loved to threaten them with rape and that it was indeed a possibility where as guys were more likely only going to get beat up.

No, a protagonist is a central character who struggles against obstacles and conflicts over the course of the narrative. An antagonist is a central character who throws obstacles and conflicts into the protagonist's path. "Good" or "evil" have nothing to do with it.

Ancient cultures weren't that isolated. There were Celts in the Near East in the 3rd century BC.

Hua Mulan is not rebellious at all. She illustrates the Confucian ideal of filial piety: her sense of duty to her elderly father is so great, she defies her traditional gender role to protect him from certain death in battle. Once the war is over, she goes home, expecting no rewards or station for her achievements.

Obligatory Space Pope reference:

Why? Because it's in trash tv and movies that all of tomorrow's most-lauded genre tropes are going to take seed and sprout.

Also, did Lucas forget that there's a 100+ page document out there detailing the hours-long discussion he, Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan had about what should be in the Raiders script?

15th century England was too concerned with fallout from the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the War of the Roses to be sending expeditions and envoys halfway across the world. There was no direct, official contact between the UK and China before the 17th century. These would have to be some British version…

Hilariously, the 1987 animated movie also killed off Duke in the original cut, only for the execs to demand Duke live after all—done with a last-minute voiceover at the end announcing, "Duke's gonna be okay!"

Roger Ebert's rule was: more than 3 credited screenwriters, it will probably be bad. Oldwookiee's exceptions notwithstanding, I think that's true more than it's not true.

So does the new Bond film, Skyfall, also count for the same reasons?

I used to dislike him too, until 21 Jump Street. Now I think he could be the next Mark Wahlberg: dim-witted hunky straight man in action-comedies. Whether he can transition from that to serious crime/proletariat success stories like Wahlberg remains to be seen.

I think it would require one of two things, or possibly some combination of the two:

The times I've managed to keep weight off and feel healthier involved 3 things:

The only diet plan I trust on any level is the Harvard School of Public Health's—I think it's about as free from the influence of agri-business (mostly dairy, livestock and corn farmers) as you can get.

Domesticated cattle have undergone a lot of wild genetic transformations over the last 10,000 years as well. How much genetic commonality is there between a modern Bos taurus and one our ancestors would have eaten 10,000 years ago? If science does find modern wheat to be detrimental to our health, it has an obligation…

So I used to work at a library with a pretty decent multilingual collection, and they had a copy of Mein Kampf in Panjabi. That was fine, except for its cover painting of a brown-skinned Hitler giving the Nazi salute. (Additionally, this library was in a neighbourhood with a large Jewish population.) Now I wonder how…

How is it the geologist and biologist are in constant contact with the ship, which has a map of the entire interior of the Engineer complex thanks to those probes, and they still get lost and end up where they didn't want to be? And the Prometheus has no recording of what happened to them? The script just conveniently…