Dwarves aren't allowed to have personal style?

Was there? I haven't seen that movie since it came out, I must have forgotten.

Van Damme and his partner were poorly paid civil servants and only had equipment made by the lowest bidder. The Senator was using better tech financed by his ill-gotten gains. My explanation, anyway.

In fact, it's been done: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box

I never understood how they came back to the present.

"Do be careful."

I think so too. It makes a lot more sense timeline-wise.

I liked the Magneto/Xavier bromance as well, and the Hellfire Club as SPECTRE appealed to the Bond fan in me, but the solo Magneto scenes definitely stole the whole movie

Hmm, I hadn't noticed that, but you're absolutely right. I liked Stardust (though as a Gaiman fan of course I think the book was better), but it was no Princess Bride.

See my hypothesis in my comment on this article. But in short, I think manga and anime adapt a lot of ideas from older Western SF, give it a visual rendering, and then Western film & TV creators see it and readapt it back for Western audiences.

I have this hypothesis that manga and anime are this machine that takes interesting ideas and concepts from largely-neglected Western literary genre fiction, conceptualizes them with a compelling visual language, whereupon Western film, television and video game creators rediscover and mainstream them.

Well, it's a kind of movie we don't really see anymore. A comedy swashbuckling fairy-tale adventure with a great ensemble cast who all get at least one chance to shine. And which is extremely self-aware and genre savvy but still manages to have stakes, and isn't awash in the ironic detachment that modern genre…

100% agreement with Nimelennar.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."

The Hurt Locker: For a film that purported to be about the Iraq War, it didn't really have much to say about the Iraq War. You could have told the same story with IDF soldiers in early 1980s Lebanon or British soldiers in early 1970s Northern Ireland or even Vietnamese soldiers in late 1970s Cambodia with only…

Spielberg's directorial decisions since Saving Private Ryan have felt like a crap shoot to me.

A bit of a divergence, but how about transcriptions of therapy or counselling sessions? Character A tells their counsellor about their relationship with Character B, while B does likewise with their therapist. Therapy sessions as character revelation was done with superheroes in Minister Faust's From the Notebooks of…

No, but God's existence doesn't immediately mean you can conclude that God has intelligence, cares about humanity, life in general, or our morality, or governs some sort of afterlife.

I can't discount the possibility of a Prime Mover, but making a logical connection from that to either a system of morality, the existence of an immaterial eternal soul, or an afterlife is something no religion has ever done to my personal satisfaction. Any definition of God that goes beyond a Prime Mover is fraught…

If you click on the link, the author of the original post is also clueless why the demons are in Zion. I think he's misinterpreting the image, since what little commentary on the image I can find online asserts that Babylon is the city of Satan and Zion the city of God.