I think when they talk to comic fans and journalists it's "dark and gritty" because "comic books are serious business you guys!" but when they talk to movie people it's "funny and lighthearted" because "Avengers made more money than Dark Knight Rises!"

Like the roads, utilities, mass transit, transport regulations, trade agreements, law enforcement, and military that allow materials, products, sellers, and customers to transact securely and predictably in markets?

Name of the Wind: I have never read such a well-written, page-turner of a book that I ended up not liking.

I have some almost every morning with breakfast anyway.

"The Borg is everywhere! We're one of the last ships left. Please... you've got to help us!"

The Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner!

So every genre film villain has to be the Heath Ledger Joker now, I guess? Like 90s films were full of cut-rate Hannibal Lecters?

Sorry. I saw Die Hard again last night.

Curses! 40 minutes too late!

And sometimes men will pay women to sleep with them, and guns kill people, and the P-90 is an extremely effective submachinegun, and cars might have to run off something other than petroleum in a couple of decades, and sometimes human beings regret their life choices, and sometimes a mother's love trumps common sense,…

Fair enough. But can you think of any films of 2012 with a better original screenplay? The Academy would like to think they recognize films that will stand the test of time, but really they have to work with what they get between a given January and December.

Maybe you don't think so, and maybe I don't think so (I did love Thank You for Smoking though), but the Academy gives him and his movie Oscar nominations. And one of his films did win an Oscar for Original Screenplay, so maybe the Academy actually cares what Reitman thinks about screenplays. That's who he's ultimately…

So some combination of #3 and #6 is basically Mass Effect.

We've already sent eight or nine probes through the Asteroid Belt, which is much denser than the Oort Cloud. The only ones that actually encountered asteroids were Galileo, Dawn, and New Horizons, and in all three cases the asteroid encounters were planned as part of the mission parameters. Dawn is currently moving…

Good point. Max should look like a raggedy man. Or at least half-jumped by Mr. Dead.

What's your definition of the difference though? Hitchcock is one of the most important figures in film-making history, and as soon as he had access to bigger budgets, he remade some of his own films. Some of which were adaptations of existing source material. So was he "remaking" the 39 Steps, or was he re-adapting…

A lot of people fear the government having too much power, and rightly so. But any locus of power having too much dominance over society is a bad thing, whether it's the state, the wealthy, the military, the church, or any single ideology. This is the basis of liberal democratic society. Not just that different…

It's not so much the idiocy as the lack of empathy. Prometheus suffers from the Eight Deadly Words. We got to know most of the characters in the other Alien films as human beings. So when Lt. Gorman makes some stupid decisions in Aliens that get people killed, we already know he's some pudgy inexperienced…

It'll all boil down to the money, I'm sure. Maybe American audiences have been hungry for despair and destruction for the last decade or so. But as overseas film markets become more and more important to Hollywood, will American tastes matter as much as China's or other BRICS?

But After Earth isn't a Shyamalan vanity project—it's a Smith family project. M. Night is just a hired gun. He did rewrite Gary Whitta's screenplay, but then Stephen Gaghan polished it.