ASOIAF’s strengths were its gritty, low-magic setting; compelling characters (or at least characters in compelling situations); and really good pacing.

No, campy Batman was from the Silver Age comics, which were twenty times campier than anything the Adam West series ever did. And people talk like TDKR was some completely unprecedented thing in the Batman mythos, when the Bronze Age comics had been telling darker-themed stories for years before 1986.

Is this really surprising? Most genre films that have been made in the last, oh, 15-20 years, are made with possible sequels in mind. That’s why they tend to lock the main actors into multiple film contracts. It should be even less surprising for a film specifically intended to be the third release in a planned…

Yeah, but Huey Lewis’ version would have been awful.

The part was written with Eddie Murphy (another SNL alum) in mind, but Murphy didn’t want to do it. So they cast Hudson, cutting back the role substantially in the process. They probably should have rewritten Winston to play to Hudson’s strengths—maybe make him an academic colleague who had something to offer to the…

Yeah, and that’s why Ghostbusters II isn’t that good—instead of building on the first movie, it essentially resets the characters back to what they were.

Agreed—that exchange definitely felt spontaneous. I can totally buy actors patting each other on the back for their successful projects, since that happens in most professions or fields. And whether the actors involved were personally savvy enough to turn it into something viral, or they’re genuinely good friends, or…

I’m sure a lot of these neat Twitter convos between film stars and creators are part of some well-planned marketing machine, but damn it, I still smile when I read them.

Remember the context of that speech in Kill Bill is the villain telling the protagonist he did her a favour by killing her husband and leaving her for dead because she wasn’t being true to her “real self”. I’m not sure we’re supposed to actually buy it.

With the fanfare of the Star Wars theme blaring as a block of yellow text headed Episode VIII [Actual Title] crawls across a star field from bottom to top?

At least it had a couple cool scenes like that one. Immortals continues the trend of the demythologized mythology film (Troy, King Arthur). Only in Immortals, the gods and titans are real and do stuff. So why is the Minotaur just a guy in a bull helmet instead of an actual bull-man?

Well, I kind of assumed that...

*Sigh* Yes.

People went to see Transformers and Jurassic World because of the cast?

If Gina Torres could play Cleopatra, and Karl Urban could play Julius Caesar, I don’t see why not.

I thought that was Hellraiser: Bloodline.

Eh, she wouldn’t be the first immigrant to change her last name.

It does matter: bus rapid transit (BRT) with its own dedicated lanes has a smaller initial capital cost, but has much higher per-passenger cost because you need more vehicles with more operators to carry your ridership. Light rail transit (LRT) with dedicated lanes has a higher capital cost, but less per-passenger…

That works for smaller transit systems. But at a certain level of ridership it becomes a less cost-effective solution. You have all the costs and issues of building a dedicated corridor, but each vehicle carries less people and requires its own operator. If you have major routes with high levels of ridership that need…

Tolkien saw this first hand in the trenches during World War I. It would not have been extremely unusual at the time.