A reincarnated Glorfindel. I think the quote was something like "after my father realized he had created two Glorfindels he decided that they had to be the same elf, so obviously he had been reincarnated after his death by balrog in the First Age."

They say it's "an accident, an accident - you realize it's snowing in my room goddammit!"

I think Maher is pretty funny. Consistently too. Sometimes he's really funny. I also have noticed that he is really smug and often cares to not dig too deeply into the details of any policy/philosophy he espouses or condemns. His gross over-generalizations about the huge and varied Islamic religion/tradition are…

This is probably what you were thinking of: https://www.theguardian.com…

"…begging critics to punt it in the keister for making artistic ambition look lame" and "On he trudges, intent on settling the question of whether filmmaking can be learned through rote repetition, or whether it actually takes talent," is just wonderful writing. Made me laugh at loud.

I think you just described a Superman movie I would be eager to see. Now if we could somehow magic Christopher Reeve back into the role. A humanistic match made in heaven.

Why is he allowed to work on anything but Conan the King?

I (barely) learned how to kite surf last year. I'm a fair athlete but without any wakeboarding, snow boarding or much surfing experience and no sailing or kite flying either, I found it to be really, really hard. What I'm saying is: President Obama has some athletic chops.

Well I'm an American, so we have our own problems. I'll leave British debates to British citizens.

So it's like The Room of the 1890s. Awesome.

The show has always had those baffling moments. I've always seen it as a show that swings from really good to what-the-hell, but the swing to baffling has got worse over time. Even Ragnar this last season was mostly a disappointment - and with Fimmel's great portrayal, it's just another confirmation that it's bad…

His character had become so uneven. He had gone from a nearly god-like figure and the most respected person in his culture to being rightly seen as the guy who ran away from his responsibilities. He returned to Kattegat a disgrace, had to pay for a boat load of old warriors who still only reluctantly went with him and…

It kind of reminds me of why Eddie Murphy stopped doing his iconic laugh. At one point it was natural and unforced, but then people expected to hear it, were waiting for it and one day he realized that he wasn't laughing so much as performing a laugh. So he gave up his laugh. Which is a totally weird thing to have to…

Wait. People don't think Meg Ryan is charming? Who are these people! She was frickin adorable.

I started editing my comment to talk about other things that sounded awesome besides the satellite breaking device and just stopped. Everything about this movie sounds hilarious.

Yeah, I'm sure they compartmentalize their lives, like we all do. Except one of their compartments is probably a lot nastier.

I lived in Siberia for a short while and met a few hooligani (low level mob guys). At least I think they were fairly low level, but they were driving BMWs. One guy approached me and my buddies and asked in Russian if we were from the states. Our Russian wasn't great so our Russian friends (girls) translated for us.…

Touche. But a lot of people still kind of roll their eyes at it. Not me though: though it was a cliched hero's journey it had such an epic scope, a great weirdo villain, memorable supporting characters and like you say, lots of graphic violence. My only problem with it was that I think Ridley Scott could have dialed…

Also, Gladiator was really good too and somewhat underappreciated.

Yup. Like the fictional Uhtred of Bernard Cornwell's imagination, Ragnar knows that fate is inexorable but that still he makes oaths - to others and also to himself - and keeping those oaths (or not) affects that fate in small and maybe large ways.