@BlueBeard: Slim Goodbody's threads were more badass than those skeleton shirts popularized by The Misfits and Donnie Darko.

I love how the upcoming Buffy remake is right up there with the prospect of ecosystem collapse.

@crosis101: Blade Runner is an immensely influential giant of sci-fi design. But while we can aknowledge its greatness (outside of the overrated hype) it's time to move on. It makes no sense to retread Sgt. Pepper (or Nevermind for that matter) forever, and it past due for sci-fi to get out of neon-clogged, rainy,…

Blade Runner is very much old school sci fi futurism - skyscrapers as high as mountains, offworld colonies, space wars, flying cars. What really distinguished it from, say, Logan's Run and other seventies-early 80s future flicks was the hardboiled noir-inspired street scenes, lingo, and clothes. I hate to say it:…

The only intriguing thing about The Cape was the concept (if not the execution) of Chess, who's something of a combination of the corporate villain incarnation of Lex Luthor and Mark Millar's Nemesis. The bank-robbing circus was wonderfully retro-pulp but ultimately just laughably hokey. That's the problem with live…

@Agent_ZigZag: Totally agree. This could be a triple shark jump moment for Pegg, Frost, and Rogen. Pegg & Frost are miscast in their own movie because they're nearly a decade too old to be these footloose slackers. And Rogen's sleepy stoner vocal delivery has long outworn its welcome. Back around the time of…

The Adjustment Bureau, Source Code, and Now look like the Dickean sort of movies that were popular at the turn of the millennium. Plus a wave of alien invasion flicks not seen since the mid-90s (Arrival, ID4, Mars Attacks). Could be a very good year of sci-fi/fantasy.

@ltwass: The movie Constantine explains:

@Covax: Exactly what I was thinking. Which may not be a bad thing.

This story reminds me how much I want to see Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page's Super.

Fun fact: Vampires didn't have huge canine fangs (a la True Blood and countless standard vamp franchises) until Hammer's Dracula (AKA Horror of Dracula 1958). Fangs evolved from merely sharp teeth in 19th century literature (Carmilla, Varney). Folkloric vampires generally didn't have fangs (but one variant had a…

Am I alone in preferring earlier whimsical Pixar to the somber, self-important, pseudo-profound late model Pixar? Compare the tone of A Bug's Life and Finding Nemo to Up (Heart Of Darkness with talking dogs) and Ratatouille. Or the first Toy Story to the third. The pathos is laid on so thick in TS3 that it's almost…

Good thing they never went with the Enterprise redesign. The sixties Enterprise is a much more plausible and much less dated-looking starship than those kitbashed Star Wars ships and their many imitators, with their pseudofunctional random junk cluttering their exterior and other excessive texture.

"walk out of a theater thinking "I just paid to see a laundry list of beats that "worked" in Star Wars""

I actually like 12:01 better than Groundhog Day, cheesy as it is. Groundhog Day is just too full of its own importance. Plus, it's infinitely more of an existential horror - Silverman spends just a handful of days repeating his 24 hours while Murray is trapped for over a century.

@Starwatcher: I would have difficulty watching Powder because I wouldn't be able to separate the work from the director.

Special, a no-budget indie starring Michael Rappaport as a 'real life superhero,' deserves mention.

@anuran001: Stephen Jay Gould was right about some things (multilevel selection for one), but he was wrong about a number of things, including the hyena pseudopenis, humans being neotenic apes (apes yes, but they're not neotenic), the reason for the size of the kiwi's egg, birds being really dumb etc. Perhaps his…

@artiofab: Paleoanthro is not always wrong, but it is exhibit A in the social construction of scientific fact. It is one of the most politicized of sciences. See: Wolpoff and Caspari: 'Race and Human Evolution,' Hrdy: 'The Woman That Never Evolved,' Lewin: 'Bones of Contention.' And many more.

@superflanker00su: While admixture of genes from archaics (in different percentage and archaic population) may have had some influence on genetic and phenotypic differences between ethnic groups, I think that bigger factors in differences between modern ethnic groups (in descending order) are selection for…