Looks like there is a retro thing going. X-Men: First Class and the Kennedy era, Star Trek reboot and mid-sixties miniskirts, and now MIB 3. I know it's kind of a fanciful series, but the idea that the aliens themselves are retro is a bit illogical.

I'm starting to think that Twilight is the most transgressive vampire franchise there is. It sets people off in a way that Jean Rollin (Lips of Blood, Living Dead Girl = awesome) never did. Nobody raves about how psychologically unhealthy and unsettling Let The Right One In (would-be serial killer + cannibalistic…

Even before becoming a vampire Bella was less intimidated and fazed by vampires and werewolves than most people would be. And she was immune to the psychic abilities of Aro and Jane, two of the most dangerous vampires in the Twilight universe. As a vampire she's arguably the most powerful of all.

You mean like Buffy-Angel? (Buffy was 16 and Angel was over 200 years old when they first met.) Or Vampire Diaries?

You know what I love about horizontal gene transfer? No evolutionary theorist that I know of - not Lamarck, Darwin, Haeckel, D'Arcy Thompson, Bateson, Goldschmidt, Fisher, Haldane, SJ Gould, Hamilton, Kimura etc. posited the phenomenon. Even once the phenomenon was discovered very few evolutionary biologists (maybe…

Anyone who goes on about how wimpy Twilight allegedly is ignores the grisly xenomorph-like pregnancy and birth (top that, Steve Niles), the prolonged agony of vampiric transformation (in contrast to the quick and easy conversions in many franchises), the torture-mutilation and limb-tearing in The Short Second Life Of…

No, Persians are black transvestite giants, crab-clawed ogres, and ninjas.

Yes, it looks as crappy as DK2 and The Spirit. As for propaganda, I don't mind as long as it's done well; if I can stomach Alan Moore's anarcho-hippie insanity I can endure this. (For an example of propaganda done badly, see Paul Pope's godawful libertarian screed Berlin Batman.) But I don't think that politics are…

He's such a douche that I hope that Supes stalks and spys on the couple using his powers. That wouldn't be creepy or untrue to the character at all, right Bryan Singer?

"an awful, incompehensible, boring mess."

Bekmambetov created the best Matrix knockoff since Equilibrium with Wanted. But the movie that made his reputation, Night Watch, is junk. Maybe that's not his fault; perhaps its problems are wholly attributable to the source novel. Night Watch exemplifies everything that's wrong with today's treatment of the…

Bekmambetov created the best Matrix knockoff since Equilibrium with Wanted. But the movie that made his reputation, Night Watch, is junk. Maybe that's not his fault; perhaps its problems are wholly attributable to the source novel. Night Watch exemplifies everything that's wrong with today's treatment of the…

I'm willing to give this a chance. Rapid cycle retcons/remakes/reboots/reimaginings are here to stay: Hulk, Punisher, Let Me In, Oldboy, Buffy, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica (is that theatrical film still in the pipeline?), the Ultimate Universe, DC Universe...

I like it when monsters flout genre conventions. Movies featuring sentient zombies:

We'll never see the likes of a franchise like Harry Potter again - a series that every demographic read, the sheer level of water cooler/blogosphere buzz, one big budget blockbuster adaptation after another even as the books are still coming out. Ten years (14 including the books) is a very long time in pop culture…

City of Ember is interesting because it was obviously adapted to capitalize on kid lit Pottermania but now looks like an unintentional cinematic precusor of the inevitable wave of movies based on recent Young Adult book dystopias.

By the way, there was always a contingent who believed that anatomically modern h.s. and neandertals did interbreed ('96-04 bio anthro grad student here), including myself, but it is true that the majority - or maybe just loudest - opinion within bio anthro and biology was that there was not. And that neandertals…

It looks like both the 'out of Africanists' and the 'multiregionalists' were right: contemporary humanity is mostly descended from relatively recent migrations of 'anatomically modern Homo sapiens' from (southern?) Africa - however several so-called Homo species including sapiens, neandertalensis, heidelbergensis and…

Thank you! I am so sick of the blinking 'bwong ... bwong ... bwong ... CRAASHHH!!!!' trailer that I just mentally shut it off as soon as it starts. Want to capture my interest, Hollywood? Show me a sci-fi/horror/thriller/action movie trailer that doesn't follow the now-ubiquitous generic format.

Stallone had some good flicks in the 90s - Dredd, Cliffhanger, and the long underrated but more recently finally appreciated Demolition Man.