African-Americans have higher prevalence of hypertension than Caucasians and higher rate of HCMV infection. This is usually attributed to genetics, stress, and/or early developmental factors. But maybe it's HCMV. So the question becomes: why higher HCMV infection?

Sky High is indeed awesome! Great fun without being self-mocking or snarky, nice message about respect and inclusiveness, and an updated Silver Age style. It's terribly underrated. My third favorite superhero movie after Super and Kick-Ass.

1) Bottom line-brained producers muck with properties to make them resemble the last vaguely similar thing that was successful. (Example: Blood and Chocolate, which could have been a paranormal teen romance before Twilight, was warped into another Underworld-like urban fantasy action movie.) So World War Z is going…

Another being that defied its own evolution to achieve an uncanny locomotory feat: the Black Condor:

Eerie children's drawings is one example of what could be called kinderhorror (not to be confused with kinderwhore nor with kindertrauma [www.kindertrauma.com] ): frightening things associated with children.

That's a blow to extreme 'fine tuning' (life is possible only under extraordinarily narrow parameters and conditions) and related 'rare earth' (earth is likely only planet with life in the universe) arguments.

So much for the transhumanists' pseudoscientific secular paradise of the Singularity. Imagine that there's no heaven indeed - neither in this world in the imminent future nor (as far as we know) the next.

Farrell looks like a cousin of the I Am Legend guys in the top photo.

That's just the apparatus for the truss Damon wears to keep his middle-aged man paunch contained.

The wolf pack looked more natural in Eclipse.

Claymation, not CG.

The owl in Labyrinth's credits is CG, but the particular shot of the owl used in the above article is not.

He was awesome in Super, which is now my favorite superhero movie. It was Fillion's idea for the character to have long hair.

For another Bollywood Dracula, check out 1967 Pakistani film Zinda Laash (The Living Corpse). It's largely based on Hammer's Horror of Dracula with bits of the novel (baby-eating!) thrown in. And random dance numbers of course. It was a lost film for years until a print was found and restored a decade ago. It's…

Intriguing! It's been a long time since I read Interview and Lestat so I forgot about that.

An interesting io9 article would be comparing visions of the afterlife in movies over the decades and how these reflect - and shape - changing cultural and aesthetic norms. What Dreams May Come (Heaven as a painting, the library limbo, Hell's upside-down Gothic cathedral - I actually think it's pretty clever,…

We have seen Julie Taymor's vision of hell. It is called Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.

The reason I hate torture porn and most splatterpunk as a fan of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy is because it's cheap, lazy, and gratuitous and fails to convey a sense of mystery, atmosphere, suspense, and true horror - that is, unknowable and existential horror.

If Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes is your favorite, you are a furry with a simian fetish.

13 Going On 30 is usually lumped together with body switch movies like Freaky Friday, and instant maturation/aging movies like Big, but it's really an 'alternate timelines' movie, like Timecop, A Christmas Carol, Sliding Doors, and It's A Wonderful Life. Its plot is actually very well-crafted.