well, for those of us with cable it's been rather fun.

I don't know, they have The Sopranos and plenty of other shows I'd rather rewatch a dozen times. And their comedy shows haven't been too bad, with Transparent being actually rather good. Amazon Prime has plenty of issues, but I don't think selection really is one of them.

unless it's revealed they're all unwitting participants in a bad reality tv-show, The After is doomed. Rarely have I seen such an awful combination of post-Lost clichees mixed with low budget 90's tv. The characters were as unconvincing as that demon, and don't get me started on the epic storyline that was 'will they…

Yeah, that movie was probably my favourite as a kid. It's going to be hard for Ghibli to match its wonderfully matter of fact-attitude. This intro is all cuteness, sparkle and prettiness, the film managed to make Ronja's environments both inviting and magical, as well as dirty, dangerous and real.

Yep, when I was a kid we got a hamster, the next day we had one hamster and 5 baby hamsters. A few months later we just had 5 grown up hamsters.

Yeah, this idea that anyone who opposes gmo-crops is some sort of loonie is just a tad insulting. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to object to gmo's. There are plenty of valid issues stemming from the corporate ownership of our agriculture and the business as usual attitude that thinks that we can simply…

The left right divide is really only useful in describing thoughts about economic policy, there are so many other areas where people hold opinions that don't neatly match up with one group or the other.
Think for example of some of the smaller 'right wing' parties in Western Europe that advocate lower taxes, keeping…

I have to say, I'm glad Gilliam had to wait a few years to get this one off the ground, Christoph Waltz seems so much more appropriate for this than Gilliam's original choice: Billy Bob Thornton.

Fisher King is probably the least personal film Gilliam made, barring the Brothers Grimm, and it's probably getting rather dated. But it still has enough to recommend itself. The Tom Waits cameo makes it worth watching at least.

Yeah, but I don't think Cuaron was exactly the director he is now either. If you simply look at him as the director of Children of Men and Gravity, you leave out all his previous work, like Little Princess and Y tu mama tambien. Cuaron is not a director with a single overriding style. What he did with Harry Potter was…

With JMS and the Wachowskis combined we're going to get a whole lot of ponderous dialogue. Expect lots of monologues filled with flowery philosophising.

I don't think the movies would have been able to withstand the full onslaught of Brian Blessed. I mean he's practically a Norse god already; he cuddles wolves, climbs mountains. He could probably bowl Hopkins over by talking at a slightly higher volume than regular.

Yeah, but that's latter day-Meet the Parents-De Niro, back in the eighties, seeing De Niro show up in a bit part in a satirical scifi movie was completely unexpected. Not that he wasn't terrific in Stardust.

the first science fiction book I can remember reading was 400 degrees in the shade. Not a classic in any way, but it has always stuck with me. It was about child labourers who were lab grown by a mining company on the walking cities of Mercury to harvest the formations of precious metals on the planet's surface.…

I don't know, but I think this was back in the nineties.

This reminds me of the treatments for The Fantastic Four and X-men movies that Michael Chabon had on his website a couple of years ago. They were from before his work on Spider Man 2 and never got anywhere, but they were interesting.
His X-men story was called Revenge of the Wolverine, you can read part of it here: http…

I wasn't really thinking of the effect on men in the media, but rather the consumers of media. All this trend is really, is the media industry discovering that male bodies can be sold and marketed like women's bodies. The difference is in the subtext, but people's bodies are still being treated as a product.

Excellent point, but isn't the effect of both that people are not allowed to be ordinary people? I mean, yes, women are for looking at and men are to be envied, and all that noxious nonsense, but in both cases, our bodies are not allowed to be anything but extraordinary.

Yeah, as nice as a set of abs is, there's a toxic mix of bullshit that very often comes with it. Lots of boys and young men swallow that crap wholesale, along with their overpriced supplements. And what you end up with is a bunch of effed up dudes obsessed with looks, and a stupid idea of masculinity.

Does the head of Albert Finney in Cold Lazarus count? When it comes to feeling out of time, I think having your partially thawed brain used by scientists in the 24th century and subsequently fought over by terrorists and an entertainment mogul, ranks pretty high.