Not sure what you mean - no one said "breathe, damn you" or anything like that, they just did CPR and it worked, which is the point of CPR. The chest thump is a not very effective last-ditch move but it's a real thing, not a "trope".

Seeing this kind of thing as an issue of "defending yourself", and demanding that the first few responses you get had better be ironclad evidence or else you'll dismiss the whole point of view as a bunch of totally unsupported nonsense… rather than maybe taking a few breaths and waiting to see if someone else might…

Sorry to rattle on, but: I think he's also getting a little more cultural visibility due to a couple different trends in genre. One is a renewed interest in early 20th century pulp in general— as we get further away from it, it becomes more possible to exoticize the past and be entertained by the original weird…

Well, there's the "powerless nobody" thing, and there's the "it was always pretty obvious that he was kind of a miserable reclusive nut driven by demons" thing. And it's not as if it was ever any secret that Lovecraft was grossed out by huge swaths of humanity, it's right there on the surface, so it wasn't too hard to…

Genji, I've seen enough of your comments here to know that you're not trolling, but seriously… you're going to ridiculous lengths to cross-examine people who, by your admission, have read way more Lovecraft than you have, and refusing to consider that they might have a point. Just go read a lot of Lovecraft, and/or do…

That makes sense if they had Sidney Gottlieb in mind, the main researcher behind the real MK-ULTRA. He rationalized all kinds of hideously unethical shit (apparently believing that he really might come up with a mind-control technique for the CIA— he later admitted that fucking around with LSD had turned out to be…

"…what Brenner was trying to accomplish. There's loose talk about Eleven being a weapon… there's no motivation present for Brenner to be doing anything"

I also really like that Joyce becoming an anchor for Elle doesn't mean that Joyce flips a switch and transforms from "half crazed with grief and terror" to "rock-solid earth mother." She's still pretty close to losing her shit at any moment, but she knows someone needs to step up for the kid. I know Ryder (and/or the…

"an excellent technique for keeping squeamish dates interested in gory and scary movies"

That's exactly how it looked to me. I wouldn't say "enjoyed", but they didn't play it as someone who was either zoned out or carrying out a sad duty— it was a guy murdering someone as hard as he possibly could with his bare hands, because when else is he going to be given a moral free pass to do that and have it be…

For what it's worth, I read the comic and couldn't stand it— liked a lot of the ideas but thought it was super self-indulgent in a way that I don't like (instead of super self-indulgent in a way that I do like), and wished Ennis had an editor who wasn't just going "we're Vertigo, you're offensive, awesome!" So far, I…

There isn't a sensory deprivation tank in Under the Skin— the reference the reviewer was talking about is just to the way they filmed the mental space: long shots of people walking in a black void with a mirrored floor. That's a direct visual quote.

I haven't seen her nearly enough either. My favorite Hunter role in a long time is in Top of the Lake— she's sort of a low-key cult leader who's clearly not all there, and isn't vivacious or communicative at all, but is able to accumulate followers just by being mysterious and intense and seeming to mildly hate…

Pitt's character being so over the top works for me not just because he's funny, but because the bond between him and McDormand is such a perfect loop of deeply committed mutually reinforcing co-stupidification. I imagine they were both a lot less grandiose before they met each other.

There are a lot of bright people who do badly in school despite trying hard— maybe because of a learning disability (which won't necessarily affect them the same way life-long), maybe family circumstances, who knows. But they could go all kinds of ways after that, and a lot depends on what they hear from their family…

And I think seeing intelligence as a single scale is a big part of how Jane gets in trouble with Tom. A plot point that a lot of critics had trouble with is, could Jane really have been surprised by Tom faking his tears, since (as she would surely know, and I'm pretty sure Brooks knew) filming reaction shots…

"it doesn't fundamentally change what I'd write—I'd just have spent a paragraph distinguishing between the two types of intelligence"

I dunno how many people will read all that, but I did. I don't think I'd go so far as to say Jane should give Aaron "a shot"— I think it's pretty clear that she's just not attracted to him, and there's no point in arguing with that. But otherwise, spot on.

The whole section around the rape interview is so well written, even though it's easy to miss the point(s) because the director is just hanging back and letting the characters have their own not necessarily well considered reactions. There are several reasons one could hate that interview piece: the Barbara…

Jack Frink is right. It's hard to tell where she is if you're just looking at that Youtube clip, but the room where she knifed Visser's hand is where she was hiding earlier; she stalls there for a minute because she's freaked out and doesn't understand why he's shooting holes in the wall, but then she goes straight to…