It was funny so I appreciate the AV Club posting about it.  This is a fairly harmless way to get a laugh or two in my evening.

A statistical anomaly.

No sipping, God no.

Same.  I think about it often, there is just something so thrilling about it.  I read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time for school in 7th or 8th grade and it was amazing, all those years later, to hear that they found him.

No, the trajectory is glasses to stunning only. Once stunning has been attained, no reversion is permissible or even possible.

Great recommendation, thanks!

Most movies in the menacing bear genre have a certain rough-hewn charm. Looking forward to it! (Also, Canada has lots of picturesque wilderness suitable for menacing bears.)

Thank you!! I haven’t seen that one.

I’m interested in why you think the world building is lazy. While I have my own issues with the Harry Potter series, it’s certainly a massive success, and I’ve always thought the world building was key to that success. Just look at all the full-grown adults who still believe they belong to one Howarts house or another…

Perfect recipe for hell on earth.

This looks terrible but also so good. People being menaced by bears (or, runners-up, wolves) is my favorite movie genre. I’m just sorry it doesn’t also feature a young Liam Neesons, since apparently everyone else in Hollywood was available.

It’s a valid way to read it, and given the adoring reception the book received, you are probably in the majority. For me, while the formal experimentation in the second half was interesting, the vapid narrator, the doomed love interest (an all-too-common type of female character in novels written by men), and the…

If White Tears (Kunzru’s first book) is anything to go by, I agree with you. The main character of that book was a cipher who seemed to have been created solely for the purpose of showing how vacuous and awful liberal-leaning young white men can be. A whole lot of shooting fish in a barrel.

You are getting a lot of stars on this, including mine, because we want to believe you! I want to enjoy it and as a Gen Xer my chances are pretty good (also I have an excellent track record with this sort of thing: I found things to enjoy about the Zoolander sequel out of loyalty to the first one, and I tried to…

Wow, this is awful.  What a shock.

What, you don’t like long, tension-filled scenes in cars where nobody’s talking?

No argument there!

I mean, sort of? If I remember correctly, there’s some sort of plesiosaur-type corpse that shows up towards the end, but it’s more about the characters’ *ideas* and *feelings* about the notion that the titular Essex Monster exists or doesn’t exist.  Literary fiction.

If all goes well, this might be one of those adaptations that’s better than the source material. I wanted to like the book but it has that literary fiction curse where a strong book falters in its final third because God forbid we have a satisfying ending (I liked the author’s second book better for this reason). The…

That stuck out for me too. Apparently these mythical women he sleeps with can also magically levitate men.