Me too! It's weird, because reading this, I thought "it sounds like they just didn't have enough to talk about—but then again, every one of these failure has a parallel to an actual Martian expedition! Did they really need to wax loquacious about staring at reddish orbs when they could've been mentally using this as…

Not exactly a highbrow question, but I wish he'd asked him about Unstoppable. If we're going to discuss how he felt about playing characters based on real people, let's ask about a real doofus.

Bribing snitches and sniding bitches, all day every day…

No doubt about it, they've been through hell.

(I promise not to derail things any further with another tangent, but I think that Tolkien was classist, not racist. The parallels between his description of the orcs and Froissart's description of the peasants during the Hundred Years' War are uncomfortably close, close enough that it's hard for me to believe it was…

Interesting! I didn't know that, but it makes sense. He does seem to go for the great big capital-A Archetypes, doesn't he? Like how the deadliest soldiers in the universe are the ones who suffered most, and the way everyone knows they've found a secretly-deadliester (deadlierest?) army is because they've suffered…

Sorry for the double-reply but I left off my own dang point, like a doofus. (I also forgot to mention that the only world without women that we're shown is an industrial hellscape populated by beasts in human form, and also sexy, sexy Sting.) Anyway, for all the apparently-feminist perspective going on in the text,…

I hadn't seen that before. Wow.

That's an interesting case study. (Spoilers ahoy, if it matters—but if you haven't read it, this won't read like spoilers so much as a sudden onset of schizophrenia.) On the one hand, Herbert tips his hand by making a magical male-only place in the spice that the women are obsessed with, but then again the women can…

When I first saw the movie, my friend and I both said "it's a good thing we'd read the book first or that would've been insane."

Pretty sure they made the teeth out of condoms, for what it's worth.

That simple, straightforward conflict probably has a lot to do with why the book worked so well for me as a teenager. At its core, the plot is one big conflict, played out as an adventure for our protagonists.

Oh man. I never thought of him for that, but you just named my dream casting choice for the role. He'd be perfect.

I thought Stewart didn't look anything like Halleck, as I remember reading about him. Halleck was crucially ugly, defined by a massive scar and I pictured him as stocky to the point of dumpy. Stewart isn't any of that.

I took "spice" as a Dune reference, but the rest of it felt like trafficking in tropes and cliches on a massive scale. It's not like Herbert invented the idea of a Galactic Empire.

Super late to the game, but as a former nerdy American kid of about ten or so, I can unequivocally say that there was a time when that man's movies were straight-up gold on a screen. I mean, I didn't know anything about Australia but I loved this movie with almost a religious intensity as a kid.

Once I saw this, I could never unsee it: http://images.somethingawfu…

Aw sheesh. My mom wouldn't take me, just sent me to a fellow-nerd friend's house and didn't want to hear about it afterwards. Your mom sounds like good people.

So many of those images had that effect on me. Whipcord-thin Sting, holding a knife in his future metallic diaper. Paul standing like a hundred feet above the people he's going to lead into battle, and them crammed shoulder-to-shoulder like ants. The massive whale-spice-baby with the desiccated vagina for a mouth. …

On that budget, though: I did get the feeling that they were way over-budget by the end. As I remember it, the final scene is literally Paul standing on a stage in a blue light.