Road House made zero sense to me, fun or not, until I heard the director's commentary and he said he basically just made a Western with a modern setting. Didn't even "modernize" it, just literally made a Western with modern costumes. Suddenly it all comes together: the saloon, the new sheriff in town, the bad…

"…surviving his extreme jackassery because the villain made a mistake stupider than the many Bond had already made…"

Heh, kinda. There's a lot going on in there; I get why the inclination was to keep more rather than less—and I do agree with Murray's highlighting Umbrage as a character that carefully, elegantly captures much of what's wrong with the world in the Potterverse. It just needed to move a bit faster…

I did the exact same thing, except I got back to it eventually and got back into the series. It does have that climb-a-mountain feel to it, for sure.

I also like talking to guys with beards. I can like both things!

A couple of thoughts:

I had a similar thought, reading this. The Epic Rap Battles of History guys are in their late '30s and they're veterans of the standup circuit. Are they "YouTube stars"? Of course they are. Are they this sort of YouTube star? I sincerely doubt it.

Robocop rap-battling the Terminator.

Mrs. Figg? She's an important ally of Dumbledore's but she's never exactly portrayed as wise or capable. The tone of the books describing her never wavers too far from humoring her, even when she's saving the day like at Harry's trial.

Unrelated, but thank you for taking part in these discussions of your reviews. I don't always agree with you but I'm always interested in what you have to say.

I'm not as down on Rowling's writing as some, but I can't stop rolling my eyes at "no-maj." Us Americans and our racism, our wizards wouldn't call them "no-maj"es. I don't know what it would be, but it would be a lot less awkward to say and a lot uglier.

Every time they want to update "booting," I tell them you can't fix perfection.

The real ugly work begins when you're a cop and you have to keep prisoners from sneaking wands into prison with them. Brother, trust me: you don't wanna know.

I like Harry Potter, but I've been keenly aware of that tension from book one. The fantasy is that even though his life sucks, he's secretly the most important person alive, magically powerful and tremendously wealthy. But for the more hard-minded reader, the fantasy of empathizing with him is badly threatened by…

I thought so, too. I did think it suffered from some tonal whiplash, though, e.g. going from Samuel L. Jackson FoxNewsing it up with a smirk to Kinnaman's contained agony.

That last sentence doesn't need those last two words.

Coincidentally, I just rewatched that maybe three days ago and while I certainly enjoyed myself, I was struck by how it has aged oddly. It's a great movie, but parts of it are so very very '90s.

Thanks for posting this; it's good to read.

My experience too. I don't want to rush to judgement about things like that (because hey, bad pitches abound and that is not a spoonerism) but then he says something like that and it's like "oh, okay, gotcha, thanks for sharing."

It's weird how none of those reviews start with a standard "I've played this game forty hours in the last two days, there are 24 hours in a day, you do the math" disclaimer, now that you mention it.