Though, to be fair, French and Belgian colonies seem to have been left in an even worse state. What European power would you *want* to have been colonized by? Maybe Portugal (unless you're East Timor)? Former Dutch colonies seem relatively politically stable, though ecologically devastated.

I would say a major factor you're leaving out — and one entirely relevant to Scott's post — is what anthropologists might call the aura of the film as artifact. Aesthetics is not purely a matter of perception; they are also rooted in emotional connections, and if you just dismiss those as sentimentality, you're…

Acutally, I discovered I was somewhat mistaken. I own the "Alien Quadrilogy" DVD box set, but this set does not feature the production audio track for "Alien." That feature apparently only exists on the standalone "Alien" DVD, which I rented way back when I first got a DVD player (and thought a track like that was…

We need to recruit a commenter to use "George" as an avatar. Then we'd have a trifecta.

Why wouldn't people make that a feature on Blu-ray editions and so forth (or even DVD, which had the "angle" feature that was almost never used)? My copy of "Alien" has one audio track where you can hear exactly what was recorded on the soundstage (without looping and sound effects), and it's fascinating. If there are…

I have the reverse complaint on the volume — I've been to far too many screenings where they have the volume cranked up to levels where it becomes physically painful in action scenes. That's a level of immersion I don't want. I've actually considered bringing earplugs to the theater for some movies, but that doesn't…

The first sync-based mash-up (song to song, rather than song to video) I encountered was the Public Enemy/Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass track back in the late 90s. It still sets a gold standard in my book.

I actually think it would be pretty cool to do the entire movie only at monster scale. No cutaways to the humans' reactions, only angles that are at the monster's level. You could start at the human level at the very beginning, with Ralph, George, and Lizzie in a love triangle; they get turned into monsters, and the…

They should make sure to give Joel Hodgson a cameo.

Of course, you could also take Kong to be the abductee who falls for one of his captors.

I wish there were statistics out there about there about who posts comments on news stories. It would make me feel so much better if someone could prove to me that 3/5 comments on USA Today stories, for example, are made by unemployed mentally ill people who do nothing all day but post comments on new stories. And…

"Backstory, with the American History Guys" is also great for looking at a current issue through a historical lens. I think the name of the show is a little off-putting (and sounds a bit amateurish), but it's a public radio show and the "Guys" are all working academics. It has a level of quality that belies the goofy…

Someone else recommended this last week, but BBC radio's "In Our Time" is pretty good for 40 minutes of discussion of just about anything (skewing towards history, though). It's typically a roundtable of academics, so it's not especially "pop," but the host tries to keep them operating at a "general audience" level.…

"The Thing from Another World" is interesting also for the way it runs counter to the typical critical paradigm for how art works. It's usually supposed that science fiction and horror sublimate the political and social anxieties of their age. But here's a film coming out during the Red Scare, which has source…

I haven't played the release version, but does it do what the beta did and not allow to change any of your settings unless you're spawned in live on the battlefield (and then will cancel you out of the settings menus if you get killed)?

I did feel like in BF2 (especially a few years after release when there were real expert players), the planes were a major headache — expert pilots could so easily dominate a map and make life hell for everyone else. I hope the anti-aircraft options in BF3 are are a bit beefier than in BF2.

It also seems like the "family" comedy has strangely disappeared. I'm thinking of the films like "The Great Outdoors" and National Lampoon's "Vacation" films — and even this film — which did have raunchy elements and swearing that keep them from being "all-ages" films, but which still seemed like family favorites for…

BF2 was much better for squad organization and communication than BFBC2. I haven't reviews yet that made much mention of the team-communication functions in BF3 — I would hope they weren't massively screwed up like they were in BFBC2, but then again, why wouldn't they be?

What I've heard is that console graphics for this type of shooter have basically maxed out. New games are not going to look significantly better than last year's games. However, people are saying that on a spec'd up PC, BF3 really does look spectacular and blows its console counterparts out of the water.

They're short because they're written for publication in the print edition. They're basically just little box reviews for the printed page.