Is the genre "flexibility" a trait of Bong, or a trait of Korean cinema? I watched a whole run of Korean mysteries and horror films on Netflix recently, and I was struck by how most of them had what seemed to an American sensibility as wild swings in tone and a kind of shaggy-dog pacing. I assumed that's just part of…

They do show fields being sprayed down with chemicals by robot crows as the scarecrow is leaving town. Of course, the fields appear to be barren, so you don't actually see any "evil vegetables."

"But it’s painfully stagy and artificial, because Baker chooses to
declaim his lines while looking directly into the camera, rather than
playing it more casually, like he’s simply talking out loud to himself."

The explanation on the DVD suggests that it wasn't exactly done "purposely" — they wanted to cover up Jameson's marked lack of tan for the promos, and the apparently rather inexperienced make-up person overdid it. And Jameson, also being rather inexperienced at the time, figured it was one of those things where it…

Would you not count "Wrath of Khan" as depicting the consequences of a Kirk decision years later?

I don't find "Tideland" to be particularly "bold" at all — I think it has something going for it for maybe the first half, but then the deeply cliched Southern Gothic types (which are now just "Rural Gothic") show up and ruin whatever was working.

The other irritating thing is that if you had a correction like, "An earlier version of this story identified the militia group as Shi'ite, but the group is actually Sunni," 99% of Americans would probably respond, "Whatever. An understandable mistake." But get the authorship of a pop song wrong, and suddenly you're…

Cows with Guns! http://youtu.be/FQMbXvn2RNI 

A counterpoint to that would be to just replace "simply" with "thoughtlessly." It sounds bad to interfere with "simple enjoyment," but it sounds slightly more ennobling to transcend "thoughtless enjoyment."

Pirates of the Caribbean VI: In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room.

I try to draw a distinction (that I'm hoping will catch on, though no luck on that so far) between nerds and geeks. To me, nerds want to take apart, understand, master, and often reproduce the objects of their obsession. Geeks are obsessive in their fandom; they are fundamentally consumers who want to possess and…

They do have their own paranormal show, "The Haunted," which according to its opening credits spiel is ostensibly focused on how animals are extra sensitive to ghostly activity, but in reality it's pretty much exactly the same as "Paranormal Witness" or any of the talking head recollection + reenactment shows, except…

Hah! I only know the Joan D. Vinge from discussion of her novelization of "Willow" on The Book Was Better podcast, where her last name has become a rather rude euphemism, but that's certainly made it stick in my memory.

Also, can we please stop calling Game of Thrones a period piece? There are enough huge misconceptions about the middle ages already without adding to the confusion.

I hope you didn't end up putting any lotion in that basket.

I can't agree. From the moment Christopher and his child start having dialogue, they are basically humans in bug costumes. And they pretty much have to be, because if the movie allowed them to be truly inhuman, then that would be justifying the kind of racist assumptions that the film's ideology is trying to denounce.

The years? All four of them?

I actually think the apartheid theme kind of ruined seemed to be a very promising concept at the beginning. In order to be anti-racist, the movie is basically obligated to take the "deep down below the superficial differences, they're just like us!" approach. The prawns turn out to have basically the same psychology…

@Scrawler2:disqus The tricky question there is if you nephew "just" likes the dumb movies as part of his essential character, or if he has in fact been *made* or trained to like them by exposure to the movies themselves or ads or games or whatever else. And then, if the latter is true, is that a travesty?

Well, now that the audience for Doctor Who spends all its time staring at little devices in order to process the world, the show has to reflect that.