Yeah, that seemed like a sentiment the movie pays lip service to by letting a hero say it, but then appears to completely betray by its own premise and existence. That, or it's a kind of "Funny Games" sneer at the audience for tacitly endorsing the movie's choice to add in SuperDino by paying to see it.

I like Melvyn a lot, but the trait you mention is also paired with a somewhat more frustrating one, which is when he tries to force the guests into simplistic reductions as though acknowledging complexity was a cop-out.

Renter's insurance generally will not cover musical instruments and professional gear. You have to get special coverage for that, which is considerably more costly. Probably still less costly than having to replace gear vital to your livelihood, but not a trivial expense like regular renter's insurance is.

Eh, I suspect the people who express the most vehement outrage are also the types who behind closed doors love some clamp action.

Well, it's all those little kids who get crushed by falling flatscreen T.V.s that they're sitting in front of. They really distort the statistics. It's like how people think there was almost no one older than 35 in the Middle Ages because that was the "life expectancy" without realizing that that number reflects the…

Yeah, I can understand getting irritated at the ubiquity of the palette, but I don't get the people who seem baffled by it or act as though it's some ARBITRARY combination of colors that's just a mindless fad.

Huh — Civ V loses the wonder movies (they're just wonder illustrations), but it does have different city styles for different cultures, and you can certainly see wonders and at least some of the unique buildings (aqueducts, walls, coliseums, harbors, lighthouses, broadcast towers, and some others) do appear in the…

I think that definition needs one adjustment: "…people who are offended that they're unable to offend whomever they want without becoming objects of public scorn." Saying they're "not allowed" just reinforces their bogus first amendment violation claims.

But Amazon dominance is not necessarily good for authors, either. I was working this past winter for an author (who has a modest national reputation in print) to help him try to increase sales of his books as ebooks. He had run afoul of Amazon by trying to sign his books up for their Kindle lending library. When you…

I think there is such discourse — or at least the marked absence of discourse — but it's when the man is the unattached lover.

And here's where you get into the paradox of MFA-program criticism. On the one hand, they're elitist gatekeepers who only approve of one kind of fiction; on the other, as an academic program, they insist on no real standards and will just rubberstamp whatever thesis project a student turns in.

I talk about this a bit in an earlier post above, but my tentative conclusion is that Forbidden Island is not very good with four players (at least not when the four players are my family). I think this is because the tactical decisions are not that hard. You really don't need four people mulling over who should go…

I bought Forbidden Island to bring home to play with my family over Christmas (based on a recommendation from Gameological, I believe). And we enjoyed it well enough, but it very quickly became apparent that no one really made any individual contributions. The group decided what was the most efficient action on every…

I think the comparison is not so much with the content but with the lo-fi, handmade aesthetic of the production. They both feel like something that might have been made in someone's basement or garage (in the best sense of that). That, and neither seemed afraid of losing its audience because it deployed some pop…

Space Spartans!

I own a working Intellivision, on which I mostly just play the Tron Deadly Discs game, which remains FANTASTIC — and is one of the games where the Intellivision controller actually makes a lot of sense.

It also has a particularly memorable (and oft-borrowed) score by John Williams. http://www.youtube.com/watc…

Huh. I really disagree with your characterization of Dafoe's Orlock as being just like any actor. I think the movie does a pretty good job of making him a decidedly alien presence among the actors — he shows glimmers of his old humanity (grouchiness, vanity, desire), but he never really connects with any of the living…

Glad to hear "Razorback" holds up. A while back, Netflix was posting a bunch of older Aussie genre-fare on streaming, and I kept crossing my fingers that "Razorback" would show up one day, but so far no luck.

Fans of "The Host" (with flexible standards) might also check out a movie listed on Netflix streaming as "Chaw" (originally "Chawu" and on its cover art as "Chawz"). It's basically an homage (halfway bordering on parody) of Jaws, but featuring an entirely inland killer boar. It's nowhere near as good a film as "The…