To clarify my "criticism is the application of ideology" point, that's how I think criticism actually functions, though it's not the way most critics frame their own work. The idea is that there are two ways (at least) of conceptualizing criticism. They dominant view — and the way it's taught to students, even if…

Yeah, I hesitated for a moment as I realized how long my screed was getting (and, boy, could I have kept going — versions of this rant have been running through my head on almost every evening walk from about the midpoint of my degree program to its finish. I'm hoping they'll finally quiet down now that got through my…

It's interesting to read the different responses to this. I feel the core complaint of obscurantism and puffing up grand interpretive claims with a very poor basis of evidence (or even conception of what counts as evidence) still holds very true, though the critical fashions have shifted.

In my English graduate study, I found a lot of truth in this quote about literary scholars from William Gass (who was extolled by Ozick above):

Note: Benjamin Bagby is not, as far as I know, the name of a band. He's the performer on the left of the second video, and he was one of the founding members of the early music ensemble Sequentia.

That would be "Breakdown," Episode 7 of Alfred Hitchcock Presents season 1, from 1955. It might have been remade or ripped off in a Tales from the Darkside or the Twilight Zone revival of the 80s, but I'm not spotting anything specifically about that in my Googling.

Also, there are two versions of Tales from the Far Side. The version that originally aired on tv (which I had recorded on VHS) is different from the one you can get on DVD (which is also the first one that shows up on YouTube). The DVD version adds in a voice-over track on the Zombie Ranch segment (which was…

I've been scrolling through these comments waiting for someone to bring up The Peanut Butter Solution. For me, it's the quintessential example of those movies that you vaguely remember and can't decide if it's something you really saw or just dreamed (and also something were you remember several of its…

Any chance it was "The Crate" segment from the movie Creepshow? A scientist gets pulled inside the titular crate and eaten by the monkey monster.

Let's class up this joint. From Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:
FABIAN: If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.

You bring up another strange thing. We read all these think-pieces about how we're becoming a "maker" culture, and everyone's starting to do everything for themselves, but it seems that in real world experience, people remain inordinately impressed and dumbfounded when you competently make something yourself. Which…

It could be a checkbox that's already checked unless you take the initiative to uncheck it.

And it has at least two different screen adaptations. One was as an episode of a horror anthology series (I don't recall which one), and the other was the recent feature film "Mercy" (which I started watching on Netflix and suddenly realized about a third of the way through, "Hey, this is 'Gramma'!") — though I don't…

Another feature of Go-Bots was that they were pretty much at the same scale as Matchbox cars, so if you played with Matchbox cars, you could suddenly add transforming robot cars into the mix. Transformers weren't really to scale with anything (not even themselves, when you factor a bunch of the original Decepticons…

No, I just thought it was poorly executed criticism. It was diagnosing a fault in Depp's career being that he's resorted to building characters off of a nationality/accent and a silly costume. I was just pointing out that there's no inherent failure in that formula. It fails in execution, not in concept. And Sellers…

"Start with a nationality or ethnicity other than his own…. Next add a distractingly over-the-top stylistic affectation… Top
it off with a silly accent, and you have a character [the actor] will love
playing and that audiences might be able to tolerate, depending on their
appetite for runaway quirks divorced from…

You don't like "The Innocents"?

"Goes by Chad"? I didn't know Chad was short for anything. Chadwick? Chaddington? Chadrach?

But how do you know it's a "huge risk"? There are thousands of child actors and former child actors working in the U.S. The tragic stories represent only a tiny fraction of that population (and plenty of non-child actor kids develop eating disorders and drug problems and depression, etc.). The notion that some huge…

I think there is a culturally (if not morally) meaningful difference between conventional and nuclear weapons.