Hey, he's coming out of the closet!

That depends on the kind of work you're doing. The fact that she approached Spielberg for an interview at all suggests that what reached the page wasn't her original plan, which can be a problem. But good criticism is based in a sound reading of the text; the author's input is irrelevant.

When I rewatched Schindler's List recently, there were things that I really disliked. The tone in the early part of the movie varies from schmaltzy to somber to kind of wacky (some of the early scenes in the ghetto have a very strange comedic vibe), the dialog and plot contrivances can be distractingly wonky, and…

I assume Molly Haskell is getting lots of "LMGTFY" emails right now.

Which is why it's so good that he made the movie when he did. That ending lends all the "dysfunctional family" business in the first act a real edge.

Goldblum's weird laugh in that movie is just him saying "penis" a bunch of times really fast.

That was my first thought - the specter of "political correctness" seems like an ill-placed cliche rather than an actual critical insight, especially talking about the 1989 sequel to a 1981 period piece.

Not having read the book it's hard to comment on the critical method being employed, but criticism specifically concerned with authorial intent is quite rare.

Nazi feelings can be an interesting topic, but they're not mandatory. Melting faces are an acceptable substitute.

That's fair, but it's not a technicality to say that the movie itself remains fairly low-stakes - the plot revolves entirely around Indy, Marian, and Belloq. The in-universe stakes don't have to match the stakes for the audience.

Didn't they also get the "skin cracking to dust" effect by covering the model in a thin layer of foil and overheating it with a blowdryer? The sheer ingenuity behind those analog/early-digital effects is so much more intellectually stimulating than CGI.

One of the things that made me prefer the avclub to the Reader when I was a young'un was Rosenbaum's, for want of a better term, raging anti-Spielberg boner. The man was a giant of criticism, but if your capsule review of Raiders of the Lost Ark is a mixture of boredom and contempt, how much can I really trust your…

Do you know how hard it is to code jorts? Computers are binary!

I think there is some grey area here, just in English syntax as a whole - it is grammatical to place an adjective or descriptive clause after the described noun, so I don't know that clause order (in this case) is necessarily indicative. In any case, those commas (ironically) make the whole sentence more confusing.

I love that movie.

Johnny Rotten was even a good singer within the limits of his voice. I got into the Sex Pistols after hearing both sloppier and more polished punk/pseudo-punk in high school, and they split the difference nicely.

Their reputation for abrasiveness sometimes gets morphed into a reputation for sloppiness, which isn't the case at all - their songs are tightly written and elegantly played. Jones' solos and fills are deceptively simple and so distinctive that when he turns up in a mid-80s Iggy Pop song you think "hey, is that Steve…

Way to bury the lede (or, you know, make a lede out of a footnote).

The capper is "this should be researched and corrected." Not "this level of detail regarding technical specifications of the robot in Small Wonder is totally unnecessary, even for bar trivia," but "someone should watch more Small Wonder to better document the robot's armpit port."

True - it's weird to think of a pre-GTA 3 gaming universe.