I took a course on Bram Stoker and was very disappointed that I couldn't shoehorn a comparison of movie Draculas from Murnau to Guy Maddin into a term paper. All those years of "research," for what?

God I love reading capsule summaries of classic X-Men comics. That last paragraph is a nice, concentrated dose of whatthefuck.

I think the issue with S1 is that the episodes feel the most isolated from each other (with the exceptions you mention) - especially coming to the show in 2017, where serialized narratives are the rule, it feels more dated than the rest of the series and also has less narrative momentum. There's plenty of good stuff,…

Buffy is definitely worth watching. I like Season 1, but parts of it are a little lame and (most importantly) it doesn't have much momentum, so you could easily stall out. You could cut that season down to the first two episodes, the episode called "Angel," and the last two episodes. Season 2 feels a lot more…

I watched it last night and was likewise not prepared for how sexually frank a movie about repression would be (the woman who fixates on the lives of sex workers, porn performers, and victims of sex trafficking is a trip). Though after a while my wife and I couldn't help laughing at how practically every character…

The same dilemma has come up with the idea of "obscenity," and the result has been that obscenity varies by jurisdiction, and the justice (blanking on his name) who helped write the most current Supreme Court opinion on the matter actually believed by the end of his career that the law had no reliable metric for…

Thought structures are relevant only as far as they allow tangible social action. Plenty of people went to their graves believing that the 13th Amendment was a horrible mistake, but that belief couldn't reinstitute slavery (it could perpetuate systemic racism, which could likewise be addressed by specific policy…

Huh, I know basically nothing about Portia de Rossi and didn't know she was Australian until reading this post. I assumed her occasional weird pronunciations in Arrested Development were part of the character's bizarro affectations.

"I'll play the gay pig, but only if he's a family man! This a children's movie for Christ's sake!"
- Nathan Lane

I don't exactly see what your statement has to do with mine, but you incorrectly used a semicolon and quoted a sentence of my post back to me even though that sentence doesn't really fit your topic, so it all must make sense!

Now I'm picturing Obama sitting at a desk, idly writing "Senator President Obama" on a sheet of paper, scratching it out, and then writing "President Senator Obama."

My wife worked for a small insurance company in New Mexico whose presence extended into West Texas. They had stiff competition for market share with national like BC/BS and also with other regional insurers. Even in that market there were issues with risk pools - turns out factors like obesity and smoking are not…

Is that part of the new pseudo-plan? I don't know how that's too different from the situation we currently have - there are multiple companies with interstate presence. The question is still going to be where the money comes from - if the government wants to spend a lot less on healthcare, the insurance industry…

I'm curious how this health care reform reform is going to pan out. Honestly I'm pessimistic that the Republicans won't 1) deprive millions of people of their health insurance, 2) deflect blame, and 3) get away with it. But if they're going to do 1) it would be nice if 2) failed and 3) changed to "get kicked in the…

Just wait until Trump gets pissed at Mitch McConnell and nominates Obama to the Supreme Court.

Jesus, now that you've posted this I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if his word choice wasn't influenced at least a little bit by his dislike for Melissa McCarthy.

It's Shabbat, so the Orthodox Jews in his life have to stand down and let the white supremacists in his life take the reigns.

It's the belief that society is an entrenched, pervasive conspiracy that wants to control every aspect of your life and is also going to crumble at any moment, leaving the most self-reliant and best-armed to inherit the earth.

Not with that attitude.

It's a neat area of cinema history, and it has the advantage of being much more comprehensible to an outsider than CGI. I've met computer scientists who have that level of enthusiasm for advances in CGI, but there's an intuitive cleverness to, say, using a partially transparent mirror to get wide shots in Metropolis…