Honestly, this has been their business model ever since the blockbuster second release of Snow White back in the early 40s - profit-mining the back catalog (rereleases, TV shows, DTV sequels, the fucking "Disney Vault" for home videos) involves a lot less risk than making new releases. It's actually impressive that…

Honestly, as a society we should be focusing less on the personalities of reactionary disphits and more on the tangible ways hard-right policy hurts Americans and also people abroad who depend on our support. Richard Spencer represents something, but he isn't the one planning to undermine Medicaid and cut the HHS…

More specifically, everything is the natural equivalent of everything else!

It's not just the actors - Mickey belongs to a narrative tradition of characters who flaunt social norms and do their own thing, and many of us are predisposed to like that kind of character, even if she has serious problems with addiction and overall mental health. Gus belongs to a narrative tradition of…

The "Doody Garland" story was a nice illustration - he considers embarrassing himself at a party the worst thing he's ever done. Which speaks both to his cluelessness and the difference between his take on the world and hers.

My plan is actually to assemble my consciousness into thousands of video cassettes, like in Videodrome (still the best movie ever made about the internet).

My point was more that the shift into what's essentially a dream sequence places the rest of the movie in context. In 25th Hour's case, it's ballsy to end a movie with a lengthy monologue - essentially a dream sequence - delivered by a secondary character. But as the movie takes us out of reality and out of the main…

I do find it funny that the usual knock against the ending of AI is "it was unexpected!"

That joke about describing an unspellable Polish/Slavic name as "just the way it sounds" is one of the funniest things I've heard in weeks (and a good indicator that midwesterners work on the show).

Personally I'd say that ending the movie underwater would be sad, and ultimately the movie would be a sad movie with a sad ending. As it is, the last half hour emphasizes the cruelty of being a child that never grows or dies - the main character hasn't learned a thing or grown as a "person," he just wants his mom. …

It's kind of funny - I feel like five years ago the movie didn't even come up, and now it's reliably a lightning-rod of "I love that movie / I hate that movie" discussion every six months or so.

Also, the ending is very much of a piece with the movie's basic theme - that an immortal, ageless child has no place in a world where children grow up and parents die.

It's surprisingly divisive - particularly the ending. I think Spielberg stages some unnecessarily broad emotional moments, but the movie's actual subject matter is pretty harrowing. You could even argue (reasonably, I think) that the direction mirrors the robot characters' emotional immaturity, in contrast to the…

You son of a bitch.

My favorite thing about some of Wes Craven's early movies (Nightmare on Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes, specifically) is that they aren't morality stories so much as stories with an extremely severe moral sense. The horror in the Hills Have Eyes is as much about a "sophisticated" family descending into violence…

They're small changes, but noticeable. In the opening narration, they remove a few Scottish slang words that would presumably be harder for Americans to understand (they do the same thing to Begbie's barroom monologue about his pool-hall fight) - the more noticeable thing is that McGregor delivers the monologue in…

As my friend in college used to say, I liked how 28 Days Later turned into a no-lyrics rock opera for its third act. Of course the very ending is a bit of an anticlimax.

When I got to that chapter I was a little taken aback - I saw the movie first, and while Begbie is a violent, myopic nutbag in the novel, he has a little more nuance (likewise the novel's Renton is a little more a dickbag, mainly because he doesn't have Ewan McGregor's smile to plaster over his unrelenting…

I kind of like that post - the implication is that the "AVClub commentariat" could be some kind of action collective rather than a bunch of people semi-anonymously commenting on a pop culture website, which is delightfully bonkers. As is the idea that the AVClub commentariat is nowhere to be found when something…

Funny, I was planning to choose nostalgia and pay fourteen goddamn dollars of my allowance for a VHS copy because that's still cheaper than renting it a dozen more times at the video store.