There was a great Siskel and Ebert during the height of colorization where Siskel actually recommended turning off the color on your TV and watching your favorite movies in black and white to appreciate how unnecessary color is.

It has kind of a subversive edge, especially compared to stuff like the Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies coming out at the same time (or even Kubrick's version of Lolita), and the opening scene belongs to a much better movie (including the way Technicolor responds to early-morning light).

Don't forget "Piper Laurie plays a middle-aged Japanese man."

To be fair to the guy, the person who should have apologized for that movie was Audrey Hepburn - it's a deeply mediocre movie, and she's the only reason anyone remembers it. We could all have ignored Mickey Rooney's yellowface routine if she'd been less delightful and effervescent.

I like how they refer to the Fu-Manchu books as "problematic," when in fact they are racist almost to the point of insanity. As much as you can call anything "problematic," it tends to be stuff that has redeeming aesthetic value but doesn't gel with contemporary sensibilities. The Insidious Fu-Manchu is an urban…

The ludicrousness of it is also the whole joke - the timing of "… and Nicolas Cage" (close up of Cage's face) "… as Fu Manchu" (pull back to reveal the Orientalist costume and set) is a perfect sight gag, incidentally.

"Hey Mike, weren't The Eagles an important part of the seventies?"

It's not like Mickey Rooney wore yellowface to play an Asian person. He wore yellowface to play a buck-toothed, pidgin-speaking buffoon in Coke-bottle glasses. That character was basically adapted straight from a WWII-era propaganda poster, and an actor who wastes their talent on that kind of racist garbage deserves…

I think the cover is so close to the original that it's hard to even say one is better than the other. Cash brings his voice to the table, but otherwise it's exactly the same song with an acoustic piano building atmosphere instead of electronic noise. Personally I like the Nine Inch Nails version better.

Even more than an obsession with the economic and moral degeneration of Middle America, the clearest link between Stephen King and John Updike is their use of gross, awkward sex metaphors.

There was a great article recently - I don't remember if it was in the New Yorker or the Times - about Bannon's Hollywood career. He wanted to make an adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus for years and is actually a producer on the Julie Taymor movie (though she ignored all of his creative input). He also…

Damn it, why doesn't "racist" rhyme with "fascist?" It would make this so much easier.

For godsake, somebody get the man a cigarette!

There's a very real chance that this exchange never actually happened, and Gaiman was just goosing up an anecdote about a conversation at a script meeting that was probably very dull in real life.

It kind of assumes that the creative process shouldn't include bad ideas, which is absurd.

It's actually a little… interesting… that it turned into that kind of conversation. Because really I'd say this is an interesting example of how to interpret an absent text.

Also, I like how this brief anecdote provided by professional fiction writer Neil Gaiman is being treated as gospel truth.

There are photos of my brothers on Christmas morning of 1982 or so, playing their brand new intellivision. And no photos but fond stories of my uncles, wasted on cheap beer, playing Tank Battle for hours that evening.

You joke, but it's actually true. Electronic doodads aside, people have never really had a better quality of life than they do right now. That's a cold comfort given how shitty things are for a lot of people, and obviously we have to continue doing better because things are always kind of a mess. But it's not like you…

Life is Strange is on Steam.