"I was ready for a break from acting, this was a really easy job to finish on, and the script wasn't didn't seem any more offensive than Kick-Ass. What was I going to do, pass?"

Things I remember from that Steve Martin collection:

Yeah, the reason that memory bugs me so much is that I did know better, I just decided it didn't matter. Even if you drill things into kids' heads, they're kids - their brains don't have the same structure for making decisions, and they have no way of wrapping their minds around the idea that they could kill someone,…

It's one of the best made movies in history (I think that if you wanted a one-day crash course in "how to direct a movie" you could just watch Goodfellas and Bram Stoker's Dracula), but yeah, the characters are all so loathsome that I can't really stand spending time with them.

Ha, I'm glad this came up because I keep thinking about Civil War. What drove me nuts about the movie (I haven't read the comics) is that in addition to obstinately opposing government oversight, Cap keeps supporting Bucky, even after finding out that Bucky murdered Tony Stark's parents and can still be triggered as…

I think your avatar is a good start.

I find that with sex, fantasies and reality separate themselves for you.

So this is something that my wife and I discuss - to take a recent example, how would someone like Dylan Roof fit into the rubric of mental illness? He obviously doesn't approach the world in a normal or healthy way, and he may have something diagnosable, but even if he has (for example) pervasive developmental…

Don't forget suicide, which is more common around people with mental illnesses and which is most successful when the person attempting has access to a gun.

Re: that last point, seriously, when did screenwriters agree that the third act of every popular movie should be exactly the same. I watched Crimson Peak a little while ago, and (VERY VAGUE / MINOR SPOILER) as they were rolling into the end of the movie all I could think was "this isn't going to turn into a…

Years ago when I was working a night shift two of my coworkers got into a friendly argument because one of them wanted to watch an MMA match on in the break room, and the other one wanted to watch a horror movie. The anti-MMA one said that he wouldn't watch two people hurt each other, and the pro-MMA one said that…

Until recently there was an actual moratorium on any NIH-funded research into gun violence. Like, Bush actually signed a piece of policy to keep the government out of that particular line of inquiry. The moratorium ended under Obama, but I assume it's going to come back (or if it doesn't it won't matter, since the…

Calvin and Hobbes put it a bit more succinctly:

My dad was a cop, so I also grew up around guns. He was responsible - off-duty he kept his gun in a lockbox on a shelf in the closet that I couldn't reach. Sometimes when he got home from work he would take off his gun and set in on his dresser next to his car keys while he was changing his clothes, and one time I…

There are some CGI shots early in the film that look so-so ("so-so" by 2017 standards - surprisingly good by "20-year-old CGI" standards), but yeah, the second half really holds up. As usual, the mix of practical and computer effects helps make both look better, but there's an even bigger thing where Cameron (like…

That whole runner where Billy Zane keeps predicting things that we, the audience, know to be historically inaccurate is just bonkers. I suspect that a real American aristocrat of that era would've spent his time eating jellied eel, bitching about Taft, and ogling Ione Bright.

I saw it twice in the same week when I was 12. The second time I totally pretended that I was going as a favor to a friend who has missed the previous screening.

Weird to think that the introduction of synchronized sound to movies was still claiming victims in 1996. Titanic is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. Everything of significance in the entire movie happens in the imagery and music, from the character development to the romance to the plot.

Me and that game go way back. I owned a novelization of the 11th Hour when I was in middle school (it was technically a walkthrough, written in novel format) and thought it was one of the scariest things ever written. When we got our first computer in 1996 I rented a copy of the 11th Hour from the video store on…

Also, even though the shooting is pretty rudimentary, it's still memorable - specifically the fact that your character whispers "amazing" whenever you get a headshot. Is he talking to himself? Are we hearing his thoughts? Like the scars on his face and the fact that he's constantly chatting about movies with his…