I find these threads fascinating because the charitable consensus is always "the story had all this potential, but it was ruined by x, y, and z," usually performances, dialog, and tone. It's probably true, but I do find it fascinating that people are carrying around this "ur" version of the Star Wars prequels that…

Allegedly there have been a few directors (Seijun Suzuki springs to mind) that actually shot their movies chronologically and in shot order so that "editing" the movie just means selecting the best takes and removing everything around them. But I often wonder if stories like that are just bullshit.

On the pre-production side he hired some really excellent people to design the spacecraft, characters, costumes, etc, and on the post-production side it's really, truly difficult to emphasize how influential Ben Burtt and John Dykstra were, not just for Star Wars but cinema as a whole. But none of those people made…

That's kind of where I stand on them right now - Episode 2 in particular. It's not nearly as bad as its reputation, and its weird mishmash of political allegory, espionage, gearhead shit, and Harryhausen monsters really does look like the inside of a nerdy Boomer's head.

For some reason the argument "Star Wars had to be 'saved' in post-production, so George Lucas sucks!" holds a lot of water in some corners of the internet.

Can you believe that a movie renowned for its music, sound design, and visual effects would be less effective without those things?

Every time I see it I'm a little more impressed by how fucking uncomfortable it makes me. "Nasty" really is the right word - the first half of the movie doesn't rely on "horror" as much as the constant unease of watching uncomfortable situations get more and more weird.

When I was getting into zombie movies my dad told me that he saw the original Night of the Living Dead with a bunch of Army friends. Afterward they were all so terrified that they walked home in dead silence. I can't even imagine what that experience must have been like in the late-60s.

He's the only actor my wife finds so loathsome that it distracts her during a movie - which is a shame because it means she won't watch Eyes Wide Shut or Minority Report with me.

What, you don't think that Quantum of Solace and Spectre are the high-water marks of the recent Bond output?

Since he can control smaller warm-blooded animals and most cold-blooded animals with his mind, he's confident that swarms of birds, fish, and friendly iguanas will rescue him from any and all work-related accidents.

Eh, the Babadook's outfit is basically early twentieth century menswear, and the top hat in particular was a mainstay for minstrel shows. People "in the know" would get it, but anyone who didn't have an immediate familiarity with the Babadook would just see a white person in black makeup wearing a silly hat, which…

A lot of it has to do with panache. Horror is a pretty diverse arena, but there's still a core set of basic stories to tell - The Descent has a lot of confidence in its interpersonal drama and the disturbing nature of cave exploration, which (for me) makes the first half pretty engaging. And then it has equal…

It also helps that it's a genre that can be entertaining without being "good." I've seen more bad horror movies than good ones, but I've also seen more interesting horror movies than boring ones.

People use the word "camp" pretty freely, but the word I've always liked for this kind of representation is "arch" - subject matter gets folded into gay iconography and receives its own context, with this balance of affection, silliness, and mockery.

To my knowledge there was never a period where racist caricatures of black men involved skin-tight leotards and had long, drooping tongues, so nobody would get the wrong idea. As a rule of thumb, if someone is going to wear black facepaint they should specifically ask "does this look like blackface" and maybe get an…

I actually scrolled back up the page, and while the original illustration clearly has black cheeks, white lips, and white eyes; but the Youtube fan in "Babadook" makeup is wearing white pancake makeup, and the costume reads exactly the same. Really the silhouette/top hat make the look.

I can honestly say that within my little scope of interest, I was exposed to much, much more hype for those two movies than anything else I've seen in years - they were festival movies, they took a while to make it to theaters, and meanwhile you had the avclub and the Dissolve stoking the flames of "best horror movies…

Yeah, being a fan of horror movies is really about sifting through loads and loads of dull, samey garbage for a few scenes or ideas (or, god forbid, entire movies) that are memorably awesome.

I admit that the most I've spent on a video game in the past 2 years was buying Mortal Kombat X (it was on sale but still north of $30, for a game that I rarely get a chance to play on a computer that can barely run it), a decision motivated 50% by a YouTube video of Johnny Cage's "tearing through your opponent's…