Man, that's rough. I particularly loved the Internet Film School articles, found them extremely illuminating and engagingly-written.

I'd urge you to check out 'Deeper Than Sky' by Vhol. A fantastic prog/thrash hybrid, Also, Hammers of Misfortune's latest, 'Dead Revolution'. Joyous, rollocking trad/thrash with a slathering of Hammond organ and a few brushes with old Western folk.

I've always that James' vocals are at their absolute peak on that record too. Perfect intersection between joyous, passionate performance and hard-earned, long-trained vocal control.

After bassist Paul Gray's passing back in 2010, I wrote a retrospective review of Slipknot's self-titled album that attempted to address that seeming redundancy - if you're interested, it's here;

This show isn't painting a great picture of the FBI. Hannah's utter obliviousness to the risk to her own life as a result of her uncovering the conspiracy to murderously silence everyone who knew about the (apparently only semi-effective) bomb-proofing of Room 105 and Jason's tiresome Stupid Chief behaviour seem to…

And the bit about the feeling of being in the Oval Office;

"Throw Carol and Morgan together in their own extended subplot though…"

Hugely sad to see them go. "Calculating Infinity" still sounds as jagged, vital and unique as it did upon its release, and whatever the line-up, the band always remained one of the most terrifying live bands I've ever seen. I had the privilege of having a photo-pass at one of their gigs once - it was on the "Miss…

"Okay, so maybe abandoning my guard of that Corellian ship, in hindsight, wasn't the Stormtrooperiest thing to do - but c'mon, Vader was lightsabre-fighting some desert hobo! You're gonna go and watch that, am I right?"

I'm not massively knowledgeable about hardcore - always been more of a metal guy, though the two scenes rub shoulders and cross-pollinate often enough that there are a few hardcore bands that I've gotten into through them sharing stages with metal bands I'm into, or seeing metal bands cite them as influences.

De nada. In all honesty, I missed that he'd been castrated - just thought the kids had gone generically hacky-slashy on him.

Bus-driving paedophile didn't castrate himself - the little girl holding the bloodied machete who you saw exiting the schoolbus with her friends in the shot before the reveal of the driver's mutilated body took care of that for him.

A.V. Club
romanticizing a lunatic, drug addicted pervert

The AV Club: "romanticizing a lunatic, drug addicted pervert."

So glad I wasn't the only one thinking that.

Don't expect too much artiness from Regeneration - it's not nearly as arty as made out here, though it is a very good sci-fi action flick with truly wince-inducing fight sequences. Day of Reckoning, though, is genuinely hallucinatory. It explicitly references Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now, and occasionally brings…

I never knew how much I wanted a John Hyams-directed episode of Hannibal until I read this comment.

Over at the site I run, OneMetal.com, our writer Ryan Neal characterised this album as one whose songs fit into one of two camps - the songs that hearkened back to the days of AotW and AsPB, and those that were more experimental. He felt the album would be divisive, whilst personally enjoying it a whole lot.

I would say you're definitely in the minority - though of course, that doesn't make you wrong.

I felt exactly the same about Kingdom of Heaven. I remember thinking to myself at several points while watching it in the cinema, "a lot of this movie seems to have ended up on the cutting-room floor". The shipwreck sequence might as well have smash-cut to a title card saying "END OF ACT 1". Then I saw the director's…