Chemex is fine, but Aeropress for me. Quick, easy, and very good coffee.

This pretty much guarantees I'll (have to) watch the show, because my husband's had a crush on him for years.

She's my pick for best performance of the year, male or female. She's tremendous in it.

Agreed, although… Heh, isn't filtering everything through The Russian Question is also a pretty Russian pastime, too? It's not that they can't write about universal themes, but there's no doubt that many Russian artists and critics are drawn to What This Says About Russia (to the point that Dostoevsky argues the only…

It's definitely read that way, but it's not quite written that way (or rather: it's superficially not written that way - books in that era could be double-edged). The idea in the book is that this medieval shitshow is Europe, who refuses to look ahead to the possibilities and innovations of enlightened socialism, and…

I'll be honest, though: I keep waiting for them to break out in a "Kuuuuuu!"

Well, Roadside Picnic would be a high-water mark for any writer. It's a fantastic book.

Oh god, now I want a romcom titled The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel.

Love the Strugatskys and I'm happy this is finally stateside. Has anyone seen the 80s version, with Werner Herzog?

I think the fact that Ida is the only one with another nomination does give it a leg up, though. But American critics are riding Leviathan so hard as a rebuke to Putin (and Putinism), so you may be right about its chances.

Glad you liked/appreciated it! I haven't gotten a chance to see Wild Tales yet, either, but this has been an exceedingly strong year for foreign film.

I still re-read one of his lesser-known YA novels, Empty Planet, pretty regularly. It's kind of a fascinating experiment about a protagonist who's recovering from trauma while the rest of the world dies out, and (though I was waaay too young to recognize this at the time) the last third turns into an extended riff on…

I'd love a breakdown of Computer Chess. I remember when the first shot came up and I thought, "Oh god, an entire movie that looks like this?", but the technique is so assured that simple pans across the room somehow become tense and creepy.

Funny enough, I was obsessed with John Christopher in middle school/junior high, and all his dystopias have protagonists who tend to be unexceptional and incidental to the plot, which is why I related so strongly to them.

Yeah, that one still baffles me. I've tried to explain it to people as "Imagine aliens who'd never interacted with humans tried to replicate a film; all the actors learned their lines phonetically and with no sense of what they mean; the cameraman wasn't sure where to point the camera; the editor had no knowledge of…

Eh, I dunno. How it was shot is maybe the least bad thing about the movie, which isn't to say that these shots are good, but that we're maybe mistaking a critique of the content for a critique of the shots themselves. The shots do what the narrative asks them to do: deliver dumb, humorless symbolism in an obvious and…

Well, I do think the documentary is pulling our legs in a few ways, but that Guetta's eccentricities aren't necessarily good evidence for that.

I think it's the question of how much of Guetta's shtick is being directed by Banksy, who pretends (?) to be exasperated by him. I have no doubt that a lot of the documentary is playing with us on purpose, but Guetta does have his own shtick, too, so I don't know if this particular angle is the real "tell", so to…

That is entirely fair, and it didn't work for me at all.

Guetta’s silliness is one giveaway