Agreed.

Ugh. No offense to MSZ, but not every period piece owes its existence to Mad Men. I mean, look at this nonsense:

Team Shawn, always.

Gaah, yes. Edited. Thanks.

starring a no-name (for the general public) ensemble

"Ordinary Extraordinary Love" for me. "Optimistic Red Velvet Walrus" is so stupid it's hilarious, and the stinger is one of my favorite bits the show's ever done.

Oh, definitely - there's a lot to like about the movie. It's still a solid B-level horror flick, moody and intense, packed with great character actor work and awesome effects, it just happens to come after two A-level adaptations of the same material. And it looks like a masterpiece given the F one that followed.

I want to like this movie more, but it really falls apart in the end. Still: Meg Tilly is, as you say, superb - and that line of hers you use as the epigraph is not only the best moment in the movie, but one of the best in all the Body Snatchers iterations. Chills, every time.

I'd agree with you except on the idea that the film does a good job portraying its native characters. All of them except one (the chief/father) are either killed or raped for the sole purpose of driving Glass' narrative arc - worse, they aren't historic figures, so they were literally invented just to be killed or…

No one ever asks him about Handsome Bob, but that's the role where I totally fell for him!

Yeah, it totally caught me off guard how strongly it finished (I nearly quit multiple times during the book). What really elevated the second half of the book for me was the appearance of the [SPOILER] character, who's so charming and well-written that I was so happy to be spending time with her. I think Smith…

Just finished Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man, which was… odd. I think it's the closest she's come to writing a DFW-style novel, for both better and worse. The ending is affecting, and it has my favorite character in her work, but the writing is somehow weaker than usual, and the other characters… Let's just say I…

I have a really hard time deciding between Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow as my favorite Pynchon. They're both wonderful, but their strengths are very different. Coin flip, basically.

A+ book all around, plus it has a pretty badass backstory: the author had to trade it around illegally because it was unpublishable, and it became a massive underground classic. It's about a drunk Muscovite who's trying to take the train to visit his lover, and he drinks, talks to angels, drinks, argues with…

Have we had this discussion about Venedikt Erofeev's novel Moscow-Petushki (or sometimes translated as Moscow to the End of the Line)? It has "recipes" for bootleg cocktails so horrifying you can't help but laugh (Sample, from the Tjalsma translation: "Bitches' Brew" contains beer, shampoo, dandruff treatment,…

No, that's not how awards marketing works, at all, and I guarantee you nearly every living documentarian (except you, I guess?) would flip at the chance be nominated for Best Picture over a documentary win. The profile boost is much, much, much bigger - a nomination there is worth a win in any other category. I…

Not to mention the documentary filmmakers themselves have little inclination to WANT to compete in the Best Picture Category. Because they'll LOSE. Getting a nomination for Best Picture would be a pyrrhic victory because it would have basically no chance of winning.

Once again, the conservative, twisted tea-heavy portfolio pays off for the thirsty investor!

Mind you, I don't think they have to be slavish to the source material, but I found it weird they'd downplay the source material's most interesting dynamics in favor of something more… boring?

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