The worst is when we get to "Remember Byron" and all anyone wants to do is forget.

That scene is awesome, but for me it works because it's great campy excess (with Katsulas's spotted, latex pectorals!) rather than a great dramatic conclusion.

Lochley always struck me as more (S2) Sheridan-clone than Ivanova-clone, even if she's filling in the role of competent, badass female commander. They've got the same notions about the paramount nature of duty, but also chafe at following orders. And the cadence of Lochley's dialogue sounds more like early Sheridan's…

Every time I see Byron, I think of this Kate Beaton comic: http://harkavagrant.com/ind…

Well, Tolkien wrote poetry outside of LOTR, and worked a lot with Anglo-Saxon and early English poetry (including his recently published translation of Beowulf), so it's not that he didn't typically write poetry but rather that it's not what he became famous for.

US place names can actually get really fun, due to the sheer variety of influences (like, there's a place called East Palestine along the Ohio river. Why?).

I think that's a problem with bad documentaries being reeeeally bad more than an inherent problem with the form once it hits a certain length. There are plenty of great long documentaries (Sorrow and the Pity, Tokyo Olympiad, Sherman's March, a lot of stuff by Wiseman, stuff by Wang Bing), although most split into…

There are actually like 30 Manchesters in the US, and they're pretty much all tiny rural towns or suburbs (except the one in New Hampshire, which is a small city).

Feet are actually a turn-off for me too, but they're not really any grosser than other body parts on the microbacterial scale. They just look lumpy and unappealing to me, like how I assume a gay guy thinks about boobs.

Feet are disgusting petri dishes of bacteria.
But um… so are mouths? And vaginas.

"It just means that once the product's out of his hands, he no longer has any control over whether things play out as he intends."

Although those themes still tend to convey an awful lot of about how a work's plot or ending will play out. It is possible for a horror film to end with the serial killer triumphant and all the main characters dead, or a romantic comedy to end without the main characters coupled, but it's damn rare.

My complaint with spoiler-culture is that it tends to focus solely on that last kind of knowledge (or irony). It reduces works to singular moments of surprise. While I agree that there is a kind of joy in these reveals, there's so much more in great works. If someone tells you that Vader is Luke's father, then they…

"The reason people get mad about spoilers is because they're denied the opportunity to experience a work the way the author originally intended it."

I'm not so sure that Shakespeare would be aiming for "surprise" with those twists, though of course it's hard to prove what his intent may have been. With King Lear, I think it's Shakespeare using the full extent of his powers to make the audience hope against hope for a happy conclusion, despite knowing how these…

I think the cases of both Psycho and Diaboliques are marketing gimmicks, orchestrated by directors who were business-savvy as well as artistically minded.

But the full titles of Shakespeare's works are actually things like "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet." We've just shortened them. At the time, genres like tragedy and comedy were heavily codified, so audiences would know that some plays would always end up with the hero dead, and others with the main characters…

I think it's a case of Babylon 5 absorbing a common neoliberal idea at the time (NAFTA had its vocal detractors, but the 90s being a period of all-around growth for the US and the majority of manufacturing jobs already on their way out, it never become enough of an issue to galvanize public opinion), but not…

Neoliberal definitely isn't the right word for the series. It's one of those words with a specialized meaning in economics and academia that people tend to misuse in day-to-day conversation. Neoliberal multiculturalism is about recognizing diversity and rights of individuals and cultures while using that acceptance to…

That's common in most sex comedies though. As much as they may try to shock or push boundaries, they generally end up with a fairly heteronormative monogamous couple at the center. It even goes back to the "comedy of divorce" popular in the 30s and 40s, where the main couple, divorced or separated in the beginning and…