They targeted Woodward's character specifically by personally sending him the letter that lured him to the island; apparently they knew he was a self-righteous virginal religious fanatic. Which, given that he announces it everywhere he goes, loudly, doesn't seem too far-fetched. Possibly one of the island's residents…

A bunch of them are covered in this piece, which recommends starting points:

I seriously considered the F for this, the first time in a long time I've done that with a film. In the end, while it's muddled and graceless and pointless enough to deserve one, it doesn't quite have that next-level brand of calculated, aggressive idiocy that says "F" to me. It doesn't fail on every conceivable level…

I enjoyed it, but it lacks the tension and the connection of "The Wire," given that there isn't the same sense of competing sides and a central narrative. It's much more "a bunch of stuff that happened," to be Simpsonian about it. There are some really nice portraits of New Orleans subcultures, but YMMV depending on…

Comics Panel will return this month in a new form.

Oh, and you can see the whole thing on YouTube in three parts.

It was originally on my list, and I wanted to bring it up in the comments, because it is a crazy, crazy piece.

Well-guessed.

The half-brother who disinherits them and the conniving wife who talks him into it and the seemingly unsuitable suitor who is a more suitable suitor than the seemingly good one are all in there in various severely reworked forms. The basic framework of the book is in place, it's just buried under a lot of pretty…

We put it in the newswire so more people would see it, though maybe now that it's aged off the newswire front page, we'll just move it back to the Wrapped Up tab so people can find it.

He's so cynical about what he writes that it 's kind of hard to tell. For one thing, there's his playing to the editors who pay him, so that he thinks about the necessity of bringing in hot big-boobed girls for the masses, preferably to be carried away by some alien. Then there's his teasing of Iris, by offering…

For a while, we tracked and were excited by each new off-site MPDG mention — it's turned up on NPR, on Jezebel.com, on TVtropes, in various mainstream newspapers. It's hard to say how far it's actually saturated the universe, but it's traveled pretty far at this point.

I'm particularly curious what people think about that: Is there one specific reason she killed herself, or is it just the whole situation? Was it because she'd been mooning over Alex from afar and then found out her sister (who had let her down in so many other ways as well) had been sleeping with him all along? Was…

Yes, well observed. And I think it plays into a larger theme of Atwood's, whereby women fixate on the idea of self-sacrifice as noble and honorable, and then use that as an excuse to not stand up for themselves or make hard choices, like Iris not arguing with her father about marrying her off to Richard.

"Of all the aggravating, frustrating things Iris did in her life, the one I can least understand or sympathize with was her decision not to come clean with adult Aimee"

Which is usually pretty important when an artwork is described within another artwork, particularly when it's described as heartbreaking, revolutionary, profound, etc. If it's left to the imagination, it's easier for the audience to picture it as something that actually meet these criteria; if we actually get to see…

"The rebellious, "communistic" spirit of Alex Thomas in turn offers sexual fulfillment, creative potential, and a methodology for subverting the oppressive social mores that confine Iris and Laura. "

Given that Iris says on her last page that she's planning to box up all her pages and put them in the old trunk in her attic — "the lawyer has the key, and his orders" — and that the obit emphasizes that Sabrina's coming back to town to deal with Iris' possessions, I'd like to think we're meant to believe that Sabrina…

Laura doesn't fit the classic mold of an MPDG, though — the purpose of an MPDG (as established in Nathan's first MYOF entry, linked below) is "to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." She has very little past and no desires of her own, she only exists to bring…

I think we have to assume that the lovers' story is "The Blind Assassin," and the science-fiction story within that story is just a subset of the novel. I find it much harder to imagine generations of moony, romantic women empathizing with the pulp science fiction tale — which was apparently never even finished.