I know Strange Days isn’t a perfect movie, but there’s something about it that really works for me. It creates a believable world, and I always found its explorations of morality and ethics (and despair) really effective. To me, it holds up a lot better on multiple re-watches than at least a few of the films on the…

I was surprised not to see Dark City, which seemed to get a lot of love round these parts not too long ago. I also have a soft spot for Strange Days, and I’m not sure if 28 Days Later counts as sci-fi, but if it does, I’d probably throw that on the list, too.

I thought it was Echo that he didn’t like - because it was written mainly about his divorce.

Yes, because it’s an object relative pronoun. But I’m not sure how nice it would sound.

Yes, that’s the one, thanks.

Great write-up, just popping in with a wee defence of my home state. It’s true Maine has twice (ugh) elected the reprehensible LePage, but in both elections there was a strong, center-left third party candidate, and in neither election was he elected with a majority. Cold comfort, I know, but the state still does lean…

There was a pre-election piece in, I think, the Guardian written by a woman who used to know him when he was in the early days of fashioning his public persona. She writes quite a bit about how much of his act is a put on. I think it’s supposed to elicit pity for the sad little boy behind the mask who just wants to be…

If you contact the kinja help desk (https://kinja.desk.com/customer/portal/emails/new), and have deep reservoirs of patience, they’ll eventually get it sorted. It took me about 3-4 rounds of email exchanges, with them sometimes taking quite a few days to get back to me. But in the end each of their emails was pretty…

Off-topic Kinja update:

I followed the steps and it seems to have claimed my account (my user name (vadasz) and avatar came through), but it’s not letting me select an account to log in via (e.g. google). The cursor changes when I hover over the icon, but nothing happens when I click.

I was doing a film/lit class back when the whole Amy Fisher thing was going on, and one of the texts we were doing was Lolita. The prof, a guy who loved doing really bad accents, told us that Buttafuoco meant “fire ass” and for the rest of the term, every once in a while he’d put on a really bad Long Island accent and…

Also, on the flipside, he complains about how Chicagoans think Chicago is the center of everything, which is pretty much my experience of every big city I’ve been to, in and outside North America. New Yorkers scream it from the rooftops (“greatest city on earth”) and being from SF seems to have massively informed his…

“Positively 4th Street”

Not loving it - have had a mess of a time getting my account sorted (long story, boring, but more frustrating than it needed to be). Don’t love the front page layout at all - which seems to have become another bland blog site, and not a pop culture news site (but maybe I’m old) - and really dislike the comment system…

How many times has the "old AVClub" died? When Stephen Thompson left? Daily content? Registered comments? The great migration? Disqus? New Disqus? today?

Right on!

I think the point is that Black Widow's playing him the whole time. Loki does his best to abuse her psychologically and emotionally, not only with the slur, but also with his "knowledge" of her dreadful past, and his diminishment of her feeble humanity. And, because he's a sadistic, torturous bastard, he gets off on…

I think Loach's is an important, if somewhat heavy-handed, one.

Were your college days ages ago, cuz I've been there three times in the last 15 years and the lines were always massive (yes, though, David is amazing, and well worth a long wait - plus, you can call and book in advance and skip the queue, unless that's changed).

The whole anthology is . . . odd. It came out very soon after the event, so even the missteps (which, Penn's isn't the only one) have a raw, how-the-fuck-am-I-supposed-to-respond-to-this feeling about them (not saying they're "good"). But some of the shorts are quite powerful and I think it's worth checking out the…