Aside from being terrible, Driven was just a bizarrely misguided concept. A $94 million Formula 1 racing movie released in the United States? Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

Yeah, Under Siege was on Siskel's 1992 list. Nothing will ever top Siskel's decision to name Babe: Pig in the City his #1 movie of 1998, though. The last #1 he ever picked!

@avclub-a74751295995aad6799bb16021522543:disqus I have not seen the remake. But as bad as I'm sure it is, there's no way it could be worse than Freddy Vs. Jason, right?

Dream Master did a whole cross-promotional thing with MTV. There's a few scenes where the teens watch MTV in the movie; the Fat Boys did the Freddy Rap; Freddy did a bunch of short VJ bits; and they even did a truly unwatchable TV special with Kevin Seal, Jon Anderson, the Fat Boys, Alice Cooper, Dokken, and Ozzy…

Gene Siskel put Die Hard 2 on his 1990 top ten list.

I just remembered Harlin directed Driven. I haven't seen it since shortly after it came out and recall very few specifics, but I remember it as one of the dumbest movies I'd ever seen.

I'd rank Dream Master below Dream Warriors personally, but otherwise I agree with everything you said here.

I like NoES 4 a lot. It's very "late-80s MTV" in style, but it has some of the most inventive kills of the entire series. I will, however, never forgive it for spawning "Are You Ready for Freddy."

I think it depends on the auteur critic. The most hardcore auteurists usually seem to prefer the absolute most personal work of a given director. (For example, Richard Brody, who is a pretty orthodox auteurist, placed Marnie on his all-time top ten list.) Even when the auteurists don't think the most personal work is…

@sigaba:disqus You're right on about the snark quotient in the book. It's been many years since I've read it, but the snarkiness is what has stayed with me the most. Arendt's style in Eichmann in Jerusalem (though not in her other books I've read) reminded me of another snarky female writer who was vilified for her…

It's always funny to me that these characters were originally conceived as "cool" Gen-Xers. I grew up watching Friends (live and in reruns), and at no point did they ever seem remotely cool. They actually seemed extraordinarily lame—they were into Hootie and the Blowfish, drinking coffee, and advancing their careers!…

Susan Sontag actually has a really good essay about this, though, to her great discredit, she doesn't mention Sucker Punch once.

Yeah, I'm sure I'll never get around to watching this.

How does it compare to the inexplicable cover of "Love Is the Drug" in Super Mario Bros.?

Jaden Smith: the boy who made me discover my latent pedophilia.

And preceded closely by The Village.

The Eichmann book was probably less controversial for the "Banality of Evil" thesis or anything specifically having to do with Eichmann, and more for her antipathy toward the Israeli government and Zionism in general.

This story actually made me like Jaden Smith more.

This is what I like to call the "Woody Allen in the 2000s Phenomenon."

I never saw it, but my impression of The Number 23 is that it's like Schumacher took those hilarious scenes in Batman Forever where Batman solves some impossible Riddler puzzle and stretched them to the length of a feature film.