Martyrs, for all its edgelord adjacency, is a work of damned genius. Its ambiguous ending gets extra credit, because all the numerous reasonable interpretations of it are equally horrifying.

Frailty fascinates me because people who’ve seen it are neatly and irrevocably divided into one camp that walks away from the movie convinced it’s an indictment of religious mania, and another camp that walks away convinced that it portrayed Paxton’s character as justified in the end. It was long after I saw the movie…

Vive la Vendée!

HOW DARE YOU SI-- ... Oh. An artificial nose, you mean.

I have zero problem with Gadot’s being Israeli, or with her being light-skinned. What I have a problem with is that contemporary sources were universally agreed that Cleopatra was NOT conventionally attractive, and that her mesmeric effect on men was of a different sort altogether from being what we or they would call…

Being a regular human is the most adventuresome thing of all.

2 is essential ... but not for any of the reasons that I think its makers intended.

I just read the Wikipedia synopsis of the film, and am at least grateful that it had a thoroughly happy ending. Damn hippies.

Do the competing union factions eliminate each other? Because that’s the only conceivable happy ending.

America’s Best titles like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are as deconstructed as it gets. No, Moore has more than one sort of comic book in him ... but he’s never really quit farming soil that got leached early on.

Mark McCain on 96 Rock was the soundtrack of my teenage mornings. Ave atque vale!

Moore’s deconstructive games had such an obviously limited and short-term payoff. But for the better part of three decades Moore and his imitators have kept at it, trying to draw blood from a stone (aesthetically speaking). A young person’s medium was succeeded by an edgy teenager’s medium ;;; but I don’t know that…

It is tough to exaggerate just how much Eddie Van Halen changed the course of rock music, and just how different everything would’ve sounded if not for him. Sure, he played sped-up blues progressions ... but his playing marked a fundamental break from his rock n’ roll predecessors, whose sound kept one foot firmly in…

Have you seen how intolerable teenage girls are when they’re happy? Benioff and Weiss made the right call.

I’m a dude, and all the pros AND cons of teenage sexuality were pretty much theoretical to me, for better or worse. I’m sure that simply being a teenage girl exposes one to her fair share of the latter, though.

Horror is something that either puts a scare in you or doesn’t, largely independent of how objectively “good” the movie is. I admire It Follows, but it completely failed to scare me ... maybe because I was the sort of unpopular kid who couldn’t relate to the “social first-world problems” that exposed the protagonist…

I don’t LIKE the son of a bitch, and I don’t want him in office ... but I don’t want him dead either. This shouldn’t be too hard a circle to square.

A show’s creators are not necessarily competent to say what should be done with their creations.

Sorry; my attention kind of drifted after “which is why.” Mind repeating?

My dude whose chosen tactic is calling out what he considers weighty vocabulary not only tries to deploy “obfuscating,” but isn’t too swift on how to use it in a sentence.