Tron wasn't exactly snubbed in the VFX category. It, along with Scott Pilgrim, made its case at the vfx bake off last week, but only five of the seven pre-nominations could go on to be the official five nominations, and Tron was ultimately scuttled by the lackluster performance of the digital Jeff Bridges head (this…

Stereoscopic presentation, as unnatural as it is, can theoretically be made neurologically "acceptible" as long as you don't push the unnaturalness too far. Unfortunately, directors in their misguided desire to make images that "pop" and "sizzle" and impress the audience only end up making images that are cognitively…

@Jesse_Astle: Well, if we allow Buffy to be called a "superhero show" then we need a different term to describe the kind of show I am trying to talk about. Otherwise we just get lost in pointless semantics that don't lead to any creative progress.

@Jesse_Astle: Buffy wasn't a four-color superhero from a four-color superhero comic book. Stylistic expectations must be adjusted accordingly.

@Partially Bigoted Zealots: "33" struck me as an exploration of being relentlessly hunted. And since we never really get to see a war between humanity and cylons, I'm not sure any BSG episode is a fair exploration of the subject of conducting war and its spiritual cost. By the time of the events of the series, what is…

@justvisiting: I saw all four seasons of BSG, but I confess to having missed the exploration you describe. In what way did the cost of conditioning soldiers for war get explored on the show?

The problem with pretty much all the superhero tv shows I've ever seen is that they try to stick a handful of superpowered individuals into an otherwise "realistic" rendition of the real world. The stylistic dissonance is insurmountable, and that's why there are never any costumes or super combat at an epic scale (tv…

@MrGOH: If all operas and novels were limited to the style and content of their worst (or dumbest) examples, then they would be rightly bemoaned, or celebrated with a sense of irony at best.

@justvisiting: Oh, I dunno. I see nothing wrong with "dehumanizing" a robot enemy.

What's so wrong about "war porn" in which all the casualties are robots?

#1 is pretty nifty, but I got tired of the unflattering leotard motif by image #3.

To (heavily) paraphrase Lazarus Long: Beware! A movie that operates on "video game logic" may have other nasty deficiencies.

Oh gawd please let it not be time travel. I'm so tired of time travel being treated—by Hollywood—as if it were novel and clever, rather than scientifically impossible and creatively bankrupt (as a plot device).

@squaresphere: Ah, I wasn't aware. I don't watch cop procedurals.

@lightninglouie: I loved both too. But a real fan (i.e., a hardcore fan) finds plenty to be bothered by in the film adaptations, despite there being a lot to love about them.

@Hofnarr: I find it discouraging that in recognizing the general need to adapt one medium to another, all perspective on how much or what kind of adaptation might be appropriate gets lost. As if just because some adaptation is intrinsically necessary, that any and all changes are justifiable.

To be fair, all that holographic techno-nonsense that Orwell uses was embedded into our pop culture subconscious by the Iron Man movies. Favreau made it acceptible to audiences, and now we're reaping the benefits of shutting off our collective brains for two hours in a movie theater by having the same supertech appear…

And we could have to spend months and months reading dribblets of news about it.

And again, Hollywood feels the need to alter Tolkien's narrative in ways the Professor himself never found necessary.

Stop.