Going to California Pizza Kitchen in California is more like going to a quack medical clinic in Mexico. It will be expensive, distasteful, slightly unpatriotic, and possibly fatal.

FACT: There is not a single licensed doctor of pizza in the entire state.

All three Nolan Batmen have structural problems, but it's most obvious in TDKR. Mainly, there's a ton of doubling for no discernible thematic reason.

To wit: Bruce starts out at a low point after a major financial loss and health problems, miraculously builds himself back up to being Batman, has a falling out with Alfred and a fractured romance with Selina. Then he has a second falling out with Alfred, suffers a second financial loss, has a fractured romance with Miranda, gets betrayed by Selina, suffers more health problems, miraculously builds himself back up to being Batman again, and gets betrayed by Miranda.

There are needlessly doubled characters: Blake/Gordon, Daggett/Stryver, Selina/Jen. The congressman and the scientist who seem important but get discarded. Matthew Modine's bad cop character. There are even two different sewer-level bases (Bruce's and Bane's) and two different underground prisons (one for cops; one for Bruce).

It doesn't sink the film, but it makes it feel flabby to me, especially the long stretch in the middle where Gordon is in the hospital and Bruce is in the pit prison and comes out with no change in character and having learned nothing (or, rather, he learns incorrect information). That crap about jumping without the safety rope was the worst; if you do a lesson-learned sequence, you need to have the protagonist then use it at the climax.

I have some other problems with it, but they're minor. The big reveal at the end requires that Bruce never heard about Bane and Talia during his time in the League of Shadows OR his time in the pit prison (yet ALFRED heard about Bane's past). And the opening lifted from License to Kill is pretty pointless.

Still, the characters are terrific, the acting is good, the focus is on Bruce/Batman, comic-booky things happen, the female characters have something to do, and the John Blake thing is really exciting.

I just watched Page Eight, an absolutely terrific little potboiler from last year featuring Bill Nighey as a British domestic intelligence officer and Rachel Weisz as the neighbor who may or may not be playing him.

Michael Gambon is Nighey's boss and best friend, who kicks off a tempest in a teapot with a report that accuses the Prime Minister of the UK of some sinister intelligence dealing.

It's a BBC TV movie, but looks fantastic with lots of great character work. And the tight script tells a story that walks a fine line between cold war thriller and light caper flick. I just loved every minute of it.

Streaming for free on Amazon Instant.

How do we delete stuff? Our security appears to be sieve-tight.

http://downinfront.net/wiki/index.php?t … entChanges

I'm allergic to cauliflower, butterscotch, imitation butterscotch, and glow-in-the-dark monster makeup.

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When I first saw them, I liked Planet Terror more than Death Proof despite the better reviews Death Proof got. But on revisiting them, I found Death Proof to be more thought-provoking and Planet Terror to just be silly.

I don't get Inglourious Basterds. As I've said before, it would have worked great if the Basterds had stumbled upon a laboratory where the Nazis were altering time and Brad Pitt said, "These Nazzis fucked up the future, boys. We gotta win this war any way we can!" That would have been an awesome holy-shit moment after which ANYTHING could happen.

Hollywood, why are you only just now filming all my dreams from when I was 15?

Also, where is Farah Fawcett? She should be in there.

"Rather than look at the effect of particular shows or genres, they focused on the correlation between TV time in general and self-esteem over a yearlong period. They controlled for age, body satisfaction, and baseline self-esteem"

If they didn't control for income, the results are meaningless.

"Martins explains in a statement that girls appear to be influenced by one-dimensional, sexualized depictions of women, while black boys may be disturbed by their TV counterparts, who are often criminalized or shown as hoodlums and buffoons."

Translation: "Since we only focused on TV time in general, we don't actually know what content the children watched. But when we applied our personal biases, we easily made up reasons for the data we got."

You claimed that the audiences for The Avengers and comic books skew younger and more male than Transformers and are therefore more dangerous to young minds. I demonstrated that the opposite is true.

The idea that the Black Widow action figure showing cleavage is somehow damaging to children's view of women (or whatever it is you're vaguely arguing) is ridiculous. Are you aware that women actually have boobs in real life? Are you aware that there is an action figure of Megan Fox from Transformers with cleavage? And one for her character in Jonah Hex WHERE SHE PLAYED A PROSTITUTE?

Why aren't you up in arms about those instead? It's because you just started paying attention to this sort of thing when you saw that stupid fucking joke image of the Avengers sticking their asses out, isn't it? But you can't admit that so you rationalize why you and others have focused on The Avengers by claiming it's worse because it comes from comic books and comic books (at least the ones with busty female superheroes) are sexist. And now you say it's because the TOYS are somehow sexist, which somehow makes the movie worse than other movies that sideline women entirely or Christopher Nolan movies that make women betray men and/or kill themselves over their husbands.

Sexism means treating people of one gender as inferior and usually refers to men treating women as not very smart and good primarily for sex, cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. By any reasonable measure, all the Avengers movies do this less than the great majority of modern action movies. They present women who are smart, interesting, commanding, and capable. And they toys are no different.

As for under-presentation, Black Widow appears in two Avengers-related movies since 2008, will certainly appear in the next one, and may get her own film. And Agent Maria Hill doubles the action-woman count in The Avengers. Meanwhile, we haven't seen Batgirl since Batman & Robin; we haven't seen Supergirl since 1984; we haven't seen Wonder Woman since 1979; and Jonah Hex features a hooker as the female lead. Stop blaming the Avengers for something that is far more true of other properties, not to mention other kinds of toys....

I've looked at the question objectively, and I'm done talking about sexism in The Avengers.

EXACTLY! Why not make Bond stop a Chinese-German guano farmer with metal hands who is planning to disrupt a space launch, Sam Mendes?

And why not make Batman go up against/get romanced by Catwoman, who is in league with three other villains, and have a hard time getting rid of a bomb, Christopher No— Oh wait, that happened.

This smells of rationalization. Like a missing-pretty-white-girl case making big news on CNN, the real reason is that nothing much else was going on.

There is absolutely nothing objectively different or worse about the marketing of Black Widow.