Final Fantasy Spirits Within is a fascinating movie, if only because it's a Western-targeted film made by Japanese with all their sensibilities but intermixed with American movie cliches, so it comes with both an environmental message and a kick-ass band of marines cut from the Aliens cloth.

I heartily disagree. Spirits Within is a trainwreck.
See, when you slap the Final Fantasy sticker on a movie, you're making fans all over the world grow expectations. Spirits Within didn't deliver. At all.

It's a very well made movie, for its time, but it wasn't, and still isn't Final Fantasy. Did I want a J-pop-esque film with overly beautiful, yet emo characters that save the world while coping with their own problems?

...Kinda. But then Spirits Within came out, FF hadn't been stamped with the whole emo-thing. The latest game out, at the time, was FFIX, which was the prettiest game thus far, character-wise. And that game had Quina.
The games really defining the series at the time were 6 and 7. 6 didn't have the graphics to really make the beauty stamp, and had a compelling story, a great roster of characters, a friggin' 16-bit opera scene, and Kefka.
7, on the other hand, had existensial crisis, world peril, a rich world and Sephiroth.

These games really defined what Final Fantasy should be, and the film completely ruined it. It was set on earth, had only human characters, and a terrible roster. Aki Ross wasn't really interesting, Dr Cid wasn't either, and the badguy, whose name I can't even remember? Nah, gtfo dude.

Now Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children, on the other hand...

..Was even worse. Goddamn it.

Ya, I never approached it as a Final Fantasy movie, just as a "realistic" all-cg animated sci-fi film, which fell on it's face really really hard.

Never owned Blade Runner, so I picked up the new Blu-Ray yesterday. The transfer is phenomenal. It's the kind of thing you want to use to show off your home theater system. Oh, and the movie is cool too, I guess. There's a massive documentary called Dangerous Days. It's over three hours long, so I haven't dug deep into it yet, but it looks really comprehensive. For that alone, you should get this set if you like Blade Runner.

I've always been a fan of "Killing Priscilla."

I was about to say...then you said it. While I enjoyed the film, it made absolutely no sense. Even after I read more on Final Fantasy, I still was confused.
So, um, cool story, I think?

If you ever played FF7, which this is a direct sequel to, you'd know the problem. Nothing makes any bit of sense whatsoever. It's really only nerdgasm eyecandy. I loved upon first viewing, because it had sephiroth, it looked good, it had insane 'stunts', etc.

Since then, I've grown very far away from even enjoying anime to the slightest(sorry, I have), so now I see the film for what it actually is. Horrific.

Attack the Block did not get any press in the US. It's been word-of-mouth, like District 9. I'll definitely have to catch up with it.

I rewatched Waking Ned Devine yesterday, which I loved just as much this time as I did the first. My 9-y-o nephew watched the last hour of it and liked it a lot. For me, this stands with Local Hero and (to a slightly lesser degree) The Englishman Who Went up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as simply adorable British film making.

Then my 9-y-o niece arrived, and the three of us watched Big Trouble in Little China. It was awesome, altho the monster was scary but you could kind of tell that it was fake.

Ninotchka was a real disappointment. I remember liking Greta Garbo in other stuff in my college film class, but this comedy of manners didn't work for me at all. She's a humorless Soviet diplomat romanced by Melvyn Douglas as a slick, unscrupulous sort—the missed remake should have starred Jodie Foster and George Clooney. It's considered a major classic, but all the humor falls flat, and Douglas seems old and unlikeable. I gave up after 20 minutes, not long after she falls for him and learns to laugh—because I didn't.

America has no comedy double acts. What has happened to us? 

Stand up comedy has replaced the older vaudeville model, comedy clubs replacing nightclubs. You still have double acts, but you have to look at the sketch TV shows to find them. Comedy Central has one, Key and Peel.

NBC will save us from Dane Cook, they cancelled his sitcom before it even aired

Maybe it's just that double acts lasted longer in the UK than in the US, because even theirs are dying out. And maybe the ones that still exist are no more prominent there than here.

In the US, we had Abbott & Costello, Burns & Allen, Lewis & Dean, Hope & Crosby, the Smothers Brothers, Rowan & Martin, and so on, which were gone by the mid-'70s (altho the Smothers Brothers soldiered on in relative obscurity for years.) Ackroyd & Belushi ended in the mid-'80s.

Whereas the UK had Cook & Moore, the Two Ronnies, Morecambe & Wise, Fry & Laurie, French & Saunders, and such. The latter three lasted into the '80s and '90s. Pegg & Frost are probably the most prominent double act now.