Edwin MacPhisto

Interesting. If it was the plan all year, then I'd say they fucked up, but I imagine it's because they need to slot in "The Girl In Question" to give some resolution to the love triangle. Leave that out and essentially start bringing together the Black Thorn threads one episode sooner so we can get the subtleties, and you're probably perfect on that arc. But understandable, and considering how fun the aforementioned episode was, more power to em.

Thumbtack is smashing up prices.

If it "got over" on one element, I don't think the non-linearity was it. I think it became popular and well-acclaimed because it's a pretty great movie in all aspects, but if there's one thing that cinched it, it was the dialogue. An incredibly quotable movie - sometimes to excess, depending on the people doing such - and great, juicy lines and monologues for every character.

Meh. He's probably my least favorite of the original Wu-Tang, but a lot of that is because Enter the Wu-Tang is my bible and he has all of one verse on that. Pass.

I love that album dearly, but the one real danger zone is "Trucker's Atlas." The song goes on for about 12 minutes, if I recall, and for the last 8 or 9 it pretty much just rides on the same bass groove. Worst, it hits right around the 50-minute point, when any album can start to get dire. I think pretty much everything else on there works in the length it's at. Sometimes. Occasionally I question why I'm buying a 30-minute album that I already have downloaded, but usually that only happens if I'm on the fence about the album's quality anyway or if it's ridiculously over-priced. The Beatles' Revolver is just over 30 and Prince's Dirty Mind only just hits 30, but I think they're both perfect.

What does this actually mean, and why should it have any effect on the material itself? I went with "Awesome" for the same reasons AoO stated. "Maynard is God" sounds a little too creepy. For me, Tool are the perfect blend of expert musicianship and expert songwriting. Virtuosity without too much wankery, and a sense of atmosphere that most heavier bands would kill to have. They manage to merge the epic and the intimate in almost every song, and each of their pieces is loaded with movements and shifts. They can do verse-chorus-verse stuff wonderfully, weird shifting stuff like "Eulogy" or "Aenema," or incredible suites like the three-part "Disposition/Reflection/Triad" that closes Lateralus. Tool is one of the rare groups that, in my opinion, have never put out a bad piece of music. Some of it's better than others, but it's always good.

It doesn't have Slash by the church, which is the big rock-out moment burned in everyone's memory. It does, however, have Slash on a conveyor belt, and lots of dolphins. I also think it's a better song than "November Rain" by a good hop.

I think 1999 saw the most overrated flicks to ever get released. And for the most part, succeeded. Don't say things I agree with. It generates cognitive dissonance. I remember sitting around in September of 1999 just as most of these movies were starting to come out, and being really, really excited about the fall. Felt like it paid off, too.

I don't really buy that. The Vines - the singles off their first album, at least, which is all I've ever heard - aped early 90's grunge-rock and did the start-stop loud-soft thing. The Strokes have a stripped down detached sound that sounds much more new wave than 70's rock to me, especially on their most recent album. The White Stripes are just a duo playing a bunch of weird, sometimes bluesy, sometimes country, sometimes arena rock. Neither "Hotel Yorba" nor "Fell in Love With A Girl" nor "Ball and Biscuit" nor their cover of "Jolene" (which might be the best thing they've ever recorded) nor the vast majority of their catalog sounds like what I'd call 70's rock. Recorded on old equipment, sure. I don't care if the music's simplistic; if you can make good music with a guitar and drums (as I believe the White Stripes often do, especially on White Blood Cells), then I'd rather have you than a rock god. Jet do ape 70's rock, and quite consciously it seems, and I've been unimpressed with them so far.

Pulp Fiction is definitely my pick. Love Shawshank too, but I'm going against the early grain in this thread and saying that Pulp Fiction is the one that holds up so much better on repeated viewings. Strongly disagreed. First off, there isn't even that much blood in Pulp Fiction. There's not even nearly as much violence in there as you might find in any R-rated action movie, and most of what is there is stylized to the point of humorous excess or situational comedy. Kill Bill, sure. Pulp Fiction, no way. But onto the more serious point. Tarantino might put up the front of being hip and showing mayhem (though I really don't think he does that so much anyway), but in Pulp Fiction he takes a great group of character actors, gives them juicy parts, and shows admirable restraint in how he actually frames shots. For me the success of the movie is the interplay between all these slightly odd but always believable people - it's partly the triumph of the screenplay, partly what each of those actors bring to the table, and a lot of Tarantino bringing it together as director. For all its frenetic energy and strange situations, the movie and the people within it are very well-grounded in the world of the film. The movie never betrays the world it has engineered and it serves as a playground for these great stories that are trashy but sophisticated at the same time. If you want an all-encompassing theme like Masked Man of Mystery asked for earlier in the thread, the best I can say is that it serves as a look at how people can interact and find themselves connected to each other in the strangest ways, and how redemption is neither an easy nor altogether pleasant thing to pursue. All in all, that's my pretty ham-fisted wrap-up of a piece of film that deserves a lot more consideration than just to be classified as having a particular "point" or message to it.

Man, chill. Remember when I said this? I'm talking about writing, not the opinions posited. Very few people at 411 can string coherent, decently spelled sentences together, and most of what the regular writers generate is masturbatory, exclamation-point laden crap. I'm not compelled to read something written at an 8th-grade level. I don't read print video game magazines either, so I don't know why you launched that surly, fiery rant. Some of the points the author makes about FF7 are perfectly salient. He just needs an editor or a remedial writing class to help touch up the majority of his piece.

Can we please stop classing all these groups together? They got big around the same time (with the exception of Jet) and play guitars. Where the hell is the similarity? I like the White Stripes and a good bit of the Strokes, for the record. There's a certain charm to the well-tuned apathy the latter pull off.

Ugh, that was awful. With very few exceptions, 411 "columnists" are some of the worst writers I've had the misfortune of reading. Some of the points are decent, despite the asinine presentation. It does have a story that, after you start getting to all the big revelations, kinda falls apart. If I played it now I probably wouldn't like it as much, but hey, I was 14 in 1997. After adoring Chrono Trigger and FF6, this was huge and, ultimately, the reason I bought a Playstation. FF7 was really the Playstation's huge coming out party and one of the first games that was really an event. Thousands of pre-orders, free t-shirts (still use my old beat-up one as something to sleep in) and a general sense of immensity. I still think that the Midgar portion of the game is pretty much superb, as in that chunk we get an atmosphere totally different from previous Final Fantasy games and definitely the densest section of character in the game. Then the whole world opens up, and I remember actually being astonished that there was so much more to the game than Midgar, which I thought was huge. It falls off once you keep going, as the storyline gets all jumbled and sort of crawls to the final exposition. But I have fond memories of it, even if the characters were essentially the same in battle, and even if the no-mouth people with chunky hands were terrifyingly odd. It's a sentimental favorite for sure.

No, we saw her, if only for a minute. She was stuck in traffic, or at least sitting in a car. Basically, she was in the first 15 minutes of the season for around 45 seconds, and then gone. Alas. I kinda liked her by the end of last season, once she moved past her initial "my sister is a terrorist, ahh, my sister is a terrorist" stuff. I remember thinking it was a really odd choice to stick a person who was just a plain ol' civilian - admittedly, one who'd have a huge part in the season - in the main "starring" credits.

This article was awful. I think this has easily been the most subtle and character-driven season of 24, and you seem to have missed the point on most of it. Just about everything has been covered already though, so I won't nag on you anymore. Okay, maybe a bit. They "totally dropped the hotel plot"? Come on now, how often do we need to be reminded that yes, there's a virus in the hotel, and no, it hasn't been entirely contained? We want back to the hotel for something in just about every episode anyway, whether it be showing images to Jane Saunders to convince her about her father, or having Jack threaten to shove her into the hotel in the second-to-last hour. I don't know where you get all this Palmer nonsense. He took the pills early in the day, and at no point did anyone say "take these pills every hour or you DIE," or anything of the sort. I thought it was lip service to the attack that, in storyline time, happened three years earlier, so that we could see he had survived but still had to be cautionary. He probably just needs to take some pills each day. Big deal. Also, you apparently missed the two Palmer brothers openly weeping in David's office after Wayne explains what happened to Sherry, and the struggle Palmer had to keep going on stopping the virus and preventing a panic despite his shock and horror at how it all ended up. The answer? His resignation. He's not resigning yet and he just wanted to tell Jack before the rest of the world knew, so why on earth do we need to see some big dramatic thing about it now? One of the things I love most about this show is that it sets up threads, resolves a lot of them, but leaves a few of the less-exciting ones - how will Jack get through rehab, where will Michelle go now that Tony is probably going to jail, how will the public respond to Palmer's choice to not run again - up in the air until we hit the next season. It takes place in 24 hours and we already get enough crises as it is - I don't want the writers to foolishly try to wrap up things that very obviously will take more than a day to settle, especially when we already have some general suggestion of what will happen based on the rest of the season.

And for every one of these I can pick out the annihilation of Howard Dean, the obsession with Clinton's sex life, etc. I'm not really concerned with anecdotes - there are thousands on either side of partisanship. I'm more interested in seeing long-term analysis of media trends - coverage of the 1994 congressional elections versus coverage of elections with a different outcome, for example. Lots of sources, and a meticulously designed model for determining best what accounts for bias. If you just want to play the anecdote game, then the media isn't biased in any particular direction - it's just a bunch of jackasses.

I like The Streets. Haven't heard the new album yet, mostly because I've been listening to Dizzee Rascal again, pretty endlessly for the past few days. Oh, those Brits, always fighting for my earspace.

They're not proven true, Mike. For one thing, more people chose moderate than liberal or conservative. This doesn't do much to reinforce the conservative view that about 75% of the nation's media is liberally biased. Secondly, it counts each individual as one point. That doesn't do very good. That means that the coffee guy at Fox News saying he's a liberal means just as much as Brit Hume saying he's a conservative, but which employee holds more weight in the presentation of the news and the journalistic integrity? For another example, let's pretend we're talking about the old era of CNN. Now, the guy who runs the Copy Room says he's a conservative, but Ted Turner says he's a liberal. Is that equally important to determining the bias of the network? Wouldn't you say that Turner's influence is probably that of a dozen or more copy boys? Well, since Pew wasn't questioning the guys in the mail room and the like --- your entire argument is moot. -=Mike That part of his argument is, but he's still right that it doesn't prove much. Indirect claims of media bias like this just flop all over the place. Pew does this sort of thing a lot, and while their methodology is great, the actual tangible impact of this particular study isn't very high. Members of the media tend to consider themselves more liberal than conservative. Okay, everybody knows this already - when you find the studies that have direct claims of media bias - i.e., content analysis, then I will care. The notion that a journalist can try to be objective isn't entirely lost on me. Preferences slip in, but most of the studies of direct bias that I've seen indicate that questions of corporate ownership in the news should be much more of a concern than if someone voted for Clinton.

"Passion" blew through everything. If I remember correctly, it didn't get a single vote cast against it until the round of 8. Which I noted as odd, because I think it's really really good, but that there are still 2 or 3 episodes even in season 2 alone that I like much better.

You don't even have to be that rich. Go to Barnes and Noble online or Amazon, and you'll probably be able to order all 10 main trades for $130. Which isn't pocket change, but, for 75 issues of one of the most astounding fantasy endeavors ever, is totally worth it. I would recommend it sight unseen if you like good storytelling, if you like comics, or if you like great character-based literature. To me, Gaiman's Sandman is the ultimate crossover comic; anyone I know who reads is enchanted for one reason or another. I love Sandman to death. And despair. And desire. Ho ho.

Oh man.

Yeah, tonight's episode was excellent. Subdued, and the dispatch of Saunders was very anti-climactic. But I think it was the right way to go about a finale for this crazy day. We got the huge all-out action ending two hours ago. This was the effect of what's built up throughout. I'm so glad nothing crazy or super-shocking happened to close out the season. I expected that we'd get a huge cliffhanger, and I was so pleased to find the show so anchored in its main character,and willing to give the last two minutes to his quiet, stoic release of everything that's built up all day. The cliffhanger is about how everyone - Jack especially - is going to deal with the changes of the day. Jack soldiers on. It was the worst day we've seen in 24. The most consequences of any day, far-reaching, and really huge in scope. Every season there are a few people who lose a lot - Jack loses Teri in the first season, Kate Warner loses her sister and the whole family falls apart on day two. This year, everyone lost something, and what they lost was big. Great season.

The world title is a beautiful, loose whore. Someone needs to pick up on LDP's old title histories to see how many times this thing has changed hands in the last year. My eyes are starting to hurt. The fed has developed a weird sort of parity, which is cool and always keeps you on your toes, but I miss reading the 4- and 5-defense title reigns that lasted a couple of months.

Is anything going to beat Not Fade Away in this poll? I don't think so. I think I'll pass on voting since I haven't seen enough of the early seasons. Alas. There's a summer project...

And Whedonesque has a great little Angel puppet picture for its IE icon. I've been going there for almost two years now and it continually impresses. Good comments section too.