Time travel movies invariably make very little sense, and Source Code looks goofier and more arbitrary than is average: I mean, why would you build a technology that lets someone go into dead people? And why for the last 8 minutes of their lives? How do you not die if you’re in that person when they die?  Would a government agency really think it’s acceptable collateral damage... 

One of the consequences of Americans’ increased concerns about terrorism and the rise of an enormous American security state has been a corresponding (if not casually related) rise in entertainment about that security state. We don’t just have shows about cops anymore. We’ve got shows and movies about intelligence analysts, and field agents, and the politics of intelligence. Apparently,... 

Battle: Los Angeles certainly looks high-end and glossy, and I do rather like Aaron Eckhart, even though he sometimes embarrasses himself by being in very silly things: But it illustrates a variant of the general problem with alien invasion movies. If you’re going to make the effort to invade a planet, traveling across time and space to do so, wouldn’t you want to do the basic reconnaissance to... 

Given the slight Sense and Sensibility kick I’m on, I was a bit concerned about the upcoming modernization of the series with a Latina twist, From Prada to Nada. Fortunately, we’ve got a trailer I can agonize over: I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about this. Sure, the main characters before they lose their money have more in common with the novel’s social climbers, and... 

As I imagine many of you can tell, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to construct narrative, story and character over the last three or four months. So I quite enjoyed this essay by Chris Braak that io9 republished over the weekend on how to understand evil characters, and providing a taxonomy of kinds of evil and how they affect the appropriate responses in the fiction in which... 

I get why CBS and other networks might want to use Hulu as a portal to their own web-based video players. It makes sense to snag viewers who want to go to one site for all of their streaming entertainment, but to get them to a place where CBS presumably gets all the revenue from online advertising (even if there are costs associated with doing the work themselves). Except, CBS’s video player... 

Netflix has put more seasons of Spooks on Instant Watch, much to my delight (though for some reason, Season Five isn’t available, which is rather vexing). I still think one of the best summings-up of the show comes from the Twitter feed of drsamueljohnson, who declared it an “Altar on which a patriotick Mummer-Troupe does save Britain by frequent Sacrifice of its attractive Members.”... 

It is a waste of a good Batman, both in casting and plot arc, to send the dude to New Orleans to fight a giant crocodile. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. The only place it makes sense for this iteration of Bruce Wayne to go is Catwoman. We’ve had the rise to responsibility. We’ve had the abuse of power (which I think worked because it was broadly topical, and an... 

I don’t think I want to play: just don’t have the time to get immersed right now, and I feel like if I was going to play, I’d want to be more experienced so I can enjoy it, rather than feeling like it’s a frustrating learning experience. But I dipped into some very basic reading about the series since rumors of a movie are floating again, and I was wondering if any of y’all... 

I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times here that I never really played video games in any serious way. The one game I did spend any substantial time messing around in was Myst, which apparently is now going to be a movie. I never finished Myst or honestly even got close. I actually don’t think I was ever trying particularly hard to get to the end. Instead, I enjoyed the contemplativeness...