No, he's been piling on the soy dog-treats or whatever it is Those People eat.

This question presupposes that most soldiers make a conscious, well-informed choice from a wide breadth of attractive options, rather than being coerced by a combination of inescapably dire socio-economic circumstances and timeless mythology about the inherent nobility of soldiering spread by people who, as evidenced by their ability to talk about it, obviously never experienced the ultimate realities of soldiering for themselves. But then I'm on thin ice, because neither did I, so for all I know soldiering is the bee's knees.

Well, if we're going to be a dick about it with a ridiculously hypothetical scenario, I'm going to be a Black Ops or whatever they're called. You know, the guys who are always yelling "Go! Go! Go!" Man I hate those schmucks.

Well, there are those who would argue that there are more pressing questions to ask when casting someone in a movie than "are his legs the right shape" and "is his hair okay at the moment." Casting is like picking songs to underscore your scenes: an obsessive literal-mindedness will lead to making choices that seem okay until shortly after you have made them, at which time they will be revealed as the stupidest thing you could possibly do under the circumstances.

This is not to say I think there are any problems with casting Keanu Reeves in a Cowboy Bebop movie per se. I have only seen the feature-length Cowboy Bebop film, and as its reason for being seemed to be "enacting scenes from other movies in cartoon form with a studio band playing copyright-skirting versions of popular rock music in the background," I can't remember all that clearly whether I was watching Cowboy Bebop itself or the scenes that it was restaging; so you'll excuse my not being intimately familiar with the work. Is this Cowboy character somewhat of a blank slate, a featureless vessel for us to fill with our own self-image? Does the Bebop of the title refer to a chaotic series of circumstances mainly visited upon Cowboy, compelling him to react like the blankly-staring subject in Eisenstein's montage experiments so that, like the participants in those experiments, we can choose to interpret him as displaying whatever feelings we feel most appropriate to the circumstances?

There is a wonderful essay called "Being Keanu" (available at http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/BeingKeanu.pdf ) which explains why Keanu Reeves works so well in Speed, The Matrix and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure; we might update that list to include A Scanner Darkly, because it is another movie in which Reeves' basic duty is to look good while reacting to a fantastic plot containing many ideas which we, and Keanu, are mainly being asked to consider, rather than taking too much agency over. I have little time for discussions of whether Keanu Reeves "can act," which is not to say I think he will be winning an Oscar any time soon, but I wonder if an exploration of the function we obviously have for him might yield an answer to the question of "Should Keanu Reeves play Cowboy?"

I prefer questions to be submitted when the questioner is at least partially sober for this very reason, but assuming you meant to say "do you think any live action material will be far better off in an anime format," then yes, I suppose that once a movie passes a certain threshold of "putting CGI in front of me just to make the statement that you are capable of putting CGI in front of me," I would prefer that you just go all out and make a cartoon out of it, so that (1) your intentions will be clearer and more upfront, and (2) I can, thinking realistically about this, probably remain oblivious to your movie's existence.

There are three possible outcomes here (well, only two, but it is customary to discuss them as if there were three). One is good, one is morally neutral (in as much as there is a moral dimension to the idea of adapting cartoons to live action, which there probably is, in a way I haven't considered), and the third, again, doesn't really exist.

The best case scenario in such an adaptation is that the movie is markedly different from the source material, technically proficient, and judged by audiences to be enjoyable for whole new reasons, which is to say, good.

The okay-case scenario is that the live-action movie is exactly as good as the cartoon, for all the same reasons as the cartoon, but takes place in live-action. This would be pointless because there already IS something that is already as good as the cartoon, for all the same reasons as the cartoon, this thing being the cartoon. Such an outcome is actually impossible for a wide variety of reasons, but is exactly what nerds want; therefore we can say that it exists as an idea solely to highlight an existentially troublesome imaginative blind-spot in the nerd psyche.

This leads into the worst-case (and in this event, most likely) scenario, which is that people who go to the movie, particularly those who enjoy the source material, do not enjoy the movie and it is judged to be a failure. This leads all sorts of people to complain that the movie has "ruined" the source material, which is a strange thing to complain about because the source material is still right there sitting on their shelves.

So, in answer to your question, if you believe that enjoyable movies are an expression of "good" (which, with reservations, I do), then certainly I think good can come of anime being translated into a live action format; and certainly no "bad" can come of anime being translated into a live-action format, except possibly from some sort of perspective of cultural recuperation and hegemonic control of the shared narrative and what-all, but that is not a conversation for today.

Aliens is my single favourite movie of all time. Alien I think is a tremendously adventurous, exciting, well-made picture and the last time I watched it I was really impressed. It's a movie that countless pictures have imitated, but very few have even tried to replicate the things that really distinguish it. It's hard to imagine how a movie could have a similar impact today.

Maybe it would be funny to re-answer this in a completely contradictory way, but I don't think my brand is established enough to risk it with that sort of gimmickry.

The film. In the commentary to the movie, Pahlaniuk basically says he wishes he'd thought of using that ending. I think Fight Club the book is made retroactively better if you map the style and concerns of Fight Club the movie onto it, and the ending is the only time in which that's impossible. I do like the nuanced spirituality of the book's ending, and I'd hate for "there's no way to get that right on film" to come across as "it's not as good as something cinematic," but where the book aims all over the place and occasionally wings one of its many targets, the movie knows what it's going for and gets there ably.

I don't think any good can come of meddling with powers you can't possibly comprehend, even in a cartoon.

That person and I clearly have different opinions about the purpose or definition of levity. I might call on the works of Mel Brooks, Roberto Benigni, Charlie Chaplin, Walter Moers, Art Spiegelman, Steven Spielberg or Grant Morrison, all of whom have covered the Nazis and their malfeasances with enough honesty to admit the ironic/blackly comic/ridiculous/absurd elements of that period in history, to help my case; but honestly, I feel like "how can you joke about bad things?" is such an entry-level question for discussions of humor and its role in human communication that I don't know that I can be bothered.

No, I'm having genuine trouble understanding what you mean by "evil" unless it's defined by human language and actions. Do you mean humanity is "against nature?" Well, what nature is human progress in violation of - the transitory order of things or the longer-term entropic degradation of the universe? Do you mean humanity is "breaking the rules?" Well, yes, we very often do, but those are our own rules, whether self-invented or passed down specifically to us by a higher power. As I said in my first answer, I'm fully on board with the notion that humankind has this notion of what it is to do "evil" and that the ascent of man is littered with crucial junctions at which such a thing has been done and that has been good for some people, but that's not what you're looking for. You're asking if the mass of humanity as a whole has been thrust upward by evil acts or attitudes. Well, people do evil to other people all the time, but that doesn't make all of humanity evil, just the people doing the evil, and thus you can't say that those people have advanced "humanity" in general, because the victims are human too.

You can't point to, say, the slave trade and say here is an example of an evil thing that drives human progress upward, because there are millions of humans in the equation who quite obviously are not progressing anywhere apart from through a thankless existence to a premature grave in foreign soil. Has human progress been fueled by human predation on other humans? Certainly. Does that make all humankind evil? To say so would be to deny the humanity of the victims, or to suggest that they too have "progressed."

This leaves violence done against non-humans. Obviously humans do plenty of that. But the only way in which we can understand that in terms of "good" or "evil" is in terms of what it means for people. Is it "evil" to raze a rainforest to the ground? Probably yes it is, because that affects the ecosystem that humans will have to live in for generations to come. Is it "evil" to kill and eat an animal? That is a whole nother conversation, and if you believe that eating meat is evil, then I suppose yes, you would have to conclude that humankind is literally fueled by evil. Personally I do not believe that.

So again, if your question is, "has evil driven human progress onward and upward," I would say no, because either it wasn't really evil, it wasn't really progress, it wasn't really applicable to all humans, or you're asking me to apply human standards to a non-human universe.

But the only framework we have for discussing evil is within the parameters of human language and consciousness itself. If you believe that good or evil are older and larger than humankind, you will not find me unsympathetic to your arguments, but the fact remains that the means we use for discussing such a dichotomy is the same network of causality and signification that we use to understand our own agency within the world. Theodicists will point to natural disasters or animal attacks as signs that nature too is capable of evil, but this strikes me as a bit like putting a Raggedy Ann hat on a cat (have you seen them? They are delightful!) and then saying "I am sure this is a cat who likes mopping the floor!"

If we employ a concept like Schopenhauer's Will to Life or Nietzche's Will to Power - both of which I have heard discussed in the cut-scenes for several PlayStation games and will have you know I understand at LEAST halfway - then maybe we can say, here is evil over here and here is the human drive to survive and prosper over here, does the latter have too much of the former in it? But the idea is meant to be that the Will to Power is the logical extension of the Will to Life and furthermore that a being truly instantiative of the Will to Power would be beyond good and evil (which, ironically, is a PlayStation game I have not even played). So, thanks Arthur and Fred, fat lot of use you have been to us today.

So what you're in effect asking, then, is, "do we often fall short of the standards of upright behaviour toward each other and our environment to which we have set ourselves?" and I would say to that, well, yes, it is fairly obvious that we do.

Oh, you know, this and that.

Sometimes they come out very promptly. Usually there is a noticeable delay. Sometimes a movie that got general release in America will get festival release months and months later here then skulk off to DVD distribution. Often things just won't come out and we will thank our lucky stars that the Government knows just enough about intellectual property legislation on the Internet to know that it doesn't know enough to pass laws that would impede our ability to download things and watch them. But that may change.

I am a pretty ornery gentleman, but a large part of this is that I just really like the word "ornery." I think that there is value in constructive discontentment, both for the individual practicing it and for those whose ears he might chance to bend; but there is a fine line between constructive discontentment and whinging, and at this point the whingers may have ruined it for us all.

As regards to being happy, I'd say probably, but I think the dedicated ornerian probably shares an understanding that the commonly-understood notion of "happiness" probably isn't something to be aspired to all that fervently anyhow.

I'm not sure that I know enough to comment, but everyone I have ever met who has taught or advocated Zumba has been a stand-up type of character, so.

Dear Mr. Eliot, I am enamored of your work and flattered that you would ask me a question on The Form Spring. Have you heard my podcast? It is work after your own heart. Anyway, in answer to your question, full fathom five your Blestien lies under the flatfish and the squids, obviously.

I'll let you know in a month or so, when it finally comes out here. Of course by that time it will not be a scathing story of an important presence in our time so much as a quaint document of How They Lived Back Then, but history is interesting.

That's not a question.