proserpina65

If Keira Knightley is in a film, I'm pretty much guaranteed to miss it, no matter how much I might like the other actors or how interested I might be in the subject matter. I find her to be such a bad actor that she usually ruins an otherwise potentially good film. (The only possible exception to this rule is if a somewhat obscure actor whom I quite like is also in it, because I have extremely limited access to most of his work.) I only watched the P&P with her after reading scathing, yet hysterically funny reviews from two of my Austenite friends; for me it works solely as an MST3K-style object of ridicule. Yes, I am also a Jane Austen snob.

And she got an undeserved Oscar to boot. Viriginia Madsen was completely robbed that year. It's also inaccurate, or at least it was when I was in Paris in 1995. In the two French McDonald's I visited, one in Paris and one in Carcassone (I was a cheap college student - don't hate me), there was no such thing as a "royale" or "royale with cheese" on the menu - it was "le Quarterpounder" and "le Quarterpounder avec frommage".

I have no opinion of Keira Knightley one way or the other as a person, but I hate her as an actress because she simply cannot act. She has one set of mannerisms she uses in every role, and aside from Bend It Like Beckham, it almost never suits the character and is particularly out of place in period pieces. She was the utter antithesis of Lizzie Bennett, although everything about that movie (other than Judi Dench and Donald Sutherland) is the perfect definition of 'suck' - the writing, the directing, the set design, the costume and hair design, etc., were atrocious. (The members of Monty Python would've done a more authentic representation of the characters and the story with an all-male cast.) Plus, as Oakgoblinfly pointed out, Ms. Knightley seems absolutely incapable of properly opening her mouth; her jaw is always clenched like she's suffering from lockjaw. NO

I haven't seen Portman in enough things to have an opinion on her, but Keira Knightley has only ever been good in one thing, Bend It Like Beckham, and even in that, she was the least good performer in it. And yes, she bloody well looks like she has tetanus 24-7. Her performance in Pride and Prejudice was an abomination, although 99% of that film was an abomination, but she stood out as particularly awful.

The Age of Innocence. Or as the friend with whom I saw it likes to call it: "The Age of Ennui". So boring it was physically painful to sit in the theater seat watching it, but neither one of us wanted to admit that we were bored and so we suffered through to the end. Stuart Wilson's character was the only one worth watching so naturally he was only in it for a few minutes here and there. Daniel Day Lewis wasn't portraying Victorian uprightness; he was just constipated. And the less said about Winona Ryder's dreadful performance, the better. I will, however, still look at the opera scenes when it shows up on tv because they were filmed at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia (being one of the few surviving opera houses of the correct period whose interior hasn't been irredeemably modernized) where I used to have season tickets to the opera. Preach on, brother/sister! The saga started with Star Wars and ended with Return of the Jedi - nothing else.

Yeah, sometimes knowing a lot about a subject makes me overthink it rather than concentrating on the clue. I get stuck on one bit of info and can't work my way past it to the actual answer.

West Brom has never really been one of the top clubs in England, even though they've managed to scrap and claw their way back up to the Premiership, so them playing a USL team isn't such a stretch. Rangers, on the other hand, is one of the two really big Scottish teams; they are the other half of the Old Firm (along with Celtic) which is one of the oldest rivalries in European football, and have actually won more league titles than any other team in Scotland - only Celtic has come close to the number of titles. They suffered some terrible financial mismanagement a few years ago, went into receivership, and were punished by the Scottish FA by being sent down to the lowest level of Scottish professional football; they've been rapidly climbing their way back up the various divisions, and I fully expect them to be back in the Scottish Premiership for the 2015/2016 season. Them playing Sacramento is more of a case of a shark playing against minnows - no disrespect intended to Sacramento.

I did what I assume Kat did: got stuck on 'reformation' and couldn't get past that to 'protestant' even though knew the date was wrong for the Reformation, or at least the beginning of it. (And I took a college class on the Reformation.)

My dream categories: Opera, Music (including Classical), Shakespeare, European and Military History, Art, Television and Movies. Nightmare ones: Math, Science, Politics/Government, Sports (except for Soccer and the Olympics) and, as I discovered during my Final Jeopardy, Inventors. Thanks a lot, F**king Alex - f**king Ander f**king Graham f**king Bell (as he will forever be known in my house) and your f**king ear! I hate those, mainly because, like you, I can't figure them out quickly enough. Although I am getting better at rhyme time. I wish I'd read up on the aforementioned inventor. And a little more on government. But mostly I wish I'd not answered stupidly on the very first question (The! The answer is "The"!), not guessed at a couple answers late in DJ (otherwise I might've had enough to win if I'd wagered nothing on the FJ because we all got it wrong), and been picked for the game right before mine, because I knew that FJ when none of those contestants did.

I'm a Madonna fan, but I couldn't pull the title of that one out of my head to save my life. I felt pretty stupid about it. But at least I got "Take A Bow". That or a lot of pop culture stuff that even my nephews are too old to be into. I came up with Mount Vernon - simply because it was all I could think of, and I had no idea when it had been designated a national landmark. When I saw the correct answer, I went "D'oh!" because obviously, given the year.

No, you're not imagining it. Last season we saw Alan tell Celia that Gillian admitted to finding Eddie before he was dead and not calling for help. Nothing about finishing him off. And that is the story she herself told John this season. The finishing him off bit is totally a retcon.

For me, Teyonna was the worst winner ever, hands down. She looked like a frickin' velociraptor. And not in a model-y way. Grandma Krista was bad, too, although at least she could pose. And Alison not winning the all-star season was the biggest travesty on this show.

I've started to wonder if the show's gotten all new writers since the first season, because the entire dynamic of this relationship, and a good bit of the backstory, has changed radically. It's like they've forgotten everything they told us about Gillian and her marriage in season one. Exactly.

My prediction is that Arsenal will stupidly fail to win their group but will advance, only to draw Barca or Bayern in the next round and go home in ignominious defeat yet again. <sigh>

HBO releases the most recent season of all their shows about a month before the next season of the show in question premieres. It's about getting potential subscribers excited enough to get HBO for the new season.

NBC Sports had matches online last season. They'll probably do that again for the upcoming season.

Lucky dog! It's not part of mine so I have to depend on the few matches shown on regular NBC and a friend who does get NBCSports for my Arsenal fix. (It's only fair - when I had FoxSoccer, I used to tape Chelski matches for her.) I'm hoping this coming season that NBC will use more of their channels for EPL matches; there's nothing on MSNBC and CNBC on Saturdays that isn't worth not bumping for football.

That we saw. For all we know, Ghost might've taken out a dozen, but the production budget being what it was, we only got to see him kill the one wildling. Just like we only got one mammoth - those things are bloody expensive. I think if the giant had made it past Grenn Team Six (love that btw), he'd have already been rampaging in the courtyard, long before the battle ended.

I had no idea that Malta was a former British possession. I just guessed it at random. Pure fluke that I got it right.

I see comments like this but you have to realize that the show isn't catering to just a certain subset of viewers. They have to cover a wide swathe of storylines, and really, what's happening at the Wall (and what will happen if it isn't held) renders everything else kind of pointless in the end. And no way could they have covered the battle for the Wall in 15 minutes; that would've made it all look silly.

Actually it's 100,000 wildlings.

It looked like the scythe would only work once the climbers got up to a certain height, so they had to wait to use it. And I suspect, based on Grenn's comment to Ser Alliser that he'd just brought up the last barrel of oil, that they had a limited supply, and therefore it made sense to wait until the mammoth and its accompanying crew were close enough to get hit by the oil before dropping it; it did seem like they could've done that a few minutes earlier, but it would've been wasting precious resources to do it too early. Nope, you're not the only one. I was glad he told the bear story, but I wanted to hear the rest of it.

The bulimia clue didn't strike me as particularly insensitive, but then again, I don't know anyone with an eating disorder; if I did (or had one myself), I'd probably feel differently. And I found Alex's Hamlet clue voices a bit amusing. Never occurred to me that the voice he used gave away the gender of the character; guess I was just more focused on reading the clue myself to notice. I can't even remember what the FJ was, so we'll just say "Of course I got it. It was so easy." and leave it at that.

I loved that category, mostly because it referenced Arsenal in a clue. Although given their results against Villa over the last few seasons, I'm not sure they'd be considered the favourite. So was I. It was right there in the photo, but I guess if you didn't know that R&H had written a musical named "Carousel", that might not have helped. I rather annoyed at myself for biffing the FJ - for some reason I keep forgetting that Penn is an Ivy League school, and I even have a friend who did her Masters there.

I believe the clue said that it was a 13th century painting of the murder of this 12th century person. I could be wrong, however. I did know it was Thomas a Becket right away, though. I totally blanked on the Kyoto Accords - for some reason my brain was heading for Iceland, even though I knew very well that was wrong. And I couldn't come up with 'Irving' for FJ to save my life. I knew the film/book title, knew Michael Caine was in the movie, knew the author's first name was John and that he'd also written "The World According to Garp" and "Hotel New Hampshire" (although I don't know if he wrote the screenplays for the films), and knew it wasn't John Steinbeck, John Grisham or John Updike, but the correct name just wouldn't worm its way out of my brain in time. I'm sorry to see Julia go, but I did like Brian and hope he stays awhile. Just not more than 19 games. I read a recent piece by Salon's tv critic advocating for the reinstatement of the 5-game winner limit because viewers don't get enough of a sense of contestants' personalities to stay interested in long winning streaks. Funny how he feels this way during Julia's 20 game streak, but thought people who got tired of Arthur Chu during his streak were just haters.