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Sounds a bit like Gutsville.

These are important questions to ask as geek culture changes and grows, and the answering of those questions would make an interesting movie.

Spurlock also missed out on the more obvious geek-culture insights to how Comic-Con has morphed over the years from a convention about comics to a trade show that includes genre fiction stars and porn stars side by side.  There's probably something interesting to be said about how it could be either that the strands of popular culture pull tighter together in an information age to create a microcosm of the geek interests of comics, sci-fi and wanking (or as I like to call it: 9am to 11am), or it could be a symptom of the death-knell of print comics that so much else has to be in play at the cons in order to make them financially viable.
Comic-Con could have been an invaluable insight to a vast section of once-niche pop-cultural consumers who now seem to be deliberately-targeted thanks to a combination of a low bar (set by years of being ignored and/or marginalised in culture) and large amounts of disposable income, but as you point out, it centers on human stories specific to the culture rather than the culture itself, though I can understand why Spurlock went there in order to make his documentary more relatable to... uh, well, to the large amounts of 'regular' people who would want to watch a documentary about people who like comics, I guess.

That's why it has a crime problem.

[Scandal]

If that's Scandal you're talking about, it's one of the worst television shows I've ever seen.  And I was sad when they cancelled a show starring Jim Belushi and Jerry O'Connell.

There is a certain expectation with a character like Dredd -as there is with RoboCop- who is a state sponsored fascist with an iconic gun and armoured bike, that there'l be at least some level of violence that isn't bloodless.

Rooster Cogburn is a mean SOB in both versions of True Grit and the addition of more graphic violence in the second version didn't make him any tougher.  Likewise, the lack of gore isn't what made Robocop: The Series so bad, and the violence-free Lawman of the Future wasn't a gash comic because Dredd didn't splatter people in it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm old enough to be able to watch whatever version they come up with, but I don't buy that it has to be a gorefest.

Gore won't make the story any smarter, it'll just appeal to a more easily-pleased punter, and of all the great PG films in existence, I'm not sure which ones could have been improved by the addition of graphic gunshot wounds.
A good story will survive not having any F-bombs or disembowelings in it - a bad one not so much.

It's one of those shows I couldn't get into at all.  For some reason, I kept thinking "this is stupid", which is an odd position for a sci-fi fan to find themselves in.

A common problem when making an ark is that 90 percent of zebras are homosexual.  You want a breeding pair, obviously, so be prepared for a long search through some admittedly banging zebra nightclubs.

Much as I hate Superman Returns, it actually has a lot to recommend it, it just goes out of its way to paint Superman as a stalker, date rapist, and deadbeat dad.

If all that was really in it, I'd watch it again. Though I must admit, in that excised Return to Krypton scene, I was rather thrown by Singer's direction as the camera tracked over Routh's splayed nylon arse-cheeks.

I have not seen this arse-ogling of which you speak, though may have to track it down in the name of science.  The rest is in there, though: Supes shags Lois, then wipes her memory of their sexual encounter and fucks off for five years while Lois finds herself pregnant but doesn't know how it happened.  Later Supes comes home and listens to Lois and her family (which he later breaks up) talking about him with his super-powers, then sneaks into her son's bedroom for some alone time.

Much as I hate Superman Returns, it actually has a lot to recommend it, it just goes out of its way to paint Superman as a stalker, date rapist, and deadbeat dad.  Based on your past form, SBT, I can see you enjoying Elektra, though: it's cheap and daft, but utterly single-minded, plus the 'making of' featurette is unintentionally hilarious when the actress playing the female antagonist - who is definitely not a truly terrible Typhoid Mary knock-off - opens her mouth to talk about her character.

[Pearl Harbor]

I would argue that Pearl Harbor belongs in the bottom 100, but freely admit that if you watch it as a comedy it is fantastic.

I actually love really bad tv regardless of genre, though shows like Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill that are at their heart rotten, hateful things devoid of even the tiniest sliver of humanity turn me off.

Xbox360 and PS3 are pretty much the same system nowadays - they've both got the same hardware, just the processors are a smidge different, and one has Halo.

Though I recall enjoying Halo 3, Star Trek: Legacy was a more significant 360 exclusive in my eyes (even if it forced you to play Voyager levels), but different controllers, dashboards, and the level of codec support for multimedia files are oddly what were deciding factors in which machine I ended up using more, even though I bought both as gaming machines, not multimedia hubs.

Verhoeven was notorious for using gallons of fake blood for gunshot impacts - mainly because so much of it turns into a red mist when splattering out of people on the set that it doesn't show up very well on camera, so he just kept making his FX team use more and more for the splats.  If you look at the corpses in his films shortly after they've been shot, there's probably more blood around them than could fit in a human body.


Bwwwrrrn.  Eh, me heart's not in it...

You don't get anybody telling you how much they love to sit down with a bad rom-com or watch badly acted, badly written indie relationship dramas with shit effects.

No, they usually just say something like "did you see that thing at 9 o'clock on ITV last night?"