No, you’re good. Excuse me if I wasn’t clear. I meant I want him to work on a book for four or five years, like I saw he used to do. Now, I don’t recall if his current output takes that long—as seen on his date notices at the back of the book. If they do, then I’m glad. If he writes books much faster than he used to,…

True, but I meant the tag, after the end of the book, of when he started and finished writing the thing. In the 1980s, those dates were likely 4 years apart.

It's a great book. I've only read Revival once, but I remember thinking it was one of his best books among those years.

That one major political party, with great power at the state and federal level, is the repository of immoral and awful people, many actual criminals (violent or thieves), and that tens of millions of regular Americans keep voting for them in spite of this, showing how morally debased they have become—all this is a big…

I was wondering how, even prolific as he is, he could have written another book when his last one came out not that long ago. That this one is only 260 pages explains it. My druthers, I wish he’d go back to how he worked in his early days and spend 4, 5 years writing a book that was really good, a late-career…

So in terms of 2021 Emmy consideration, Rhea Seehorn will have exactly the same effect on voters as she does when there’s a broadcast season.

I'd rather watch an anime sequel to Bowfinger. Think of the possibilities!

So Tom and Jerry are the animated, animal version of The Three Stooges.

As someone who likes short seasons, I noted the mention of a grueling 24 episode season contributing to that toxic work environment. Even though young TV of the ‘50s and ‘60s had shows with over 30 episodes a season, there’s little reason today why series can’t be 6 to 10 eps a year. Better for the cast and crew and,…

It’s been months since I read the book. Now that you mention it, I seem to recall he refers to the great work done on TV but says something like it's the exception to the rule, and other mediums are doing the nostalgia thing too much. And even TV over the past 2 decades has done its fair share of recycling.

Kurt Andersen, in his recent history (called Evil Geniuses) of how the right-wingers radically changed America’s government and economy over the last forty years, for the worse, argues that a side effect was how American culture came to a standstill, didn’t advance like it had always done. He started noticing it in…

Gary Marshall’s romantic comedy, New Year’s Eve, rotated on cable recently. Never saw the movie. But just watching a few minutes at different times, I was pretty surprised every single cast member, it felt like, was a well-known/big actor. Even doing a tiny, one-scene part. At least Modern Love is 8 or 10 hours long,…

It’s not like Shearer is gonna lose money. How much money do all these people in the main cast have anyway? Must be dozens if not hundred plus millions each.

Right. Just because they're the protagonists doesn't mean they have to be some kind of hero. They can be the villains. "Anti-hero" as a category I wish would die. Among other things, it's reductive.

With guest star Peter Stomare stealing a battery.

TBOH is a good movie. People should check it out.

I had this thought on my latest rewatch of Hitch’s The Birds. Didn’t quite buy young looking Jessica Tandy being the mom of both 30 something Rod Taylor and 11 year old Veronica Cartwright.

Maybe you’re being too candid saying she was miscast in many a role. No offense, but that’s not very nice to say in a career-retrospective interview, even if it is how you feel about her.

When you decided to be a film critic, how many movies per day did you see? You had to become educated and literate in the classics, which by themselves are a huge number, over a 100 years of cinema. And you had to do more than a superficial analysis of any film in front of you, so you could have something to write and…

Even setting aside the photoshopping, that’s just an aesthetically ugly cover in image and cluttered, unnecessarily varied text.