While it’s certainly true that the Seattle sound eclipsed the L.A. sound in rock in the early 1990s, the contest took quite a bit longer to be settled than most people realize/remember. Use Your Illusion I/II (the follow-up to Appetite for Destruction) came out in September of 1991 — just one week prior to the release…

If you’re not a douchebag, you call Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Guns ‘N Roses and the other Led Zeppelin/Deep Purple-derived branch of bluesy metal bands “glam metal” and you trace their tights-and-teased-hair aesthetic back to David Bowie, Thin Lizzy, etc.

Hot take: The first two Thor movies’ flaws largely derive from the bland presence of Natalie Portman (who has been failing to live up to a credit she earned when she was 10 years old for her entire career) and the cringingly unfunny comic relief of Kat Dennings. The bit in Thor 2 where Dennings essentially drafts a…

Captain America: The First Avenger is regrettably bland and uninspired despite the perfect casting of Hugo Weaving as The Red Skull. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Peggy Carter’s TV series after yawning through Hayley Atwell’s performance in the film. The Winter Soldier was probably the biggest uptick in…

Not piety, I’d argue; piety can be (and is supposed to be) quiet and sincere. Virtue signalling is sanctimony — per Wiktionary, “A hypocritical form of excessive piety, considered to be an affectation merely for public show.” 

Quibble: “The Doctor Dances” is part 2 of a two-parter, the first being “The Empty Child.” Which is possibly the scariest (and most thrilling) pair of NuWho episodes until the first one with the Weeping Angels. So you’ve gotta watch The Empty Child.

I like both Oona and the evil magician couple who sent Luci as a wedding gift. If you’re a minor character on a Groening show, in the early going pretty much all your dialogue is going to be jokes:
“We’ll need chairs.”
“_Dark_ chairs.”

And that’s what I’m here for.

1974, but emotionally I’m still 17, so it balances out.

Nothing like watching my old MST3K tapes and remembering a time when the entire U.S. economy was seemingly based on long-distance call services (10-10-whatever), EXTREME sodas, and Flooz.

I think the comparison with Little Miss Sunshine is apt, in that both movies create a great deal of buildup around a performance piece -- dance, in both cases -- that winds up utterly deflating that buildup by being complete camp (in the John Waters sense of “tragically ludicrous/ludicrously tragic”) but played with…

To be fair, in John Wick 2 or Dark Matter, good acting would have stood out like a sore thumb.

Slack makes a pretty good platform for a D&D session — a friend of mine coded a dice-rolling chatbot for our campaign, which is really all you need if you’ve got a good DM — and there are also tools like Roll20 (https://app.roll20.net/sessions/new) if you’re playing an edition that absolutely has to have maps.

But in episode 219, you said that you really enjoyed shows that were faithful to continuity, and that it showed the creators cared as much about their craft as the audience did!

For the benefit of you whipper-snappers who weren’t on the internet in 2005, we present the greatest movie trailer ever created:

I don’t hate it either, but after watching I dunno how many dozen episodes over the course of several years, I started to find it exhausting and had to jump off the train.

Also, I feel like the newer episodes have been kind of treading water creatively, cycling through the established tropes of the show — celebrating…

I saw the film as part of an AMC double-feature event — so pretty much a smallish audience of die-hard Marvel fans --  and the Snap Coda™ provoked one such gentleman to bark “Fuck you!” at the screen.

I don’t have a whole lot of experience with the term, but from asking much the same question of a friend who lives in Los Angeles — prompted by me discovering there’s a “Cholo Ln” in my town — apparently the connotation in Mexican Spanish is not a mestizo Hispanic, but a rural/country bumpkin type. (How much of an…

A moment of appreciation for the perfectly Marc Maron/Sam Sylvia moment of Britannica’s storybook entrance in a beautiful white wedding dress, riding a white unicorn, and his immediate reaction being “That horse better not take a shit in here.”

I had enough of smug fuckin’ robots talking in circles with a not-so-secret agenda of “kill all humans” when it was called Battlestar Galactica 15 years ago.

“Hey mang, I don’t feel so good, it’s kinda like when my cousin Chuy was out buying a watch a  n  d .  .  .  .”