I go back and forth on Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman. I think it’s one of those rare cases where the casting works, even though the actor isn’t that good, if that makes sense?

Justice League was a bad movie, but even more than that it was such a boring, generic movie. It’s what you get when you set an automatic script generator to “Generic Superhero Team-Up Movie.”

Key & Peele sketches always did a really, really good job of replicating the look and story beats of the genres they were working in. Their Les Mis sketch, for instance, basically is a big, grandiose historical epic musical in terms of staging and set design, just...funny. They clearly had a deep understanding of…

I know nothing about the comic books (and I mean *nothing*), but the obvious story here would seem to be Natasha’s decision to flip sides and join SHIELD, right? Show her doing bad-ass things for evil people in the first act, conscience acts up, joins SHIELD by the end of the movie. Maybe related to that Budapest…

A boyfriend who looks exactly like Paul Rudd in 1995. So...Paul Rudd?

In the movie’s defense, I didn’t notice the editing the first time I watched this scene because I was distracted by the god-awful writing. 

The commercials for this made it look as dour and un-watchable as Dowd suggests - Goodman gives off a serious “here for the paycheck” vibe even in those spots.

This is a really good point. It’s hard to overstate how much I like the ending fight. It’s the first time in the history of the MCU when Iron Man is genuinely scary -it’s Stark stripped of quips and irony and all the protective emotional armor. He’s just an angry guy who never got over his mom dying, and a furious…

The funny thing is, while the marketing played up the whole “Team Iron Man or Team Cap” angle and people argued about who was right, Rogers pretty much abandons any ideological objection after Bucky is brought in. He’s ready to sign the Accords, but then Zemo activates Bucky and Steve’s whole thing becomes saving his…

Honestly, that was one of my takeaways from Infinity War - indeed, the MCU as a whole. You have these massive casts that include literal Oscar winners, not to mention incredibly accomplished directors, writers, crew members, behind the scenes people, and they all give a damn. No one is just cashing a paycheck (well,…

I’m a big Civil War fan (I have it as the fourth-best MCU movie), and I think my favorite element is how much of a raw nerve Stark is throughout the movie. He’s exhausted and alone and pissed off, and when he talks to Captain America or any of the other Avengers he comes off as nothing so much as a frustrated parent…

That shot at the end of the movie where Iron Man and Captain America are framed in a crack in the wall mid-fight is amazing, just a perfect combination of iconography and character.

Someone needs to let John Mulaney play an old-timey radio announcer. It’s the role he was born to play.

I own dozens of songs I only found as a result of a Paul Krugman recommendation. Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, Rihannon Giddens, The Civil Wars, Jessica Hernandez and the Deltas - all discovered because of praise from a Nobel Prize-winning economist and bearded senior citizen writing a column for The New York Times.

The Academy has been using ranked choice voting for about a decade now. I wonder if Green Book was basically every voter’s second or third choice and ended up ascending to the top spot when the more polarizing movies fell off. 

I love the idea of Marvel showing off and making a series of MCU movies for every country on Earth just to prove that they can.

The “In Memoriam” should just be all the characters who died in Infinity War. 

I’ll probably give in when their adaptation of The Stand drops.

Yeah, it seems pretty normal to me (the peel tastes good), but people tend to have a disgusted reaction when I explain it to them. 

When I eat an orange, I also eat the peel. I use a knife to cut off slices from the orange, then eat them like they’re apple slices, peel and all.