It is kind of amusing to imagine the piano player getting to make those decisions on the fly, with complete autonomy.

That’s a hell of a cast, if nothing else.

“Originally entitled Straight Man, the show’s title was changed after the writing team decided Odenkirk’s character would be incredibly gay.”

Yeah, of all the terrible insults these characters have hurled at each other over three seasons, that hit hard.

Murphy’s Oppenheimer voice is creeping me the hell out.

I’ve been an, at-best, reluctant tolerator of From Software’s whole deal in the past, but I genuinely loved Elden Ring. And I think it’s because, for all the talk among From’s most relentless partisans of “uncompromising artistic vision,” Elden Ring is a game that does make a handful of very important compromises and…

The guy running HBO sure does seem to suck. 

I think the construction implies that a story can be both invented and broadly true to life in the way it reflects inter-personal dynamics, broader social factors, etc, while, on the other hand, there are invented stories that ring false because they don’t accurately reflect those factors.

Wait, Dan Savage co-wrote this? 

Fresh Off the Boat was definitely wheezing a fair bit toward the end of its run, even if it was never a genuinely bad TV show. Everyone -- writers, actors -- seemed pretty much done with it. 

And her last name is actually “Margarine.” 

I basically came here to ask if she’s ever bad in anything. I haven’t seen everything she’s done, obviously, but she does seem pretty remarkably consistent.

Glen Mazzara had a pretty great plan for The Dark Tower over at Amazon, basically starting with Wizard and Glass, then working through the rest of the books. It’s a shame Amazon decided not to pick up the pilot he shot.

It was a broken heart.

Yeah, I think there’s a certain degree of ambiguity there.

The other thing I find striking here is the lengths to which the various power players involved seem to be going to protect Ezra Miller. They’re not Brad Pitt famous or Cate Blanchett talented or Tom Hanks beloved — how many rank and file Americans are even familiar with Ezra Miller? Is America suffering from a bad…

I want to tip my hat to Hughes for his continued work on these reviews. I don’t always agree with him or his particular Archer bugbears, but he’s clearly passionate about the show and enjoys writing about it, and that’s not a small thing on The AV Club in the Year of Our Lord 2022.

Fraser’s Mummy isn’t a perfect movie, in the sense that it has very unimpressive ambitions and you never forget that it’s just a corny action flick, but it is pretty much a flawless movie within its very limited box and achieves everything you could possibly hope for a movie like that to achieve. Fraser is perfect as…

I’ve been playing Steelrising, aka, “that Bloodborne clone where Louis XVI is a murderous tyrant commanding an army of killer robots.” The lack of true AAA-caliber polish is obvious — the faces of the characters are all flat and plastic, it’s rather buggy — but it’s an undeniably fun game, with a pretty simple,…

I’m in favor of any movie that prominently features University of Florida gear, though I’m obliged to point out that the mascot is a Gator, not a crocodile. That was actually a small-scale controversy at one point in the early aughts.