So this comment is 5 years late, but I am just catching up on Justified now, and I just had to write down something that bothers me: Ava is pretty clearly terrified out of her wits, and with good reason. She is playing an extremely dangerous game with Boyd and with Katherine Hale, and if she doesn’t deliver she is…

As I was reading this article, I kept getting this weird memory niggle, the kind I get when I read about something I only experienced as a child. So I am reading along, hit the mention of Charles Grodin, and think “Is this the one where the housekeeper goes to get her feet scraped?” So thank you! It is that one! I…

On the car ride home from seeing that movie, I imagined a bunch of different scenarios where she could have been in the whole movie and made it about 300 percent better and I was so mad at the wasted opportunity.

I loved this movie, and yes, that final car chase is one of the most sublimely ridiculous and ridiculously sublime things in any Pixar movie. I also love the moment she finds her parents. When she spots the shell, I immediately started tearing up, and then was pretty much a sobbing mess when you see the many spokes of…

And now I’m crying. Thanks a lot.

I loved it, too, for many of the same reasons. It is one of those movies I wish had come out when I was a kid, because I would have had Merida on everything I owned. Stories about mothers and daughters are kind of hard to find in animation, it seems, and this one had a particularly fraught but loving relationship,…

Damn, you’re right. Missed opportunity.

My son, who was 6 at the time and a huge Pixar fan (Wall-E was on almost constantly at our house), was so excited about this movie coming out that he talked about it non-stop. He wanted to see it in the theatre more than anything, and even though we had a 4 y.o. and a 6 month old baby as well at the time, we all…

I am so glad you picked this scene. I actually missed Toy Story 3 when it was in theatres, for some reason, and never managed to see it until very recently, so I already knew about the incinerator scene. So I didn’t really feel anything during that, except a bit of admiration for the sheer audacity of it. But then…

I have been watching Star Trek: the Next Generation with my kids, a 9 year-old and a 15 year-old, and we never, ever skip the opening. We watch two episodes every Friday, and every time, we say the monologue right along with Patrick Stewart, and then jam along to the song until the end. The skip intro button has never…

I was so mad that song didn’t win the Oscar that year. 

This was my son’s favorite movie when he was little, so I have seen it countless times, but it remains compelling even after all that. Such a wonderful movie. This is the first Pixar movie to make me cry because of the beauty of the thing, I think. I mean, so many glorious moments, especially the dance with the fire…

Couldn’t agree with you more! I remember being especially blown away by the credits, to the point that they actually made me bust out into tears with how beautiful they were, right down to that final boot with the tree growing out of it. Fantastically lovely, both in a literal sense and an emotional one. The perfect…

Monsters, Inc. has always been my favorite Pixar movie. I think it is extremely underrated. It has the best world building (mentioned in the article, thanks Erik!) which combines playfulness with scale (big monsters, tiny monsters) and some really excellent art design, alongside a fully fleshed out society relying on…

Yes, I was extremely disappointed in the storytelling this go round. Just felt like they were yanking things where they wanted them to go, rather than following where the story wanted to go. And yanking emotions right along with. I don’t mind being emotionally manipulated, usually, but when it feels forced it doesn’t…

I might have been too close to it to see it that way, maybe. I was just angry. Especially since, as soon as the mess-up happened, I knew they would have some kind of truncated amount of time, but I spent the whole movie hoping it would be longer. “Okay, if they fix it now, they’ll still have 4 hours. Okay, 2 hours.…

This song absolutely killed me the first time I watched this after I had kids. Like, hiccuping through tears sobs. I think my kids thought I was unhinged. But I loved it despite the pathos. Most Pixar movies have this moment, of course, but frankly, I think Onward was a misstep. It was the first time I cried and was…

Reply All episode #158--The Case of the Missing Hit. A mystery about an earworm that may or may not be entirely fabricated. Completely mesmerising from beginning to end.

This was way funnier than I expected it to be.

My mother rented a beach house in California for her birthday for a week and my family and my brother all stayed there and enjoyed the waves. Last meal out was at a fantastic Chinese place there the night before we flew home to Canada. That was the last week of February. Sob.