Wow, what alternate universe have I arrived in where people don't love that Coz impression (by Castellaneta, I believe). I mean, it's obviously not "spot-on." It's caricatured—even, dare I say, cartoonish?

Crap. I honestly didn't mean to upvote myself in my original post. I don't even LIKE myself. Damn you, Disqus!

Agreed about Steve's ex, but she was the only female character who seemed like a real human being to me. Stan and Steve are given a lot more airtime and complexity than Haley from what I've seen, and Francine just kind of vacillates back and forth between June Cleaver (her current life) and drug-crazed groupie skank…

…and the character of Haley is treated marginally better than Meg on Family Guy. But only marginally.

They certainly find a lot of excuses for Roger to call Francine a b*tch.

I don't know, I've been watching a fair amount of AD lately and while I agree that it's much better-written than Family Guy—no manatees were involved—I don't think the sensibility is that different, regardless of whether MacFarlane is involved creatively or not. The characters for the most part are basic facsimiles of…

If by "shitty" you mean hilarious, yes.

Yeah, I wouldn't say that was a great song or anything, but it was at least cool.

Yes, I do remember that highly successful era of the show.

Vanessa Redgrave?!

Noice?

It's a black day for baseball.

I tell my kids all the time: "STOP PATRICIDING ME!"

Wow, that's right. When Monster came out that fall, those curly locks were gone for good.

Obamacare, obviously.

I wonder if it will be as funny as his last pairing with Edward Norton, in Red Dragon.

Glad to see some love for the much-maligned Darjeeling. I just saw an interview recently where Wes said the "Play With Fire" train-car sequence at the end was all one shot—including the tiger, which was created by Jim Henson's people.

That second piece to me is emblematic of the ways people misunderstand his work—as though his films are just manifestos of quirkiness and individuality (and thus only applicable to privileged white people). I don't see these films as paeans to quirky individuality at all—his heroes all go through a humbling process,…

Comedy doesn't preclude any subject matter, of course, but it does render your complaints about lack of "grittiness" and "realism" irrelevant. I enjoy Alexander Payne's work, but the subject matter alone doesn't elevate it above Wes's films. Was Chaplin automatically superior to Keaton because his work was more…

Max and Sam are not "absurdly precocious," they're just misfit kids with outsized ambitions who have to learn that the world doesn't revolve around them. Wes Anderson movies are in no way "Horatio Alger" stories—they're almost exactly the opposite, in fact.