Star Wars does — Empire Strikes Back is way bigger than A New Hope, even when you set aside the budget I feel like it has a lot more locations and big sequences. The difference is that SW is probably the only franchise where the sequels deepen/improve on the original (at least for the original trilogy).

I read somewhere that while most actors take roles in blockbusters to support their indie dreams, he does the opposite, and I think that's exactly right. It's harder than it looks to play something like Mummy or Journey to the Center of the Earth (interesting how they replaced him with the Rock both times)

I love almost any movie that starts with a flashback to ancient Egypt (i.e my love for National Treasure), and The Mummy hits all my sweet spots. If there was a bar based around 1930's Egypt I'd drink there all the time. I want to live in that kind of world.

I love his Kong, but it really plays like a directors cut. You could lose 40 min from the island sequence.

This exact joke is repeated in Returns, with the kid doing a domino effect with a bunch of columns in a tomb… exactly the kind of lazy repeating that makes franchise sequels suck.

Raiders is untouchable, probably the greatest action movie that will ever be made. I can argue for parts 2 and 3, but they don't come close, and while its fun to revisit the world in part 4, it obviously isn't on the same level as even 2 and 3. Honestly if I was going to introduce Indy to someone, I might just stop…

I told someone I like old movies — meaning stuff from the 30s and 40s— and he said, "like Face/Off"?

My favorite part of the movie is when he kills a bunch of bunch of mummies with a sword, and then he strikes some action hero pose, scoffing, "pfft, mummies ". he's then immediately tackled.

Interesting how Returns, for all its flaws, seems to have had a pretty big impact on future action movies. There's a bus scene in Harry Potter 3 that reminds me a lot of the bus scene you mention, and the ending of Indy 4 — a tornado near a pyramid in a jungle — is basically the ending of Returns.

Oh man did that book tap into something deep in me. Just the other night I realized that I could see into my neighbor's kitchen and I thought about that book and how the kid spied on his naked neighbor crush.

Fine performance, but lazy movie. Slate had a piece a while ago about how HBO is essentially making made-for-TV movies—whereas Netflix etc are making movies that would be theatrical films, except for they're on Netflix— that felt pretty spot on.

Churchwill won the Nobel prize in literature. I haven't read his memoirs, but by all accounts they are definitive for war history.

Reminds me of that one Simpsons episode.

Is A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night worth watching. I keep hearing that its critically acclaimed, but every review I've read has been pretty tepid, while admiring various elements like the cinematography or just the idea of a female director from Iran making a genre film. I wonder if that latter element has…

The Brendan Fraser Mummy is seriously one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time. It basically hits everything I want in a movie. I like Tom Cruise, but this version looks boringly dark and "unrealistic" - in the stunts and stuff, which look cartoonish, even for a mummy movie.

the gag quoted in the review - "forged in the plastics of China" - made me laugh. So far this flick's batting 1000!

I generally liked the storyline, but really thought Pina needed more dimensions. To have him be pretty black-and-white douchy really simplifies the whole situation, at least from the audience's point of view — it doesn't seem like a sacrifice for her to leave him and go to Dev instead, who we've seen is ultimately…

It really is strange to watch political shows in the current environment. VEEP has its whole subplot about Jonah trying to kill daylight savings, which it seems to think is a ridiculous thing for the government to do, even though most experts agree with it. And then the most recent episode had people spouting off to…

It wouldn't surprise me if there were a couple of dumb studio heads who saw the grosses for Deadpool and Logan and figured that boobs and gore were the reason they made bank, as opposed to having unique styles and stories that actually ended and some decent writing behind them.

Yeah, I agree. I'd like to see him tackle an assignment instead of just discussing something that happened to him. Something like how George Saunders wrote about Trump voters, going out and reporting on some rallies. I don't think that subject would be right for Sedaris (though it'd be interesting), but something…