The Ru-Ru’s, Bangleru’s, Runanadrama and the Pointru Sisters.

I have a regular discourse as I am obsessed with pop culture which is: you can see a clear evolution of cinematic language, you can see a slight mainstreaming of the gameplay bits, but in the last two decades pop music has stalled hard, super super hard. And not only girl groups: I am a gay old clubber and it…

It was depressing to see that the queens could only reach back twenty years or so ago to name any girl groups at all, and you could tell that Angeria felt she was really stretching back to the stone age for that SWV name drop. No Go-Go’s? Bangles? Bananadrama? Pointer Sisters?

I grew up in Madison, birthplace of The Onion, so it was always readily available around town in the 1990s. Taking the print copy to lunch every week through out college was my routine, and the AV Club eventually became the main attraction. I started reading the online version in the mid-2000s when I moved and the…

It’s baffling how much Kinja seems to actively hate its users. 

Great point. And weirdly, one I think all critics understand at the low end of the scale. I don’t think I’ve seen Dowd or anyone else give a movie a D-grade saying the film was simply below average, within a few tweaks of being an okay film. If your film gets a D-grade, you’re being told it’s a failure. An actual…

“but is a necessary part of most broad-interest entertainment sites’ (flawed) ecosystems and perfectly fine to put up with if it allows good writers and critics some breathing room on the more interesting stuff, which for a long time I’d maintain that it did. But, doesn’t seem like management is willing to hold up…

Me too, alongside the print version. No joke that wasting time posting on AVC got me through grad school.  Now it’s like watching a parent die

IM2 also had Sam Rockwell AND Sam Rockwell dancing, which on its own almost guarantees an A grade.  

And if it’s even possible, Kinja actually got worse over time.

Aw, thank you! As much as I sometimes jokingly shake my fist at the comments section, it’s been such a crazy and still-novel pleasure to discover people actually read stuff I write and say funny or insightful or tangential or even aggrieved stuff about it! I truly loved writing for this site AND reading it AND jumping…

I certainly didn’t mean to minimize the experience of both those leaving (who, in a perfect bit of double-speak, were told that the move was not mandatory, though their jobs would be moving) or to the incoming staff, who have to reckon with whatever BS this new regime has in mind...and likely some bad will from those…

started reading in 1998 when it was theonion.com/avclub. 

Yeah, I definitely don’t want to rag on any newcomers (too much), who I’m sure will do their best despite being underpaid and instructed to write 300-word newswires which are also somehow slideshows. Not gonna lie, from a commenter’s perspective, the Kinjapocalypse really did deal a death blow to the reader community,…

I want to say I first started reading in the mid-2000s. I didn’t comment for a while because you’re spot-on that at that point in history you better come prepared because that was an educated crowd. I learned massive amounts about music and movies from other commenters, things I’d never heard of that are amazing. I…

My feeling has always (well, often) been that the newswire stuff isn’t of much interest to me (even at its best, the assignment tends to be “write up the news these other sites are writing up”), but is a necessary part of most broad-interest entertainment sites’ (flawed) ecosystems and perfectly fine to put up with if…

at least in the days before Kinja decimated the site’s robust commenting culture

The letter grades at least sort of make sense for movies, where they represent, albeit imperfectly, the degree to which the reviewer recommends seeing the film. Giving individual TV episodes letter grades, on the other hand, was always next to pointless. Depending on the writer, the grade either represents an…

Exactly. You should know how a writer feels by the time you finish reading their review (and definitely whether or not they recommend you see it) without a letter/number grade. If not, they’re a bad critic.

Attempting to encapsulate all of a movie’s qualities with a one-byte letter grade has always been ridiculous. The world would be a better place if film reviews never contained letter grades or star ratings or any other kind of numerical summary.