It's all good, @avclub-cad44517b35950ca85cffe44458ff25a:disqus .  People use "the Midwest" like that a lot, and don't necessarily mean to paint with such a broad brush.  Hell, I didn't think much about what "the Midwest" meant until I lived in it, and realized that it was really quite culturally different from where I…

Furthermore to this beer, wasn't Mr. Pitt romantically involved with Gwennyth Paltrow before Ms. Aniston?  No one calls Paltrow's career a failure because of that (instead, she suffered the Best Actress Curse, and tried to counteract it by making pretentious cosmetics and obnoxious travel and food shows with Mario…

Your comment equated the naivete and lack of worldliness of suburban kids with that of kids in the Midwest.  While I'll say that both are stereotypes, the one about suburbs breeding naive kids who lack constructive interaction with the real world is somewhat fair.

Sounds like you could credit the show with evolving and gaining a more mature and respectful view on the subject of homosexuality, kind of like the entire culture around it.

Friends gets my vote for the blandest show with the greatest success in my lifetime.  This came to my attention once when Malinger-Her was watching a Friends rerun while I was on the computer listening to Bitches Brew through the headphones.  That soundtrack couldn't possibly have been more dissonant with what was on…

"to those kids from out in suburbia and the Midwest, the Friends were an
idealized version of the life that people could have in New York."

I would think breaking up with Brad Pitt would feel like you just had the world's most cleansing shower.

September 1994 was the beginning of my junior year in college, so I wasn't paying much attention to TV.  I was busy growing a funky beard, really getting into my literature classes, and hanging out in real coffee shops, smoking cigarettes (which you could do back then) and talking to classmates about Dickens and Plato…

I would love to see some sort of Entertainment Tonight-style show out of the Vatican, but instead of celebrities, movies, and TV, it was all about the Lives of the Saints.  More specifically, Deaths of the Saints, because that's the sensational stuff that grabs eyeballs.  And when I say, "grab eyeballs," I mean…

@avclub-75e43c12ef9f1cfdaeae92ca6fa90640:disqus , where do you live that they make you get a drinking license?

@avclub-5125ad2b58405bb877649bbea104f866:disqus , yes, that's why I was careful to specify "a single person (or even a group of unarmed humans)."  As you rightly say, prehistoric (and, I guess, modern) humans hunted in packs, and they and their progenitors were armed many hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Our…

It REALLY goes for the Bushes.

I agree that he's a visualist, and not much of a writer.  There shouldn't be any shame in that.  His idol, Spielberg, doesn't write his own screenplays, either, but that doesn't make us think less of him as a director (granted, Spielberg has much more humor to his films, and encourages much better performances from…

I'll cop to that.  I made up my mind not to watch it, and I still have never watched it.  The Village was the last one of his movies I've seen, and I agree that it's at least an interesting failure.

Probably the same way that everything in Australia evolved to be so massively poisonous that it's almost comic.  I mean, there are snakes there that deliver enough venom in one bite to kill 5 horses.  But it wasn't deadly to them, so there was no outside force keeping the venom down to non-overkill levels through the…

@avclub-723c7ca41a74ee7ee5d26e39d12235be:disqus , when you say that you worked on a Shyamalan film, all I can think about is Sweet Dee trying to get noticed as a dead body in that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

"make a burrito" is the most disgusting euphemism I've ever heard.  The idea of euphemisms is to lessen the impact of unpleasant topics!

Nobody gets catapulted until I blow this whistle!  Even if they do say "jaw-droppingly"— [gets catapulted].

Top predators wouldn't necessarily lose their human-killing greatness in a long absence of humans.  I'm not sure we should think of, say, a tiger as "optimized to kill humans."  Tigers are optimized to kill deer, or whatever small- or medium-sized mammals they typically hunt and kill and eat.  They also have to be…

The only thing that can stop a bad bear with a gun is a good bear with a gun.