Okay, but then how do you single out one writer out of the many studios hire to make a blockbuster film? These tentpoles, franchises, four quadrant Hollywood movies are commercial products; the screenplay is done by committee to include a required number of action set pieces and jokes to appeal to the masses. Goldman…

He's a fat, conservative white guy who loves to talk and has a drug problem. That's pretty normal.

To be fair, I've seen comments about shows where the poster wrote of the characters as if they were real and didn't have writers, but I just assume that's how people love or criticize the writing of the show. My curmudgeonly compliant, tangentially related to this, if at all, are the Amazon and Goodreads book reviews…

I've seen this woman on TV. It's still naive of me, but I still wonder how people with those kinds of academic qualifications can be idiots. The only and cynical explanation is that they don't believe the BS they're spewing but are in only for the money and tax cuts.

I thought that was Jeff Goldblum and was confused about how he was involved in Dark Tower, Batman and Robin, much less ruined them.

Or Character Actress Margo Martindale. Just remembered the joke about mixing them both up.

That's a pretty good idea.

I've been saying for years that Blanchett should do screwball comedies, not only because I think everyone should as it'll test dramatic actors' abilities, in a good way, and because an actress with her incredible range shouldn't be typecast in imperious roles when she's done a lot of different work on stage.

Love Ms. Negga. I laughed out loud reading James Gray was going to direct a space movie. Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Lost City of Z starts out joking about how his previous films didn't leave New York, but now with the sudden departure all the way to South America for Z, if Gray continues like this, "his next…

During the campaign, I believe The Atlantic crunched the numbers on Sanders' free college idea. I recall they came up with a total price tag of 15 billion annually. If we chose to, I think that could be done! Not factoring in the moral hazard of also paying for rich kids. I'm embarrassed not to know how the other…

To upend the cliche, I'd like to see a POTUS choose another sport besides golf (or game, as some people don't think it's a sport) to get interested in. Like curling, dirt bikes, indoor rock climbing.

I wish California's Own Huell Howser had lived to be LWT's example of the TV host who enthusiastically loves everything. Just the other day I saw an old episode where he was at a student restaurant in UC Davis, and the way he said "fish tacos" when they brought them out seemed like he had never heard of them before…

I saw Dunkirk this weekend. Pretty good. Went in early and sat through the pre-trailer, inside new shows ads. One was an ABC drama coming this fall starring Freddie Highmore as a doctor—I thought, "Yes! They're bringing back the Doogie Howser MD concept!"—who is autistic. "Dammit, not again the high-concept,…

There's an alternate Earth where the Beethoven pictures are radically different.

Any remake has to keep the adorable "No fair!

Really? She was the scariest thing for child me (and probably adult me if I watched it again) in the picture. "NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN!"

This must be a new AVC feature. Good that we're extending discussions of the entire work of art to the medium of books, as we've done with movie spoiler spaces and after-episode TV reviews. Maybe the latter gave a much needed paradigm shift to how to write reviews: after everybody has seen it instead of before. A book…

I don't think any of the major characters will die at this point in the series. I don't believe the "good guys", like the Stark family, ever will. Despite Martin's fantasy-novel-breaking rule that nobody, including the hero(es) of the tale, is safe, stories can't become that radical by upending thousands of years of…

Seconded.

The Time mag cover story on the show about two weeks ago had the reporter watch a long day of Emilia Clarke on a mechanical bull thing for a major scene, which no doubt was this one. I was counting her screen time on the back of the dragon to see whether that would take that long, and yes—time and effort well spent!