I did want to bring it back to Dowd, but I couldn't think of anything he'd actually liked enough to make a comparison.  Apart from The World's End - which, thinking about it, is a "men dealing with men feelings" movie, isn't it?

But there are lots of men making movies about men working through their feelings and learning to mature, and they generally don't get this "sitcom", "first world problems" dismissal from critics.

Personally, my problem with Dunham and people who use the term "first world problems" is the same: they both seem uninterested in the humanity of people who aren't in their class bracket.  Like, every time a person who isn't a rich white woman is in an episode of Girls, they're only there to be an obstacle or nuisance…

Necrobutcher?  Is that you?  I always knew it wasn't true, man!  They smeared your good name!

His new one, 'Dream River', just came out in the UK today and I must get it; the last one, 2011's 'Apocalypse', was a career high.  The opening track, 'Drover', already feels like one of the all-time great country songs.

I've just rewatched that to see if it yields anything new.  I love the stupid fluke of them only meeting because the guy he saved thought he'd ordered room service, and Cage's regret over "ruining his underwear" to save him, as though that's the last piece of bitterness he's hanging on to.

Bad Lieutenant, man!  Honestly.

Wild At Heart, too.  And he was the best thing by a mile in Kick-Ass.

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus "Shit, tits, bugger, arse, fuck, fuck, fuck… and twerk."

Theo Tait in the Guardian gave it exactly the same review he gave to Eco's The Prague Cemetery; literally alternating paragraphs saying it's not as clever as it looks, then saying he can't understand it.  I can't even muster up the energy to get annoyed at it, it's just pathetic: http://www.theguardian.com/…

Yeah, that was the thing that surprised me most when I first took the Pynchon plunge; how funny and entertaining these 'difficult' books are.

Bullet goes in, brain goes out.  You can't explain that.

Molly Ringwald was in a Godard film.  I'm not going anywhere with that, I just like to repeat it to myself occasionally in a futile attempt to make it make sense.

I'd rather have someone like Thom Yorke, Janelle Monae or Elvis Costello, who makes terrific music and says interesting, well-considered things in interviews.  It's not impossible.

He patently, obviously is, but Gervais did a press tour beforehand insisting that wasn't the case.  He's just kind, a special variety of kindness which manifests itself chiefly in a jutting jaw, badly-slicked hair, stooping gait and all the other accoutrements of end-stage niceness.

Beauty.

The director's surname is how Cockneys pronounce Cairo.

She's super-bitchy, yow!

His commercials and music videos are worth checking out, too.  I was a teenager when Glazer and Tony Kaye were the golden boys of British advertising, and the commercial breaks were more fun than most of the programmes.

My favourite comment on Peter Capaldi being the new Doctor: "We went from a guy with no eyebrows to a guy with too many eyebrows".