You're totally right; barring some dance miracle, Burim probably wasn't going to offer us much more than going home next week. But Asaf has sailed right past his expiration date and every time I see him it's galling that out of all the people in the top 40 that they could have used to fill the empty slot… they chose…

Mostly it was weird that the judges saved Asaf over Burim because they had basically nothing good to say about Asaf's dancing during his critique, but they at least had some qualified praise for Burim. Now, maybe this is a case of Burim having plateaued and Asaf having more potential/room to grow (although there's…

Having Asaf on the show isn't just disrespectful to all the dancers who could have and should have taken his place. It's disrespectful to the show's audience, who watch because they want to see great dancers dancing cool routines. It's disrespectful to DANCE. Because while Asaf is a decent B-boy, his whole attitude…

Yeah, I really didn't need to see another video package on National Dance Day, especially one that makes Nigel out to have saved America through one day of sporadic cardiovascular exercise.

I was expecting this to happen with Asaf, but I'm stunned that it was the judges who decided to keep him. I mean, I figured that he would skate by on the votes of teenage girls who think he's gorgeous, and the people who see a cute guy getting bad critique week after week and end up likening him to a kicked puppy. But…

I'm by no means an expert on this sort of thing, but it's been released as a bare bones Warner Archive DVD that I briefly fondled at Amoeba in LA. I don't know how that affects the possibility of a Criterion release. Probably not positively. But Criterion dealings always seem kind of opaque to me. They have been on a…

The first time I saw one of those large yarny things in a museum attributed to Nick Cave I was like Huh, I can kind of see how this relates to 'The Mercy Seat'… and I've been operating under the misconception that musician and textile artist were the same man until about a minute ago. The more you know.

I saw it in the UK right after the ban was lifted, at a neighborhood Oxford art-house absolutely teeming with, well, myself and the two other people I had corralled into joining me. It felt so taboo and, well, filthy. I had read the book so I had a sense of what we were in for. I remember it being notable that it not…

Yeah, 'Crash' was the first example that came to my mind. It's funny how, despite all the controversy, Ted Turner's personal quest to derail its release, the UK 'banning', and whatnot, (not to mention its pedigree as a film adaptation of a great, transgressive novel by the late J.G. Ballard, who deserves more props…

I gotta say I was surprised and impressed that Nigel/Derulo watched an all male ballet duet where ripping leg muscles and bulging leotards were heavily featured and somehow managed to not make fun of it very much at all (though I think Jason Derulo made a crack about the costumes, but pretty much all the costumes on…

I basically watch this show because it's fitfully entertaining trash, and because it never fails to fill my quota of manly shirtlessness for the week. I don't expect that much, and I'm rarely disappointed. I feel like going into any episode hoping for it not to be a convoluted, nonsensical mess is probably a mistake.

Yeah, that's basically what I'm afraid of; people are going to see Nigel being critical to the Hot Guy, and they're going to vote him up, and we're going to be stuck with him most of the season. It's going to be exhausting.

Don't get me wrong, I really really love this show. But I'm making my peace with this being the last season. So far we've basically had Fuller's remix of the books, with some material that Harris referred back to or implied fleshed out to give the Will/Hannibal relationship more weight. But unless they got the rights…

I was pretty disappointed to see Asaf show up. He's exactly the kind of showboating, less talented, "personality" that the show indulges in occasionally. He's probably going to be popular with the 'Magic Mike' crowd who are watching primarily to ogle supple hunks of man-flesh, though, so he'll probably stick around…

I've re-checked it out; I like it a lot more than I did when it first came out, but there's a lot about it that still just doesn't connect with me. A huge part of my issue is the sheer length of it; there's a lot of good individual songs, but there's a lot of "other stuff" that just jams up the works for me.

My relationship with this album is so complicated… It basically single-handedly made me the teenage mascara smeared goth homosexual misanthrope I became, and then when I grew out of (most of) that, I couldn't even tolerate listening to it at all. Now, a lot of that had to do with The Fragile, which felt like such a…

It's going to be interesting to see Kit Harrington and everyone walk back the really pretty definitive statements that have been made about Jon being dead and Harrington being off the show. Like, "I said I wasn't going to be on the show next season…" or something. They definitely have all the pieces set up for his…

He'd probably say "member" or "phallus" or something weirdly poetic. You know, while recreating works of fine Renaissance art from memory and extemporaneously lecturing on Dante.

Cock au vin.
I had to think way too hard to come up with that.

Noticeable dong would have spoiled the delicate mise-en-scene Hannibal was cultivating.