Yeah… I'm pretty ready for Hatred to be gone. He was fine for a while, but they've done everything they can really do with his character, and now that Brock's back there's no reason for him to be around at all. His weird vendetta against Gary isn't enough to keep him around, and he doesn't have his own supplementary…

I've never seen the AVPs, because they just seemed like such blatant cash-grab dilutions of the brand. Also, I just never dug Predator as much as Alien. But I'll check them out, if what you're saying is that viewing them won't actually kill my soul and burn out my eyes.

….that I did not know. ::shakes head ruefully::

The Alien Movies: Two Great Ones, One That Will Piss You Off, One That Will Really Piss You Off and One Where Charlize Theron Can't Run Sideways.

Yeah, no Lindelof. So I think we can rule out a late-in-the-game flash-sideways-but-NOT-purgatory twist.

This isn't that much of a disappointment; it's not as if her mission had much hope of success. I figured Dr. Shaw would roll up on the Engineer homeworld demanding answers and be instantaneously snapped in half by any one of a hundred albino super-soldiers/progenitors of the human race and that would be that.

Ehhhh sort of? It's definitely set in the same universe, and there's a lot of call-backs (call-forwards?) to the first Alien film. But it has a totally different agenda. And I thought it was better than the critical consensus… but I'm the kind of person who wet himself with joy when the space jockey showed up in the…

So yeah, the second episode was basically just a continuation of the pilot, except Quentin had slightly longer hair. I got lost in the whole expulsion plot, especially since they never explicitly seemed to say whether he was expelled or not… Yes, I know "Eliza" told him he wasn't, but then they also never said he was…

So rushed. I'm imagining an alt. pilot that ends when Quentin does "real" magic for the first time and passes out.

Yeah, I mean, Quentin's relationship with Alice starts from a place where he's a fumbling, inexperienced, kid. I assume they're probably going to cut the fox sex anyway, but that was a huge moment for the character. You're totally right; making the characters older changes whole character arcs, and some actions just…

Actually, Kacey Rohl would have made a much better Alice. Like, so much better that it breaks my brain that they didn't somehow make it happen.

Well, I think they're still going that route with Julia. At least that's what I hope they're doing. There would be no point to the parallel journeys if they're identical.

Yeah, it's kind of exhausting having everyone talk in hushed tones about Quentin. We should be allowed to discover that he's important, not have his importance rammed down our throats with unnecessary exposition. It feels like really crass shorthand to ensure audience investment that's there in lieu of, you know,…

Pretty much all my worst fears about the adaptation have been realized. Aging the characters up is basically just a cheat to explain why the cast is all in their mid-to-late-20s instead of being actual 18-years olds. Nothing about Brakebills even remotely resembles grad school; they all live on campus, and have…

As far as big, glitzy, televised awards shows go? There isn't really an equivalent. The Spirit Awards are televised, and tend to recognize a more diverse pool of talent, but they aren't nearly as splashy or well-known. There's all the critics awards, all of which come before the Oscars, some of which make more…

As mush as I agree with all the points being made here regarding queer- and-POC exclusion by the Academy, I'm hard pressed to get that riled up over it. We're talking about the Oscars here, a glitzy, self-promotional and, frankly, useless barometer of what's supposedly "the best" in film - one that's so out of touch…

It was one of those ideas that worked on paper but didn't function at all in execution. Sure, if you took a deep dive into some NIN album tracks you could hear the Bowie-influence (A Warm Place is a straight-up rip off of Crystal Japan and Trent owns up to it freely) but most of the crazy, lathered up NIN fans in the…

Bowie, means a ton to me, more than I could cogently express. He's been a presence, in one way or another, for most of my life. His whole thing was constancy; there's a Bowie for every mood, every era - that's part of what makes it so hard to process his death. More than anything, though, Bowie was a skeleton key that…

When I saw the video for Lazarus, I had a brief moment of thinking, "Jeez, Bowie's looking a little ragged here," but I pushed the thought aside, because, after all, he was in his late-60s, and on the verge of releasing a new album, and there hadn't been any allusions to his health being poor. I even made a little…

I'd say it's nowhere near first tier Bowie, but it sits comfortably in the second tier. I wouldn't say overrated either, since the general consensus is that it was the start of his decade long slide into Tin Machine.