Episode II really missed an opportunity to have Anakin fight some sort of sand monster at the end of the film. They already had the perfect set up.

"Specialist" should be in a running for best song not included on an actual studio album by the band. (This should be a feature on AVClub if it hasn't been already). And, strangely enough, Interpol is another band that put out two great albums and then just sort of lost it.

I think there are a handful of fun songs on The Green Album and Maladroit, but I've always maintained that Matt Sharp made the right decision by leaving Weezer. The two Rentals albums are still miles above anything Weezer would do after Pinkerton. Cuomo has benefited from the perception that he's this troubled…

I generally agree with this hatesong, but I have to take issue with the "preaching to the choir" critique. That line of criticism always bothers me, because you never really know who is going to be affected by the song in a positive way. The song still might be corny and cloying, but I would guess that it is…

I haven't seen the original films in a long time, and I forgot how great Chewie's reaction is to Han warning the droids about the consequences of winning the chess game. These Star Wars movies might actually be pretty good.

There's an argument that rages across the internet whenever Goonies is brought up: is the film actually good or are have the people who love it merely caught a bad case of nostalgia. I watched it when I was a kid, and I think it absolutely holds up. But more than most beloved children's films, there is a vocal…

"It’s just that the more light you shine upon it [the mythology], the goofier it all seems."

I actually kind of enjoyed the first half of the film. It's the moment he returned to Earth for incredibly contrived reasons that the movie completely fell apart.

Until I read the actual statement, I thought the phrase "conscious uncoupling" was a joke. There are some people who you just can't parody.

I dig the new album. It's somewhat all over the place, but there are some fantastic highlights.

These write ups have been rather short. I wonder if it's because they already posted a full season review and feel they don't need to put as much time into the individual episodes. I can only take House of Cards in small doses, so I've been following along watching two episodes a week.

This is obviously a simplification, but I think the acceptability of "stupidface" comes down to whether or not it's actually funny. Chappelle and Murphy could get away with it because they were funny. Nick Cannon isn't funny, so he just doesn't make the grade.

I just assume that he spent his years as a critical and popular darling gathering blackmail information on every major player in Hollywood just in case his skills as a director inexplicably vanished. It's really the ONLY explanation for his uncanny ability to continue making films even as each one flops at the box…

It's been a while, but I remember really enjoying the first half of Valhalla Rising but absolutely loathing the second half. I thought I read somewhere that they didn't have a working script for parts of the film, and the second half of the film just felt aimless.

Refn strikes me as a director who works better when he's not trying to say something. He's all style and no substance, which I'm totally fine with. He just happens to run into problems when he attempts to throw in what he thinks is "substance." Drive and Only God Forgives are fun, fractured action films. But…

Open City is a good one. It's somewhere between a full novel and a book length essay. A lot of people have compared it to the work of W.G. Sebald. It took me a while to get into the book, but once I got used to its rhythm it started to take off. I'm still not sure I ever fully grappled with what Cole was trying to…

"[E]very episode sits squarely in the B range…There are elements of this show that will always be substandard and
elements of this show that manage to be exciting, and the combination
lands the show in the zone of average."

I would agree that Sajek seems like a pretty cool guy to hang out with, but Trebeck always struck me as seething with anger and resentment. He's incredibly condescending when a contestant gets an answer wrong, and those personal interviews halfway through the show are painfully awkward.

Funny, I had the exact same thought. I'm not the world's biggest Kevin Smith fan, but I remember enjoying his Green Arrow run many, many years ago.

This article would be spot on in the years following his Oscar win. But I think Spacey is actually one of the more enjoyably campy elements of House of Cards. Without him in the lead, I probably would have ditched the show a long time ago.