She's 5'9, well above average female height (plus heels), though she has the added bonus of those adjacent being Kit Harrington (5'7/5'8-ish), Rose Leslie (5'5), and Maisie Williams (5'0; sorry, Maisie).

My grandmother was a huge fan of the Queen because "she always wears such nice hats".

Yeah, that's the same problem Marvel had with the whole Civil War story. If looked at objectively, the case against superheros operating an an independent agency is virtually impossible to dispute. Superhero comics have typically responded to this either by ignoring the issue (most common) or completely stacking the…

Now that I finished catching up on The Americans, the next thing on the prestige TV checklist is to finish watching the first season of True Detective. Having finished the third episode, so far the most compelling mystery is why Rust hasn't been brutally murdered by his fellow detectives who are sick of listening to…

That, and the "Greedo shoots first" moment with Shae. In an age where the antihero/antivillain rules TV, the writers' fanatical devotion to keeping Saint Tyrion pure as snow really makes no sense. Tyrion in the books is, as George R. R. Martin put it, "the greyest of the grey", but to the writers he's just a…

I thought "The Mountain and the Viper" was the best of the season. "The Children" was such an incredible copout in terms of Tyrion's story that it kind of overwhelms the other segments, which are mostly good (Cersei's scenes don't make much sense either, mind you, in the big picture).

I've started reading The Silkworm as well (I had just started on Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear before I saw that this was out, so I put that book on hold). I'm enjoying it so far (about 100 pages in), though it feels like Rowling is writing shorter chapters than in previous books.

Belle: Anglo-Ghanaian director Amma Asante directs this (very loosely adapted) historical drama about Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a British admiral and an unknown Caribbean slave, who was subsequently raised as a young gentlewoman by her great-uncle Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of…

I'm a big fan of that movie. Great characterization, and they did a really neat ambiguous ending. Also, one of the biggest "shock" moments I can recall in my recent cinemagoing.

Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain and The Simpsons between them parodied an enormous number of movies that I wouldn't fully understand until 10-15 years later. There's an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures that's a full-scale reenactment of Citizen Kane, for instance.

Same here.

My favourite Sturges film is The Palm Beach Story (my favourite screwball comedy), followed by The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels. The rest are pretty middling, to me.

I could never get into Morgan's Creek, because the lead actor annoyed the crap out of me (both in that film and the other Sturges movie he's in).

Is it over already? Where did the time go?

I like that Gloria's backstory showed a sympathetic aspect of her backstory, but at the same time wasn't an apologia for defrauding SNAP.

Gloria's dialogue implied that the food stamp fraud was the thing putting their store in the black, which would suggest a pretty high volume of transactions. If she has a long sentence, I imagine it's related to the amount of money she's supposed to have defrauded the government of.

Honestly, this season did a pretty decent job of showing him as a guy beaten down by the nature of his job but trying to improve, and the bits where he starts talking about the lesbian agenda or whatever just seem more out of place than they did last season. I mean, I guess there are people like that in real life,…

Though Sturges himself made one attempt at a drama, The Great Moment, which wasn't great.

Vertigo - Finally got the chance to see what Sight & Sound crowned the best film ever made in its most recent decennial poll. I wouldn't go that far (it's not my favourite Hitchcock film, either; North by Northwest would win that accolade), but it's quite good. Hitchcock's decision to dump all the answers into a…

That's very high on the list Simpsons jokes that I completely did not get as a kid when I first saw the episode.