I weirdly applaud and admire the lengths of manipulation but in the same way I looked at the Ashley Benson and Vanessa Hudgens characters in Spring Breakers in that 'I WOULD NEVER EVER WANT TO DO OR TRY THIS' kind of way because I am not a sociopath of the nth degree. 

You'd be surprised.  Jenni Konner and Lena Dunham on a commentary track of an episode expressed fandom for Smash (though possibly ironically).

I wonder about how marketing and cultural legacy plays into the bait and switch for people who may have not seen these movies at the time they were made but were playing off what was being sold to them.  RoboCop and Saturday Night Fever both come to mind.  One of my early childhood memories was the Terminator and…

Favorites: Babe 2: Pig in the City, Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, Looper, Jackie Brown, Peeping Tom, Blow Out, and the 21 Jump Street movie (in that the real twist in the movie is that Jonah Hill's character would be more in with the popular kids as opposed to Channing Tatum).

I feel like everyone here predicted Kyle as sacrificial lamb, too precious for this harsh world saintly figure from the getgo.  

The Doctor had such a kind, friendly, respectful look toward Don when he saw him speak to creative at the office.  Is he the type of man cool with his wife having certain needs that cannot be fulfilled by him or will he be the type of person who will suddenly embrace having control of 'life and death'?  Not saying he…

Dammit Don!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And also that is his given, baptismal name. 

The bro-ish attitude that turned me off to Cenk actually made me wonder how him and Toure never teamed up.  Maybe because the world would melt. 

That piece really did change my perspective on them and recently seeing that clip really crystallized my opinion on it as somebody who sometimes checked out their articles.
 
Too many people who enter hard-hitting journalism like to posit themselves as Hunter S. Thompson, ripping apart everything with their provocative,…

I approve of any homages to The Shining though it vaguely reminded me of how in American Horror Story season 1 there were shout-outs if straight-up transposing of imagery and music from classic horror that for me proved distracting. 

I cannot be the only person who thought that bathroom scene with the vibrant red was citing The Shining, right?  

Metallica and Lou Reed do a concept album based on the works of Frank Wedekind.  What could possibly go wrong?  Lulu did.  She did bad.

Why not Maya Rudolph, once she is out of his 5 year pregnancy, to do this?  Although I have no idea what her interviewing skills are (and frankly, the same could be said of Seth with actual people than 'characters') she needs a format where her multiple talents can be used aside from appearing on Fallon singing…

Anybody who saw The Hurt Locker or ZDT as a love letter to the military or torture (which to me shows that it was horrific and that there was intel buried in a bunch of ignored case files, not unlike the case files around Maya's desk that never moves and gathers dust, shows how this rush toward revenge in the movie…

I definitely was not too sad that Evan Peters and not she was in Asylum. 

The only wrinkle of Army of Shadows and other movies/stories of Occupied France is that a lot of people who fought in the resistance were the biggest defenders of the colonial empire.  I think even Col. Mathieu's own narrated resume includes that he fought in the anti-Nazi resistance (as did the actor who played him…

Well, the movie stated, that is pretty reductive, was not the movie I and a few others saw.  And speaking of drones in the post, the scene of where somebody's career is destroyed because his name was on a lawsuit of a US drone strike that would have supposedly never been known had another country's intelligence agency…

I would say that the detainee Ammar in ZDT comes pretty close to being humanized in midst of his dehumanization.  I am not even comfortable with the Maya and Dan 'playing nice' with him with the nice food spread just because he was like such a different person due to the sleep deprivation and that he is getting…

Oh, boy.  The score in the milk bar and the torture scenes are the same.  It was not like Pontecorvo had that one piece of music for Morricone to play again.  It showed that their lives and livelihood were equal and came at the same cost.