Yeah, I think he's reaching the point where he needs to make a serious decision between looking natural but older and fighting to still look ageless but increasingly unnatural. The former (and correct) choice, especially for a man of Cruise's resources and genetics, would still have him looking great.

If you work out religiously, eat reasonably well, and get minor plastic surgery (I'm guessing) now and again, you can probably achieve similar results as Cruise without needing to spend the extra money on getting your Thetan count audited.

The purpose of reviews (as opposed to other styles of criticism) is to help people decide whether or not they want to watch/read/listen to the thing being reviewed. It is traditional to publish such reviews shortly in advance of the thing being made available. Indeed, companies WANT to have these reviews out there, to…

Robert and, you know, Lyanna's oldest brother Brandon, who rode to King's Landing demanding Rhaegar (who wasn't there) show himself and release Lyanna, leading to Aerys imprisoning Brandon and his companions and then summoning Rickard Stark and all the other companions' fathers to court and then having them all killed…

There may be a kernel in the detail from ADWD that Jon is preserving some corpses in the ice cells carved into the Wall in the hope that they'll "wake" again, to see if anything can be learned from them.

Aerys, the Mad King, who had an increasingly terrible relationship with Tywin and is presumed to have lusted after Joanna Lannister, as underlined by the extreme "liberties" Aerys is supposed to have taken with her at Tywin's wedding ceremony.

I think a lot of conservative outrage-at-liberals-doing-something-they-say-usually-outrages-liberals-when-conservatives-do-it involves basically misunderstanding the premise of liberal outrage, but I thought this was an exception. I thought the comment was super inappropriate in directly attributing some awful…

If I wanted to preserve evidence of having a good comment/like ratio, I definitely made the wrong choice when I decided to keep using my AVClub "Medrawt" id instead of my disqus "medrawt" id when disqus was implemented here. Luckily for me I already have a head start with commenting at Deadspin under a "medrawt" id,…

I used to hate nested comments; I really think they only work when the page is live-updating to alert you there are more comments. But then at least for me the AVClub live-updating starts to collapse when a page gets too many comments on it, which is exactly the point at which nested comments become really…

You can find the show more entertaining without believing that therefore there are logical answers to these questions. I just meant if you're confused and like "huh, I must not be getting something …" no, I don't think there is.

The answer to most of these questions is "at this juncture in the show's history trying to divine logic for things that don't appear to make sense is a category error. The show is not more clever than you are."

Targaryens aren't immune to fire. In the books Daenerys' fire immunity was a one-time magical event (word of author); in the show they seem to generically make Dany immune to fire, but it doesn't apply to her family, many of whom in fact burned to death.

(1) We have no goddamn clue what that means. There are at least two and possibly three stories/prophecies that pertain: the Westerosi tale of the Last Hero, the Essosi or R'hllorite tale of Azor Ahai, and the Targaryen (or Valyrian? or Essosi?) prophecy of The Prince That Was Promised; the last two might be explicitly…

Liam is the one with a narrower face and a slightly more interesting singing voice.

It's also just easy. It's easy to make fun of something (not necessarily easy to make fun of it WELL. (Lessons teenaged Medrawt earned when he trashed a Live album for the school paper, and then thought: "well, that was some really shallow work on my part.") Free pointer: your favorite song's lyrics are either…

So I know you already edited this to add the spoiler tag, but spoiler tags (that are meant seriously) don't really work when you don't tell me what you're spoiling. I had no fear of Louie spoilers, but I wasn't expecting that.

Ah!

No, man, it's just fucking magic. Like, the winter lasts a really long time. Melisandre and Euron both have enough magic to control the local weather, and they're just individual people who've picked up a few tricks and know whose name to chant when they make a sacrifice. The Children of the Forest did something to…

In the comments people also point out several things we call mountain ranges that violate his "no right angles" rule, which seems basically to come down to him talking about the primary mechanism through which mountain ranges form vs. the lived experience of seeing places where sometimes the ground is higher than the…

The Appendices cover the meta-translation stuff, like how the language of Westron was almost-entirely glossed as English down to proper nouns, so Meriadoc's true name was something like Kalikimak, which I guess gets you halfway there, but I don't think there's anything as explicit as in the materials published…