She said no, by the way.
There are few moments in film or television that are capable of making me cry. This scene is one of them (as is the end of the special). I've never seen a television show that treats its characters as much like real people as The Office did. Tim's appeal to and rejection by Dawn doesn't seem…

Borders killed itself by over-expansion. They opened so many stores that they were competing with themselves in many markets, and their purchase of the already-struggling Waldenbooks only further reduced their same-store sales numbers. One of my biggest problems with corporations is that investors seem to demand…

Banmar, unless you have a family of four, streaming to your house for $30 is a huge rip-off, and it's not nearly as immersive an experience as a movie screen. Dating couples and groups of three or fewer would have no incentive to do that. Besides, films were made to be watched in theaters. If theaters die, cinema…

Ugh. I recently abandoned Netflix for Hulu because Hulu offers Criterion and more recent seasons of shows I like, like the third season of Parks and Rec. But it's frustrating to find that Newscorp's draconian contract with Hulu imposes strict time and medium limits for streaming, so that I can't view ANY Archer,…

Season 7 isn't just full of Slayer canon continuity errors, but internal logic holes, like the magic portal a couple weeks back. That portal could be opened with any blood, but the First chose Jonathan's, even though that meant slowly luring Jonathan and Andrew back to the U.S., and even though Jonathan turned out to…

They are fantastic live.

Noel, this is NOT A SPOILER, and I'd actually like you to read it.

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

It's a very good film. It's not as confident as Zazie or Malle's other great films, but it's incredibly beautiful and quite an accurate depiction of the adolescent subconscious. There have been attempts to claim Malle wasn't a true auteur, but there's a continuous line of accurately rendered youthful unease running…

Zazie dans le Metro is a legitimate masterpiece, I think. It occupies the stylistic middle ground between Duck Soup and Head. It's one of the most imaginative, anarchic, and scathingly satirical comedies I've ever seen. It's also very much of a piece with New Wave films like The 400 Blows and Band of Outsiders. Like…

Scream 4 is alternately pretty good, brilliant, and terrible. Sometimes all three in the same scene, like at the end.

Agreed completely.

Speaking of Great Scenes in Scream Films…
Scream 4 contains a doozy. The film is an extended diatribe condemning its own existence: the movie-in-the-movie Stab series has resorted to such ludicrous self-parody that the latest killer intends to "remake" the original murders for a social media-based audience. The movie…

She shot Andy Warhol, but did not shoot I Shot Andy Warhol.

Both parts of the Christmas Special and the last episode of the second series are definitely my favorites. They push the characters' desperation to the absolute brink, and then let them earn just enough hope that they aren't completely damned at the end of it. It's the most natural happy-ish ending I've seen a TV show…

The Breeders and Aimee Mann are definitely the best-ever performers at The Bronze. Nobody can touch artists capable of cutting records like Last Splash and Bachelor No. 2. Cibo Matto was pretty great, too. But the rest were mostly grueling, fashionably "alt" would-be rock stars. Bif Naked's appearance was surely the…

After only "Selfless" and maybe "Lies My Parents Told Me," "Him" is one of my favorite episodes in this mostly dire season. It's emotionally resonant (Who hasn't been where Dawn is in this episode?) and so funny I laugh until it's damn near painful. I don't think it's a spoiler to say the season is about to get very…

All Wong's films are slow; that's one of the defining aspects of his style. However, they're usually not boring (I haven't seen this one). His early films feel more like half-remembered dreams of films than actual films. They're rapturous nonsensical visions of materialized emotions and received cinematic images.…

Louie
I'm not sure this can even be properly called a comedy, but it's definitely one of the best television seasons I've ever seen.

Yeah, the faceless "rebels" just kind of disappeared in the mythology reboot, when they might have made a much better subject for the loathsome season 9…