I actually thought that scene was the closest the movie came to making this entire plot strand work, because Stone's argument isn't "you've sold out" - she says that she likes the music he's playing. What she's saying is that it's not worth it to do something that makes him miserable just to make money, which is fair…

That, to me, was the major flaw in the film. I could have lived with how annoying they were about their art - the whole white savior bit with Gosling, or the fact that Stone is yet another one of those writer characters who can't write about anyone or anything but themselves. But in pretty much every other respect…

I think there's a limit to how far you can take the Lost Cause reading of Firefly. It's clearly there, and a major point against the show. But I sincerely doubt that Joss Whedon intended to write Confederate apologia, and certainly not in the way that Ron Moore intended to reference real-world post-9/11 politics in…

Fringe never had a suicide bomber as a hero

Well, to be honest, I'd say that the political landscape of The Expanse is one of the things that makes me class it as not really descended from BSG. Because, as stated, BSG never had its own political landscape. Its politics made zero sense if you tried to view them as internal to the show - they only worked as a…

I'm not kidding when I say that every space opera on TV owes Firefly a debt. Admittedly, there aren't a lot of those, but if you can't see how both Dark Matter and Killjoys are riffing off it, I don't know what to tell you.

I can only think of one recent TV show, The Expanse, that has been called "the next BSG", and that's not really a justified comparison - SyFy is clearly making it because it hopes to cadge off BSG's prestige after more than half a decade of producing dreck. The actual show is similar to BSG only on a superficial…

The whole point of the article is to list political works from the Bush/post-9/11 era that have stood the test of time. I'm arguing that BSG doesn't belong here specifically on that metric.

I had some pretty serious problems with the way Battlestar Galactica tried to comment on 9/11 and its aftermath. I mean, I agree that that was what the writers intended and in certain points - chiefly the miniseries and the first season - they succeeded. But inevitably, the show had to buckle under the weight of its…

I fully expect there to be religious issues surrounding the wedding (most obviously, whether it will be in a church with Father Brah officiating), but not only would I consider it out of character for Rebecca to consider converting, I'd be a little offended by it. One of the things I love about CEG is how Jewish it…

Yeah, firing George is the most reasonable thing Nathaniel has done since joining the firm, and I'm including realizing that Rebecca is crazy hot and wanting to have sex with her in that calculation. Honestly, George is lucky Nathaniel didn't have him arrested.

One difference between yesterday's marches and the Iraq War protests that I think will make all the difference is that while Bush was a normally popular president overall, and extremely so in the period following 9/11, Trump is historically unpopular just going into his term. His current approval ratings are lower…

I think one potential advantage that Powerless has is that it seems capable of mocking the established DC characters, and maybe even acknowledging that different people might have different takes on them. Agents of SHIELD often seemed contractually obligated to follow the Marvel company line in which everyone loves…

Gosling's character literally calls Legend a bad guy. And since he's the hero - and not an anti-hero whom we're meant to question - that's a point of view we're meant to prioritize. Not to mention that he ends the film a success on his own terms, which again validates his point of view.

I saw a trailer on iTunes just recently for a movie where he plays an American who goes to Italy to play football. Or something - it looked bad enough that I just read the description and closed the tab. So I guess he's working a lot? That's… something, I guess.

I'm trying to decide if it makes it better or worse that MPD is a discredited diagnosis that basically only happens in movies. Probably worse.

Except that Legend's character is treated as a bad guy for trying to combine jazz with modern (black) musical styles like hip-hop, whereas Ryan Gosling's character is depicted as as the sole keeper of jazz's true flame.

I liked La La Land, but it's the whitest film ever, and if it wins in a year in which there have been multiple Oscar contenders about black characters and the black experience, including one that is considered to be strongly in the running for best picture, it'll send a pretty strong message about Hollywood's (lack…

For all the noise they made about him, it doesn't sound as if the show or the network expected any different, or they'd have had him on for longer than eight episodes. From the sound of things, they're now on to a completely different story, so I'm guessing Ghost Rider was basically a face-saving measure - look, our…

Three different people have now failed to grasp that I was referring to the fact that Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is, by the way, a West Wing superfan, is not himself white.