I don’t think anyone really believes the sabotage story, but her lawyers need some kind of answer to the big question: “How did real bullets get into that gun in the first place?”

Being lax on safety checks is bad, but if you have no reason to believe the gun could have anything but blanks, that’s just laziness and…

It’s not exactly high art, but Center Stage is probably the most accurate ballet film. It at least acknowledges that dancing can be fun sometimes! And certainly “get a good role in the student showcase to impress recruiters from various companies who are scouting talent” is a lot closer to how it works than “one…

As a former (non-pro) ballet dancer, the film that comes closest to capturing that world for me is actually Whiplash. It’s the only film that manages to capture both the appeal and the dark side of ballet’s intense perfectionism. Most ballet films are either boringly inspirational or boringly dark, they always feel…

I think a lot of shows/movies, CW especially, aren’t really about teens, they’re about adults-who-happen-to-be-in-highschool. For plot reasons (and to make the show more relatable to actual teens), the characters are in high school, but they look and behave like adults and the audience is supposed to judge their…

Lost in Translation is a little more nuanced case, I think - it’s from the perspective of two characters who don’t know much about Japan, and conveying that feeling of “this is a strange place with strange people and I have no idea what’s going on” is important to making the film work. In theory you could let the…

Suzanne Collins would have been 38 with two kids when Battle Royale came out, so I don’t find it hard to believe she hadn’t heard of it. I was a teen in the mid-2000s, so I’d seen it, but I doubt she was hanging out with many teenagers at the time. 

A very charming Netflix show that’s not really involved in any of this drama.

Yeah I think unfortunately this is a story where you really can’t get away with Dawson Casting. Most movies/shows it works because the characters don’t really behave like teens anyways. But to find Evan Hansen sympathetic at all you have to see him as a kid. 

I know I’m basically just repeating the jist of the article, but man I’m hoping in the future more musicals will do like Hamilton and just film a high-quality production of the stage musical with the original cast. You can always do endless movie adaptations later. 

I had a cat who was disinterested in all toys and he got up to 20 lbs before my vet gave me a talking-to, and I put him on a diet. I got him down to a stable 15 lbs (healthy for him, he was a big cat) over about a year and a half thanks to severely restricting his diet and forcing him to work for his meals. In the…

I really can’t be bothered to be upset about Blink-182 doing their schtick in 1999, but it’s fun to imagine them playing a concert with Modest Mouse and both bands finding each other insufferable, so that’s nice.

I think it’s meant to highlight that while she’s not emotionless, she’s also not the innocent girl that Caleb sees her as, either. If I put myself in her shoes, it looks something like this:

Imagine you’re watching Star Trek, and Captain Kirk and his away team have been captured by your typical aliens of the week. They…

Is it wrong to mourn that the demographic of nerdy guys that were the champions of science fiction for so long are now disappearing from it? I feel like the Hugos have become something very different than they were when I was growing up, or maybe it’s the genre as a whole that has changed. Either way, it doesn’t feel…

If this is aiming to be a heavy-handed allegory for illegal immigrants living undocumented in the US, it’s not really hitting the right parallels. Illegal immigrants are immigrants, they have to travel somewhere to get that status. And if they’re trying to escape to Mexico, that’s sort of the opposite of immigrating? H…

It’s funny and clever but also beautifully shot, especially by the standards of 2011 youtube. I still find it hard to believe it’s not the official video.

The annual passes will be back eventually, I’m sure. Even aside from the profits they brought in directly, they’re a way for the park to stay on good terms with the surrounding city. Local government can cause a lot of hassle for them if they want to. Annual passes make it practical for local residents to attend,…

So is the little girl a hallucination, or are the astronauts a hallucination? Sounds like it could go either way!

It’s because he was so idolized for so long. One of the dangers of parasocial relationships is that if you learn the person wasn’t who you thought they were, it feels like a personal betrayal.

Macarons can be delicious, but they have the same problem that cakes do - you can’t tell by looks how they are going to taste. So professional bakers will put ridiculous amounts of effort into making them look gorgeous, and no effort into making sure they taste good. If you want a tasty macaron, you’re better off…

I feel like it’s due for an adaptation, it’s pretty timely given how much the book revolves around the concept of privilege: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together,…