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 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…

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.

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.

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,…

There’s no way she could have done more than a cursory level of research on autism, or she would surely have noticed the burning hatred a lot of autistic folks have for Autism Speaks. To claim “I had no idea it was such a polarizing group!” is damning in and of itself, honestly.

It also falls squarely into the kind of rhetoric that got Trump into power in the first place: “We hate Trump because he reminds us of you, working class white voter! Eating fast food like a poor person, how gross.”

It’s really a shame that she wasn’t born a decade or two earlier, because these covers make a very good case for how talented she would be as frontman for a rock band. Sadly... rock isn’t really mainstream enough anymore for that career path.

Yeah. I think that spouses of high achievers often make a lot of sacrifices for their spouses career and have a legitimate claim to their profits. But there needs to be SOME limit. No one needs millions of dollars a year for even the most luxurious standard of living.

It also detracts from the feminist message of the film. The message to young girls in the original was: you too could be a strong warrior if you work hard (and with a little cleverness). Now, the message is: if you’re already super-gifted at martial arts from birth, you can be a strong warrior. It’s no longer “girls…