Yeah, I totally expected the Belchers to invite the truck driver over for their dried-out ham, since that's what most shows would have done. I'm glad they didn't go that route, although I'm a little skeptical that what the guy needed was yet another symbol of the holiday he's missing out on (he's driving a giant candy…

Obviously Joy Ride is heavily "inspired" by Duel, but I thought the fact that the truck was a candy cane, rather than having the trucker call out for "Candy Cane" on the CB radio was pretty obviously a reference to Joy Ride.

The dragon was cool but all the foundry stuff felt just as dumb as the foundry stuff in Attack of the Clones.

The Hobbit is certainly much less complex that Lord of the Rings, but it's also much more densly action-packed, and action takes longer to show than it does to explain, whereas Lord of the Rings is much more dialog and description heavy, which is easier to condense and usually takes up less running time in a movie.

Their motivation in the book is pretty much the same as in the movie, they're refugees whose home the dragon stole. In fact, in the book Thorin is much more of a blowhard and is constantly berating anyone within earshot about how he is the rightful King Under the Mountain.

Yeah, I mean it's still a crappy "We Are The World" clusterfuck, but I don't think it's overtly racist like a lot of people argue.

Problematic as these adaptations are, they're definitely still above average for fantasy movies, just by virtue of having great source material and having great actors in almost every role.

I've always kind of felt like Do They Know It's Christmas is often given the short end of the stick. I mean, it's not a great song musically, and not one I love listening to, but I think the "insensitive" lyrics are pretty obviously meant as a sort of ironic calling-out of first-world people on their bullshit (but in…

I just felt like the show was shot and lit very indifferently, like a soap opera or a Kevin Smith movie or something.

I thought the actress playing Piper was generally good, as was the girl from That 70s Show. Jason Biggs, Nicky from The Wire, Kate Mulgrew and that old police officer guy from Weeds are all distractingly self conscious in most of their scenes.

But he's male! All boys would be perfectly fine and not at all emotionally scarred by that!

I would say Breaking Bad has a much more linear structure. Walt was always going from Point A to Point B to Point C, despite one or two brief "turning over a new leaf" moments. Mad Men is much more freeform, and your guess is as good as mine as to where we'll find Don at the start (or end) of any upcoming seasons.

I'd say the first is probably my least favorite, because it takes for-fucking-ever to get going and has way more of the "TIMES SURE ARE DIFFERENT SINCE THIS IS SET IN THE 60s" stuff than the rest of the series. It's still really good, just not quite up to the level of the rest of the show.

Theoretically they could have just asked each what they wanted their door to read. If everyone she works with knows her as Peggy, it'd be kind of silly for her to put "MARGARET" on her door, even if it's her formal name.

Here's the thing that nobody talks about with Orange is the New Black: it's really contrived and fully of terribly stilted performances and looks really cheap and flat.

But "California Don" is only an illusion, it's Don a his least reliable. California Don just impulsively does whatever he wants at all times, and remains so calm because he has no baggage. If he stayed there for any length of time, the baggage would start piling up again.

I can't wait for the third film and yet another round of reviews that can't get past the fact that it's long and that they made the book into a trilogy.

This is kind of the way I feel. There's so much action tightly packed into The Hobbit, I can see where it would be hard to make one film that didn't either feel horribly rushed or cut out a lots of favorite setpieces from the book. So the idea of making it a trilogy never bothered me. But did they all need to be 3…

I don't think Joan ever really saw Peggy as an enemy, but she does resent her a bit for what she perceives as Peggy having everything come to her so easily.

It took no effort to make sense of the comparison. It's taking effort to argue with you about it, but I got to work early and I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything constructive until other people get here.