In The Strokes' defense, the "riff" they stole from American Girl is really just a single note (though they certainly borrowed the cadence with which it is played). The rest of the song doesn't really sound anything alike.

Going by IMDB, all of the "___ & ___" episodes are as follows:

I was worried that the whole "Jess tells both Nick and Schmidt the other one has 'man problems'" thing was going to go to a super cliche'd place, but kudos to the show for zagging and having Nick and Schmidt both instantly thank Jess for trying to be helpful rather than having them "work together" by turning on her,…

I don't really care if they "leak" since that's incredibly easy to avoid. Simply don't go out of your way to watch the advertisements in advance.

Yeah, the only thing I could think about during that spot was that there's definitely some footage floating around of someone responding "My mother's dead."

Well, sure, but if you haven't seen The Big Lebowski, you don't really have any frame of reference for the spot. I'm just saying that claiming "there are no pop-culture references to miss" isn't strictly true.

I'd argue that the sight of a bearded Jeff Bridges humming some kind of pseudo Bhuddist mantra is at least a slantwise reference to The Big Lebowski.

YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR

Yeah, I feel like Davidson is getting a huge helping of benefit-of-the-doubt here for what have essentially been tired old gay panic monologues. I don't really get what's smart or subversive about them, the whole joke was just him being afraid that a girl might think he's gay.

I think you're devaluing the word "genius," but yeah Timberlake could hold his own as an SNL cast member, and that's certainly not true of Shelton (he was a fairly decent host, but that bar is considerably lower from a "comedy sketch acting ability" standpoint).

I generally enjoy her, and her energy is so different from everyone else's that it's worth keeping her around, but good lord she needs to stop flubbing every third line.

I felt like the Riblet but was none-too-secretly Bobby Moynihan's way of showing the world that he could do Update better than Jost or Che in his sleep if he felt like it.

It's phrased weirdly in the review but I think it makes sense in so far as Seinfeld being one of the only observational comedians to be successful with an objective voice "proves" the rule that most other comedians are better served with a subjective approach.

"Backstrom doesn’t put cracks in the china so much as make cracks about the Chinese."

I downloaded and watched the "Dwarfed Edition" that was posted here a little while ago, and while it doesn't incorporate the third film yet, it is amazing how much the edits make it play more like the book, with the focus on Bilbo's POV removing a ton of the added darkness and gore which are mostly contained in the…

The only thing that has aged poorly in the first film is the use of skippy-cam in a few of the flashback scenes, which always just looks corny (whereas actual slow-mo usually looks cool). That, and the part after Frodo passes out at the ford of the Bruinen where Elrond's head floats by in a white void giving…

The problem is that Tolkein never wrote what Gandalf was doing beyond very vague terms, so there was no dialog, no specific events, nothing to adapt into scenes for the film that feel anything like Tolkein's writing.

They'll probably make it so that the official single-film edit is only available for purchase as an extra on the hyper-deluxe Blu-Ray 90-disc set with all three Hobbit films and all three LoTR films.

It's Bilbo's narration as per it being the Red Book of Westmarch, though that was basically retconned by Tolkein after the fact.

One has to think that Warner Bros will release a condensed version at some point. It seems so obvious that money is on the table for them to do so. But it won't be until they've milked all possible money out of the final extended edition and subsequent 37-disc boxed set and whatnot.