My only quibble with Manchester by the Sea is the dream sequence. I wish that had hit the cutting room floor. It really undercuts what the film is doing and seems like something the financiers insisted on—nothing else in the movie feels like CliffsNotes.

Everyone talks up the director's cut but both versions of that movie have the same basic problem Prometheus does: the people behind it are above average in the intelligence department, at best, and don't have anything remotely new or interesting to say about their chosen themes and subjects but think they are…

Easter, not Christmas, is the biggest Christian holiday.

I like them in concept. I just think the execution is really bad. The Clone War cartoons—particularly the original run of shorts on Cartoon Network—make it pretty clear the raw material for really interesting stories was present and was just squandered by a control-obsessed Lucas.

I was actually sold on it from that premise—and pleasantly surprised that it was a dark and cerebral movie about accepting various forms of loss up to and including squaring up to your own death.

It's The New Yorker. Its editorial mission is basically to pat the upper classes of this country on the back and tell them how wonderful they are and troll absolutely everyone else.

Its main fault was it did not know what kind of show it wanted to be and tried a different approach to that question basically every episode—at least in the first season, I didn't bother to watch the second. The fact that the guy in the title role was a perfect charisma black hole didn't help, either.

Gene Hackman has got into full-blown street brawls during his senior years. Acting isn't exactly working in the mines for a living. If you live in a country as rich as the US and are rich, you can be basically middle age in terms of physical health and prowess for many decades. It's the working classes that hit the…

Mark Gatiss has a gift for coming up with really interesting spins on old tropes at the basic premise level and then running them into the goddamn ground. He's the George Lucas of television in that way. He really needs to embrace the executive producer role and come up with the broad strokes of things and then let…

Even as a director, he's seems limited to religious films and action-orientated dramas, which makes it seem like they'll only deal with him behind the camera when a weirdly huge ROI is more likely than not to happen.

Changing classic logos for sleeker and shittier "modern"/corporate takes has become a thing for some reason. Here in the states, the two biggest examples I can think of are the Democratic Party exchanging the traditional donkey logo to a big blue "D" for some reason and the University of California's aborted attempt…

Dude, the first poster for The Phantom Menace literally has the little kid version of Anakin casting Darth Vader's shadow. If you are just barely paying attention to those movies and don't get they are telegraphing "this is Darth Vader as a little kid," you probably shouldn't have a license to drive, access to other…

That's not that. Not paying attention at nerd level is not knowing why the giant multi-armed cyborg with lightsabers has a nasty cough. Not knowing that Anakin is going to be Darth Vader is not paying attention on a "I am either mentally handicapped in a medical sense or incurious to the point that somebody really…

That part I think, sadly, is spot on. I've met diehard Star Wars fans who didn't fully get this was another prequel of sorts even when they were aware Darth Vader and the Death Star were in the movie.

Yeah, this was what I was going to touch on. If this does well, there is no way they aren't making another anthology movie with these characters. So this just comes off as needlessly flip.

Its missing a "you bet your ass" and is way too understated and family-friendly for that.

The thing I really hated about this—outside of it making no sense and being the kind of thing dumb people think profundity sounds like—is that it brings a dumb Bay Area Boomer sense of moral relativity into a series that absolutely did deal in moral absolutism up to that point. You have literally purely good and evil…

I really liked this film. It's not up there with Reds by any stretch in his body of work but I think it works better than most reviews suggest and actually does well according to its own terms.

The first season was good to the point that I was legitimately confused that it was created by some of the same people responsible for Smallville and Arrow. There was very little filler, everyone got to play, and the A plotline was as emotionally resonant in comedic and tragic ways as anything on television. And in…

Underwhelmed by the trailers—and if its ending is that sentimental and unearned, I have a feeling the trailer is Sky Captain levels of deceptive.