Zappa is one of those writers where it's hard to tell where the joke ends and where it begins. Look at infamous pop single "Bobby Brown Goes Down," and try to figure out how Zappa actually feels about feminism, sexual assault, homosexuality or BDSM. It's a labyrinth in there.

I've always liked Sleuth, but I tend to prefer the Pinter version to the original Shaffer one. Shaffer's play is a fantastic workout for two ham actors onstage, but on film it tends to play a little too twee, and the time period in which it was written meant that most of the psychosexual subtext has to remain subtext.…

So many people hate on the movie/miniseries version of "Angels in America," but I think it's damn near perfect and has one of the best all-star casts ever assembled.

Hulce is a major theatrical producer now, one of the biggest independent old-school ones not attached to a giant producing house like Weinstein or Disney.

Once in a while, you'd come across a novelization better than the movie. I remember the novel of "Titan A. E." making a lot more sense and being a lot more fun than the movie; similarly, the world-building of Terry Gilliam's "Baron Munchausen" actually comes across better in the expanded novel than in the film, which…

DC did a "Batman Forever" one. I remember a strange scene where Two-Face and his two dominatrix girls sit around smoking pot.

I tend to sing the title to the Iron Maiden song "Can I Play with Madness?"
"CAN I SLEEP WITH DAIN-JAH!" Boww, chickachickachickachickachickachicka….

Amanda (Fucking) Palmer likes to say "quit pretending art is hard." A big part of her advocacy for keeping the arts, and in particular music education, in schools is that the ability to be competent, even pretty okay if not great, at a musical instrument is treated as a rare and heavy-discipline thing, when more often…

How long has Superman been an established presence in Metropolis at the time of Supergirl? If they want a more seasoned, less fresh-faced hero, Jon Hamm could make a great Supes. Not that they could probably get him, but they can try.

I think, for better or for worse, the alternatives have always been "a white guy plays Apu/Dr. Hibbert/etc" or "there is no Apu/Dr. Hibbert/etc." It's not because something is inherently funny about a white person doing an ethnic voice (particularly in the case of Hibbert, whose blackness has been referenced…

Gotta say, the world needs more Mara Wilson. In a world where Lena Dunham is a celebrity multi-hyphenate, why can't Mara Wilson, who does all those same things, and more, and better, without being a genuinely evil person, be a hip household name?
Also, she is kind of shockingly pretty, in a weirdly wonderful fashion.…

Oates is a Southern Gothicist, the most "literary" subgenre of the psychological horror field. She, like Flannery O'Connor, counts as horror but JUST barely.

Well, I DO want an Elric of Melnibone movie…

Glockenspiel may be more of a R&B/Jersey Boardwalk Sound instrument than pop-punk, but Green Day used it extensively in "American Idiot" and "21st Century Breakdown."

No, in that film they rob a Home Depot.

Tatiana Maslany, starring in "The Last Temptation of Christine."

Until you developed psychic powers, and…
(if "righted wrongs with mischief," congrats! You're Matilda Wormwood!)
(if "gathered like-minded exceptional individuals," congrats! You're Professor Charles Xavier!)
(if "killed everyone," sorry! You're Carrie White! Plug it up! Plug it up!)

The Aladdin series was interesting, because it had the usual comedy and light adventure plots, but also ventured into elements of high fantasy, unusual for Disney series at the time. I remember an episode in which a godlike entity called "The Ethereal" came to Agrabah to determine if life on earth was worth…

I remember a surprisingly cool team-up of Geoffrey Holder and Samuel E. Wright as a puppet Sebastian, for "Sebastian's Island Music Party." It was a video (and album) of Wright and multi-hyphenate legend Holder performing reggae, calypso and soca music. Basically a kid's primer for West Indian and Caribbean music,…

Natalie Dormer is good at telling people what they want to hear- remember when she told the internet how to date her?
Her attempts to appear pious keep reminding me of Trump wooing the evangelicals, misquoting the Bible and naming his favorite book as "Two Corinthians." (So, two Corinthians walk into a tavern and…)