The Money Monster at the end of this movie.

I've never really liked the idea of calling the Western remake "All You Need Is Kill." Is it a snappy title when you hear it? Yes. But it's also a blatant example of run-on-buzzwords, almost-makes-sense-until-you-actually-think-about-it Gratuitous Engrish.

What about the unspeakably bizarre Denver International Airport's whole… thing? It's a little purple to call anything eldritch, especially a modern airport, but it's hard not to have weird feelings about that place.

He did a fantastic job in that role, wringing charm and oddball sympathy from a somewhat one-dimensional character who was written, more or less, as Ferris Bueller (so much so that Matthew Broderick famously played the role in the previous Broadway revival).
"How to Succeed" is a weird, quaint show, because the…

So, in other words, Hollywood CREATES the lowest common denominator!

Three major composers have tried taking on Batman as a musical or as an opera, but it hasn't ever clicked- I wonder if it's because adding music, except in the BEST POSSIBLE WAY (like "Sweeney Todd" is the only possible musical/operatic treatment of the Sweeney Todd legend that wouldn't be ludicrous), just gilds the…

This is why "Arkham Asylum" works so well as a mature adaptation of the BTAS canon: it makes Batman's genuine remorse that Arkham isn't working a big part of the character, to the point that his guilt-ridden nightmares show the rogues' gallery gloating over how the asylum has become a hub for criminal activity.

And speaking of gimmicks, the way it subverts the too-familiar "Joker kills young Robin" story arc was genuinely inspired.

Batman leaned into a Hayes Code aesthetic of implication over innuendo that actually worked very well with the show's ambiguous retro-futurist style.

As fast-food establishments gradually replaced both the business and the culture of family-run greasy-spoon diners, it's interesting to see that McDonalds is now beginning to take on the former cultural function of the diner as well- a hub for the disenfranchised and the underbelly.

This, my friends, is how Urinetown begins.

Get on with it? Please. I haven't cried since age eleven, when I told myself it was a stupid habit and I wouldn't do it ever again. Pathetic. To feel ANYTHING is to feel weakness…
Joking aside, hindsight has proven this was a bad decision to make. It turns out that the downside to never crying for fifteen years, not…

I went to the recent Who Hits 50 tour, and the band is actually sounding the youngest they've sounded in years. The main blokes may be old, but they're old and in great health, whereas twenty years ago, Roger's voice was blown and Pete had a hand injury that prevented him from playing much but his picked acoustic…

Quadrophenia throws out the vastest part of the album's convoluted story, stripping it down to "troubled Mod teen lives through the Brighton-riot era, has angst." It's for the best, really.

Did anyone ever really doubt that it was part of his research? There's barely a single album he ever wrote without a veiled reference to victims of child sex abuse. It's been his bugbear since the mid-Sixties.

It's not as balls-out or as memetic of a film as "Tommy" was, and it jettisons much of the original album's weirdness (not to mention the time-period-specific confusion of bipolar disorder with split personalities) in favor of being a relatively realistic slice of life film.

The Dream. That bloated corpse-woman with the long fingers and swollen-shut face…

Schwartz was either a clunky writer in general or trying a very specific "oral campfire storyteller" vibe that doesn't translate on paper. The famous actor George S. Irving (best known as Heat Miser) did audiobook recordings all three books, and the individual stories are on YouTube. It's amazing how much better the…

People argue that the variety show is dead and dated, but I think it's just been subsumed and merged into other more current forms of entertainment. The modern "postmodern late night show," of the Jimmy Fallon/James Corden/Conan O'Brien style, has less and less to do with the monologue/standup/witty guest banter…

Short's best work was as The Male Leads in the Neil Simon/Cy Coleman Broadway musical "Little Me," which was originally created for character comedian Sid Caesar in the 1960s. Caesar was a beloved comedian, but not really a singer at all, so the seven characters he played were written exceptionally broad (mostly as…