I like Diane Wiest, but I’m having a hard time imagining her giving a performance anything like Ruth Gordon’s in the original film. Wiest is always sort of tightly wound, whereas the whole point of Gordon’s Minnie Castevet is that she presents herself as careless and heedless to bum-rush people into doing what she…

“Your first point is applicable to both candidates. And I think less so in Biden’s case. He may stumble over words, but those words aren’t ‘electric sharks.’”

“Just stick with with the shitshow you know, rather than a new shitshow.”

There’s a Harker-esque character and prologue in the original Nosferatu, right? Thomas Hutter, who travels to Count Orlok’s castle in Transylvania to kick off the story.

To me it was the exact opposite of coming together at the end: The first episode couldn’t have been more perfect, remaining faithful to Moore’s original vision while updating it for today’s social climate. But over the course of the series, while the individual episodes remained incredibly well-written and compelling,…

“None of these undead individuals can speak, and of course there are no external authority figures to explain or offer meaningful guidance on their conditions.”

Can we take the final pull-out as confirmation that Carmy’s restaurant is actually supposed to be located in River North, like the real-life location where the exteriors are shot? I was never clear on that, since it sometimes seems like it’s supposed to be in a rougher and less developed area, where local lowlifes are …

I would say that the difference is that race is purely a social construct, based on people eyeballing the effects of a bunch of random genes for things like melanin levels and eyelid shape, whereas sex is an actual biological mechanism that plays a central role in the human life cycle. So while I think it’s unlikely…

It looks like the main character isn’t Mrs. Gardenia, the former owner of the Woodhouses’ apartment, but Terry Gionoffrio, the young houseguest of the Castavets who throws herself out the window early in the original film.

I suspect what happened here is that the filmmakers were trying to chase down a much bigger and more coherent story that would’ve implicated Dan Schneider in the more grievous sexual allegations, whether by action or knowing/negligent inaction, but they never got there. So they took their one bombshell element, Drake…

I agree, and in fact I think the series got a lot of unearned attention and respect because the fact that it aired on Max tricked people into thinking it was a classy HBO docuseries like The Jinx and not the middlebrow Investigation Discovery program it actually was.

There also has to be a knowing or actively negligent misstatement of fact. There’s nothing legally actionable about the factually accurate statement that a certain group of actors costarred on the show, distasteful though it may be in this context.

The weird thing to me is that if you’d told me a bunch of weirdos on social media had decided they hate Anne Hathaway, I would’ve assumed the haters were Very Online straight dudes who resented the fact that she rose to fame in films like The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada that didn’t cater to the male…

Heh, that’s how I expected the Seinfeld reunion scene to end all those years ago, after the bit in the second-to-last episode where Larry thoughtlessly tells his doctor about his nine-year-old texting buddy’s private rash, and the doctor thinks he’s a sexual predator and calls the police.

That’s not what the Wall Street Journal quote I’ve seen says. It refers to vertical format before and independent of the idea of mini episodes: “Benioff and Weiss, who have been friends since grad school, weren’t crazy about HBO’s then-owners, AT&T, whose executives once asked whether ‘Game of Thrones’ could be shot…

Is it really “veiled liberal Islamophobia” to portray a generic made-up faith to make the point that it’s bad for a religious movement to treat women like property and violently repress queer people? That seems to me to be broadly true, whether the religion in question is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Seraphitism.

I don’t know why we need to resort to a complicated sociopolitical explanation for why people are opposed to AI art in this particular case, when the AI art in question looks like complete garbage.

Yeah, that was my reaction as well. I had no idea what to expect going in, but I was impressed at how well the Osage-focused portions walked the tricky line of making a distant time and unfamiliar culture feel both authentic and approachable (I especially loved how Everett Waller’s big speech as Paul Red Eagle both…

It’s even the conclusion that the movie itself is clearly leading up to, from the opening scene that analogizes Will Smith’s character to the genetically engineered “cure for cancer” that brings about the zombie apocalypse, to the repeated scenes where his character is shown to be in deep denial about the zombies’…

Yeah, that whole interview with “Marty” is great, basically just him being butt-hurt that his career never took off after This Is Spinal Tap and begging for work: “I may not be as edgy as some of those young guys out there, but I think I’m edgy enough. . . . Listen, it’s not my fault that Stanley Kubrick’s last film…