I think there’s even a shift in the British version between seasons 1 and 2. David Brent is a lot more of a villain in season 1, when no one has any real power to resist his awfulness and even nice-guy Tim is corrupted into following in his footsteps by the end. In season 2, they wind back Tim’s corruption in a single…

Eh, “dickless,” suggests that he’s withholding the tapes out of cowardice, when in fact I think he made a calculated determination that protecting the reputation of his stupid TV show was more important than preventing a gross, unstable creep from becoming president of the United States.

She related an instance in which, as part of Franco’s Sex Scenes class, she shot a short film while partially nude, which she uploaded to what she understood was a private Vimeo channel for class-related materials. But she found out later that the channel wasn’t overseen by the school, and worse, that the video…

First of all, one assumes their agents negotiate their deals, so it’s not like Wahlberg himself demonstrated some special financial wizardry that makes him worth 1,500 times more money than his costar.

What the hell, just because I’m curious where this’ll go from here . . .

That exact exchange is why the ending worked for me, actually. We’re given a specific explanation for what the firewall will do (it will delete the AIs’ rogue coding), and then the characters’ theoretical extrapolation of what that explanation entails (the AIs will be permanently “killed”). What happens instead is…

I really expected Daley’s conspicuous milk-drinking to lead into an ironic ending where someone else got his saliva off one of the straws and made him into an AI slave.

The conclusion bordered on deus ex machina. The big magic story contrivance that was supposed to bring everyone the sweet relief of death liberated them instead? It even restored their genitals (as well as the rest of Shania’s body and Elena’s skin color)? The fuck? Why was the offline mod even affected by the…

It’s interesting—that’s exactly how I feel about Chamber of Secrets the book, which to me is the most underrated entry in the series. But I hate the movie version, which to my mind is so focused on duplicating the book’s big setpieces that it completely loses track of what the book is about on a thematic level.

Yeah, that’s pretty gross. Also, what is the history of ACTUAL African Americans in the film’s universe? They seem to have a cultural identity that’s recognizably similar to black people in the real world, so did they conveniently develop a similar culture without any history of enslavement and oppression? Or are we…

I figured it was something like that. But that means that “Fairy lives matter” doesn’t have an equivalent meaning to “Black lives matter” in this universe, right? So what exactly is borrowing the phrase supposed to mean?

For me it’s that “Fairy lives don’t matter” line that really boosts this film from Shitty movie yawn who cares? to Horrifying fiasco what the actual fuck? And they put it in the freaking trailer!

I saw this one at Sundance. It very much wants to be another Bernie, with Black again playing a kooky, eager-to-please criminal, but this time his performance never really rises above the level of amusing caricature.

Any top 20 list that includes The Americans and The Leftovers but leaves off the overrated, past-its-prime Game of Thrones is okay by me.

Season 3 also fulfilled the promise that season 2 sort of punked out on when it went from an “Everyone is at the center of his/her own world” theme in the early episodes to a “Never mind, Kevin is the one big magical savior” thing by the season finale. The final season didn’t abandon the messianic stuff with Kevin,…

To be honest, I haven’t seen it either, because the reviews made it sound okay but thoroughly unremarkable. It certainly wasn’t getting any awards buzz.

Call me cynical, but I imagine one of the reasons none of the young cast got nominated is because the HFPA knows they’ll happily show up and do their thing even if they’re not accepting an award.

Definitely. I feel like the writers really screwed up by trying to have Varga represent both a Trumpian anti-establishment bully and a Mercer-esque ultra-elite schemer. You can have a villain who screams populist platitudes and tries to overturn the status quo, or you can have a villain who amasses power in the…

This could be an interesting story. People tend to think of reporting of this era as very button-down and careful, but the assassination story especially was a crazy, crazy scramble. The best anecdote I’ve heard is about how Don Hewitt almost sent Dan Rather to steal the Zapruder film. That’s apparently a real thing…

Yep. It’s especially galling after the previous seasons were centered around much more compelling villains who are at first made to seem like some unconquerable force of malevolence, only for them to be revealed as merely human in the end. After all that, for season 3 to be like, “But what if this gross weirdo really i…