Yay, Searching! The trailer is pretty good, but I worry that people are going to see it and just think “gimmick movie,” when in fact this is the holy grail of gimmick movies. It takes the most impossible conceit imaginable, and carries it off with more style and substance than most movies with premises half as…

Absolutely a public figure. And it’s not like Mulaney exposed his bathroom habits or whatever; he discussed the public persona of a public figure—the very thing Bittenbinder wanted to be known for. Once you make a deliberate choice to present your own ideas for public consumption, you can’t then prevent other people…

But as I thought more about them, I warmed to those clips. They’re not hand-holding; they’re a gentle reminder.

Yep. “Taylor said you needed some help to scare the shit outta some guys.” He also adds, “I got your back. I ain’t soft,” so it seems like he came along precisely because he was the noncombat logistics guy among hardened, in-the-shit marines—because he felt like he had to prove himself.

I just loved when after Chris said he was going to go to the police Barry pretty much said “why the fuck did you have to say that” and Chris realized that Barry had to kill him at that point.

Apparently the guns can detect when someone is a guest and somehow adjust the ballistics to render it nonlethal. There was some brief dialogue in the season premiere where this was kinda-sorta explained:

Ha! Recently I was texting with a friend about the similarities between Nixon and Trump and she asked whether I thought Dick was as kinky as Donny. I replied, “Dick and Pat had respectable Republican missionary sex, but he always told her she’d be good at anything.” My friend had no idea what the fuck I was talking…

There’s even a throwaway line where one of Nixon’s aides points out that the dog might like him better if he calls it by its actual name, King Timahoe. (Which was the real-life name of the Irish setter Nixon had at the time.)

The movie Dick makes a meal of that same scenario. There’s no more perfect articulation of Nixon’s restentful sadsackery than Dan Hedaya grumping “You’re supposed to love me, Checkers” to a dog that is not in fact named Checkers.

Yep, and Kimmy’s mom alludes to it too. (“Women don’t rape things!”) And the fact that Kimmy reacts violently whenever she gets too close even to a man she wants to get close to is a pretty clear sign of sexual trauma.

Ha, no, he recorded their plans for the evening before they set out: “Bruce insists on seeing a movie tonight . . . [young Bruce stops reading here, is psychologically scarred for twenty years] . . . But Martha and I have our hearts set on Zorro, so Bruce’s cartoon will have to wait until next week.”

I’m surprised no one has mentioned one of the weirdest elements of Batman Forever: the fact that a pivotal story point was completely excised in postproduction. Originally there was a whole dumb thing with the flashbacks about how young Bruce read his father’s diary and discovered that they had gone to the movies at…

I was mainly thinking about the trial scenes, which I absolutely hated. It was essentially about how an entire town of morons was going to let a child rapist go free because he cleaned up nice and spouted a bunch of Fox News platitudes.

Disagree. The series has never been worse than it was in the last few episodes of season 1, when it briefly pivoted from being a witty and empathetic show about a woman who survived unspeakable trauma, to being a lazy, contemptuous cartoon about how small-town folks are stupid, gullible rubes.

Correction: Looking into this story again, which Buffy and Lost scribe David Fury has shared on at least a few occasions over the years, it may have actually been the Jackie Thomas Show writers whom Arnold begged for butt photos. And it may not have been so much a guy who parked in his parking space as Julia…

If there’s anyone I trust to handle this sensitive issue carefully, to ensure that he doesn’t turn it into even more of a joke or fall for fake nonsense designed to discredit the entire Russia investigation, it’s definitely the guy who once went around to all the Roseanne writers begging for pictures of their naked…

When I started college in Chicago in the mid-1990s, my university decided that the best way to prepare new students for life in the big city would be to hire J. J. Bittenbinder to give his crazy, crazy seminar. That seminar was my first real exposure to weird Chicago culture, and Mulaney’s account is not at all…

“Elizabeth spits back at him ‘You can take your foreign bullshit and shove it up your ass.’”

Season 1 alleviated some of my “mystery box” fear by setting up and paying off so many of its mysteries effectively and without annoying fudgery. But the sudden explosion of violence and betrayal in the S1 finale felt very smoke-and-mirrors, and S2 has yet to settle my fears that Ford’s master plan will ever make…

Part of the problem is that they’re defending a show that’s basically been coasting on the goodwill of its initial classic seasons for the past twenty years. In all that time they’ve made no real effort to innovate or to update the formula, and it still makes them money hand over fist, so why would they shake things…