The main problem with a Jesse cameo during the main Better Call Saul timeline is that Aaron Paul would need to convincingly look several years younger than he was when Breaking Bad premiered ten years ago. He’d be, what, seventeen or eighteen at the time?

Jesse was a street-level dealer who mostly pushed his own product. His only connection to the Cartel was that he knew Krazy-8, who was cousins with Jesse’s partner, Emilio. And it wasn’t Tuco Krazy-8 was informing on, it was small-time dealers like his cousin. Tuco doesn’t come into the picture until Krazy-8 is dead;…

As near as I can tell, his main arguments are:

Yeah, I remember there being a lot of negative buzz before the movie came out, most of which focused on the script and how so many high-profile writers had done different drafts and none of them were working. Joss Whedon even complained publicly about how he was called in to punch up the final action sequence but “I…

Yeah, I thought it was pretty clear and worked really well, especially since it’s a great way to confront Wolverine with the downside to his lone-wolf, It’s all about me attitude for it to turn out not to be about him at all. And it nicely exposes the secret selfishness of Magneto’s anything-for-the-cause attitude, if…

Ugh. I know everyone talks about how Best Supporting Actor in a Drama is so competitive, as if it explains why absolutely killer performances like Noah Schnapp in Stranger Things and Noah Emmerich in The Americans were long shots even to be nominated—but then they populate the category with not one but two actors from …

TLJ had some great stuff and some dumb stuff, but its worst parts didn’t come close to being as bad as the many, many terrible things in the prequel trilogy. And the few positive things about the prequels don’t come close to being as good or as interesting as the best parts of TLJ. Heck, in my opinion there are only…

What surprised me was less the idea that nepotism could happen in Starfleet than the fact that Rick Berman was the one pushing the idea. He always seemed to be the guy who would nix things that seemed too edgy because “that’s not Star Trek” or whatever.

There’s not a rule that you have to name a movie after its subject’s real-life nickname, no matter how badly it plays. If a studio made a movie about the murder of Emmett Till, they wouldn’t call it Bobo.

I don’t know if this counts because I probably wouldn’t have seen the film anyway, but it always amazed me that a professional marketing team at Universal Pictures sat down to title a $90 million movie about a heavyweight boxing champion directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe, and decided that it should be…

The craziest thing? The write-up here doesn’t make it clear, but Milo is playing a real person, Dr. David Sopher, a London gynecologist villified by anti-abortion activists for pioneering techniques used in second-trimester abortions.

I’d say the exact opposite is true. Successful media properties are constantly being sued for IP infringement—Stranger Things, Harry Potter, The Matrix, Zootopia, Lost—and only rarely do these suits amount to anything.

Even then it wasn’t a slam-dunk case, since you can’t copyright ideas, only the specific expression of them. Cameron would certainly be within his rights to draw inspiration from Ellison’s Outer Limits episodes, the same way writers do riffs on It’s a Wonderful Life or pay homage to The Godfather or what have you. And…

I’d caution against getting hopes up too high for this one. It’s not without a certain amount of rickety charm, but it mostly just increased my appreciation for how well Stranger Things balances the familiar and the original, the stylized and the realistic. In this movie the formulation is way off; the kids’ banter is…

Heh, when I first glanced at the cropped image at the top of the article, it looked an image of a Dora Milaje warrior riding into battle on a centaur who is also Spider-Man.

The reporting is a little confusing on this point, I think. Roseanne waived the rights to profit participation in this new series, to which she would automatically be entitled because of her “Based on a character created by . . .” credit on the original series. When they say she otherwise “retains the rights” to the…

Yeah, this one’s not great. I caught a Q&A with the director after the screening I attended, and he came across like a bit of a hired gun, not someone pursuing a passion project, though he also seemed thoughtful about the subject matter and respectful of the historical record. But part of the problem may be that he’s…

Maybe, but the zeal with which Dr. Patterson tries to explain away Koko’s wandering responses doesn’t fill me with confidence that she’s not doing something similar the rest of the time.

Eh, the fact that animals are capable of spontaneous gestures and emotional responses does not mean they aren’t also capable of mimicking those things for approval or reward. There’s legitimate disagreement among researchers in this field as to whether Koko’s mastery of sign language was really as impressive as Dr.…

Yeah, I was pretty much checked out by that point too. For me the show probably peaked around season 4. It stayed pretty consistently entertaining for the next few years, but slowly the number of really brilliant episodes diminished and the number of real stinkers increased. Season 8 is probably the last year I…