It’s actually even more improbable than that—the argument would have to be that people who were already watching the movie got to that Choose Your Own Adventure line, mistakenly concluded that the film was sponsored by Chooseco, and then convinced $25 million worth of other people to watch based on that incorrect…

There’s a strong argument, though, that using the name Choose Your Own Adventure in a throwaway line of dialogue within the film itself is editorial rather than commercial use. It doesn’t seem like Netflix’s advertising ever implied that the movie was affiliated with Chooseco, and that’s the only thing trademark law…

Eh, I blame him more for writing a suck-ass movie. Just because he wrote Anakin Skywalker as insufferably precious and precocious, it doesn’t mean that all child characters are inherently terrible. Which is why I find the “Oh no, young Tony!” reaction to the Sopranos news sort of odd.

Apparently there was a supernatural storyline for the teen characters that got cut for time. I’m assuming it had to do with Billy getting injected with the same needle they used to sedate Will and becoming a more willing agent of the Mind Flayer. Henry Bowers from It, basically.

Eh, I’d find it more improbably diabolical if that weren’t exactly what happened. Of course, it was framed as Dushku not having a sense of humor and being hard to work with, but it usually is. And that’s the root problem, it seems to me—a professional culture that demands that women put up with their male colleagues’…

To me it sounds much more calculated than that—Weatherly discovering that Dushku was slated to became his co-lead and lashing out for fear of losing status on “his” show. By swinging his dick around like a creep, he ensured that either a) Dushku would swallow her pride and go along to get along, proving that he was…

They essentially all turn into the people the aliens promise them they’ll become.

After Ferrell the role of Dubya bounced around the cast; Parnell, Hammond, and Sudeikis all did versions that were totally unmemorable. The only one I sort of liked was Will Forte’s; he played like a flop-sweat in-over-his-head Dubya that had some funny moments, like when he tried to provide an explanation for his…

Cecily Strong is so underrated. She’s one of the best voice actors the show has ever had—every one of her performances has a unique sound that’s perfectly suited to the character and the needs of the sketch, whereas nearly everyone else has like two or three vocal modes that work or don’t work depending on how well…

As for the other stuff: I’m not sure if anyone complained about his ad-libs, but apparently the Parks and Rec set was considered one of the most comfortable sets to work on.

THIS. GoT used to be ‘The Wire with Magic’. Now it’s just Shut The Fuck Up Here’s Some Dragons.

Yeah, that’s one of the adaption changes in the earlier seasons that I defended pretty zealously. Not only did Shae have a good point, but the Tysha reveal wouldn’t really have made dramatic sense given the earlier changes in Tyrion’s storyline.

Someone over on Reddit pointed out the obvious implications of the title “The Sauna Test”: creatures from the Upside Down can’t abide heat, so if you were trying to figure out who in a group of people has secretly been taken over by the Mind Flayer, you’d insist that they all sit in a sauna and see who flips out.

My completely uninformed guess is that it’s a movie about code-switching, with the duplicates representing the different sides of people that they present or repress depending on the setting and the company, and the attendant paranoia representing the anxiety over which presentation is a person’s “real” self.

So the shocking uninvited guests are probably mysterious alternate versions of the invited guests, right? That’s what the summary, the title/poster, and the casting of twins suggest to me, but maybe the combination of Elisabeth Moss and a vacation-home setting is just giving me The One I Love flashbacks.

Yep. The drop in quality since they stopped hewing to the source material has been dramatic—not because it would be impossible to improve on GRRM’s novels, by any means, but because the showrunners haven’t even tried to match Martin’s nuance or ambition, settling for loud, empty spectacle and inane plot twists like…

Imagine if the messaging from Jor-El was like “your job is to wipe away the filth and make this world ready for us to take over” would it have really mattered that Jonathan and Martha Kent were good to him?

Yeah, I definitely feel like there’s a story there, especially since it doesn’t seem like the showrunners even considered bringing back Fontana. I suppose it could be as simple as “He didn’t really enjoy doing the show,” rather than anything interpersonal. (And given that he stuck around in season 2 long enough to…

Yep, I also found it jarring for them to get so aggressively meta when they a) weren’t in a musical number, and b) weren’t in Rebecca’s POV. Usually that’s when things are most down-to-earth, as if it’s Rebecca and/or the musical fantasies she inspires that infect the real world with unreality.

Not if there’s something wrong specifically with the accounting system. Mindy was flagged for special treatment precisely because her actions couldn’t be assessed using the standard system, so it’s possible this allowed her to bypass whatever problem consigned everyone else to the Bad Place.