Me, I’d be reluctant to argue that a random twittizen “might be onto something” when said person argues that a commercial was secretly “about selling the ethic of neoliberal capitalism in Russia” even though the commercial never aired in Russia.

I agree that everything about the movie’s framing suggests that we’re supposed to see the plastic bag nonsense as profound. That was my knee-jerk assumption the first time I saw the movie and hated it, but after everyone kept lavishing it with praise, I thought maybe the film was more satirical and tongue-in-cheek…

“Jeremy Blackman’s Stanley Spector more or less disappears during the third act, and his story suffers for it. Sure, there’s something powerful and moving about him telling his shithead dad that he ‘needs to be nicer,’ but it’s unclear exactly what prompts him to stand up for himself.”

But what’s Will’s character arc in that case, though? He starts out saying he’s not interested in romance and his storyline is that he isn’t? That’s less of an arc than a straight line.

Except that the interrogation scene was in episode 6, and per Hawke they’d already decided to reveal that Robin was gay by episode 4 or 5.

Honestly, I think this article leaves a somewhat mistaken impression by assuming that the “we” in “we started to feel like she and [Steve] shouldn’t get together” is Hawke and Keery, as if the actors had to lean on the show’s creators to convince them to take the characters in a more interesting direction than they’d…

I dunno, I feel like South Park gets a bit of a bad rap because it confronts political issues so directly, while a lot of shows that are much more regressive get a pass because their politics is never made explicit. For instance, I can’t think of a show pitched to young people that shilled harder for shallow…

I think Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter pegged it perfectly in his original review back in 1999, dubbing it Dr. Normal Love: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Have Sex With My Wife.

It’s also not clear to me from Williamson’s comments whether the guest actor’s scenes at the end of the season were actually shot after she protested his return, so I’m not sure we can even assume that he appeared in the final episodes at all.

“Is Luce a budding radical, hiding extreme intentions behind a veneer of smiling success and promise? Or is he just a victim of expectations, of the way his community can see him only in binary terms, either as someone who’s overcome his past to become an ‘example of why America works’ or as a kind of ticking time…

I’m not arguing that at all. I think the writing for the finale was pretty bad. In fact, I don’t think any episode of the series has deserved a writing Emmy since, jeez, probably season 4. I just think that criticizing the writers for the incidental content of their action paragraphs, of all things, is not a…

I dunno, to me it seems much more poignant if Drogon’s final act is to expose the fact that the Iron Throne doesn’t matter—that Dany was using this awesome magical creature to claim a meaningless prize that he didn’t care about at all and could obliterate without giving it a single thought..

Yeah, the nomination was for writing, but for writing a screenplay, not a novel or other work designed for direct consumption. The sole purpose of a screenplay is to convey to the people working on a show how to play it, so if its only issue is that it reads as flippant to a bunch of Internet pundits reading it after…

It’s not at all clear to me why most of the quoted action is a problem. It’s not like “They both failed geography” led to the actors playing the scene in a confusing or tonally inappropriate way, so what does it matter if it was framed a little flippantly?

This was one of my favorite movies from Sundance this year. It’s a lot smarter and sharper than most low-budget horror comedies, which tend to be a little rambling and catch-as-catch-can. It’s not quite at Shaun of the Dead levels of craftsmanship, but it’s close. The one major weak point is Josh Gad’s character, who…

Joss really does hew to a template, doesn’t he? I see the institutionalist mentor adjusting to a new and more complex world (Giles/Book/Lavinia), the vulnerable cutie-pie with a surprising will of steel (Willow/Fred/Kaylee/Mellie/Penance), the crusading white knight with a dark side (Angel/Paul/Frank), the…

Hear, hear. The final season of Hannibal wasn’t just bad, it was a perfect example of how great shows are most in danger of losing their way as they move into their latter seasons: the major characters become so beloved, their relationships with each other so inherently interesting to fans and producers alike, that…

“Will doesn’t tear down his fort because he learned to move forward. He tore it down because he was lashing out. He already knew the Mind Flayer is back.”

I’m not gonna argue that S3 doesn’t have its problems, and you’ve certainly identified two of them—that the mayor’s storyline is empty action-movie bullshit (as are the Russians, to a large extent), and that several characters’ storylines climax way too early in the season. But I think you’re wrong that the “growing…

“We agree that season three had a bunch of disparate storylines instead of one main cohesive one.”