Really? It’s a moral outrage to write a novel that’s well-intentioned but just kinda stereotypical and sucky? In a world where (gestures at a dozen horrifying daily news stories), I think that outrage would be more productively directed at something other than How dare she not be a very good writer!

Yeah, but a lot of things that get plaudits are utter trash. It usually isn’t framed as an outrageous moral failing on the part of the honoree. Or at least it didn’t used to be, but now we seem to be eliminating the possibility that things can just suck without needing to be atoned or apologized for.

Honestly, I’d be happy for them to ruin the ending, because for me the ending damn near ruined the season. After the series spent nine episodes extending Alan Moore’s original argument that superheroism is inherently damaging and dangerous, it was bizarre for it to land on the notion that this one character becoming a…

Well, if by “star-making scheme” you mean her own representation working to get her cast in stuff, then sure. But I’ve seen no evidence of a larger publicity push to make her into a tween celebrity a la Shirley Temple / Macaulay Culkin / Millie Bobby Brown. She’s just a kid who gets a lot of good roles, and in and of…

Eh, it’s probably more of a practical issue than some sort of star-making scheme. Finding good, reliable child actors is hard, and Grace is real damn good. I saw this movie at Sundance last year, not long after I watched The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix, and it’s impressive how good Grace is as both Troop Zero’s…

I mean, except for the original article, which said Lifetime was developing “its own” Silence of the Lambs series that happened to have the same title, and not that Lifetime was the previous network with which MGM tried to place its Clarice concept.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Lifetime was developing its own Silence Of The Lambs-related TV show in 2012 that was also called Clarice.

Say what? On Parks and Recreation, four members of the main cast were of minority or mixed-race descent (Aziz Ansari, Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza, Retta). And both 30 Rock and The Unbreakable Kimmie Schmidt were designed partly as a vehicle for their African American male leads (Tracy Morgan and Titus Burgess,…

There were a lot of things I liked about Fargo season 3, but I just can’t get past the fact that David Thewlis’s character ultimately doesn’t work for me at all. After two seasons in which a supposed human incarnation of evil is exposed as a mere man who will be shot down and have his empire crumble into the sea, it…

I agree. It’s ironic that a lot of the criticisms of TLJ were about what a mistake it was to overturn the “fascinating” questions raised by TFA like “Who is that guy?” and “Who were Rey’s dead parents?”—but then TROS decided that the proper corrective was to overturn the actually fascinating questions posed by TLJ.

Yeah, there’s a perspective some fans have that’s like, It’s all made-up anyway, so as long as the filmmakers technically explain away the inconsistencies, they can do whatever the fuck they want. But if what they’re doing is retconning away the central arc of the main characters, the whole previous film becomes just…

Whether people liked the decisions or not, TFA set a course. It wasn’t TLJ’s job to then set a new course, it was to continue it.

Yeah, my issue with TLJ all along is that it has some really terrific moments—including one, the throne room scene, that’s among the very best in the franchise—but they never cohered into a fascinating movie, and the whole thing ended up being just an interesting mess.

I agree that the adaptation didn’t need to be as pessimistic as the original comic, but I think a form of positivity more consistent with the original story would have been for Angela to reject exceptionalism, recognizing that it’s what got both her and the world into such a state in the first place. As I mention,…

Lots of good thoughts here. I’ll especially have to think about the idea that Laurie can only capture Adrian once she’s no longer a superhero. I certainly see the logic in that, but I do think it’s undercut somewhat by the decidedly non-naturalistic way that scene plays, with glib, quippy dialogue (“People change,…

They shoulda definitely written a song about how he does not diddle his sister.

I gotta say, if the message Lindelof thinks we ought to take away from his Watchmen is that we need heroes to rise up and take on the insidious threat of white supremacy, he’s got a very different understanding of what it means to remain faithful to the spirit of the original graphic novel than I do.

Yeah, I wish he’d elaborated on the specifics, but I guess it has to do with the fact that his character in the second half has to initially seem like a genocidal terrorist but then turn out to be a mostly harmless prankster. I’m guessing he thought that to maintain the suspense he ended up playing the character in an…

True, though you could see a lot of that as falling under question #1—recognizing, for instance, that the CW is a largely untapped source of potential gift baskets.

Yep, this. People are always puzzled and/or outraged by the Golden Globes’ critical judgment, but the truth is that the Golden Globes have never represented any sort of critical judgment. The nominations are awarded purely on the basis of two questions: 1) How can we maximize the number of gift baskets the studios…