I also have a thirdhand connection to someone who worked on Buffy, and I’ve heard some quite horrifying stories as well. The interesting thing is that they don’t just center around Whedon, though his tendency to play favorites and wield authority like a high-school mean girl was obviously a major contributing factor.…

Honestly, I’ve always thought that Whedon’s work was far better—and more genuinely feminist, to boot—when he was just writing well-constructed stories about the sorts of women he was attracted to. Once everyone started lauding him for being a Genius Artiste telling Important Stories About Lady Power, his work got…

I mean, with the Golden Globes it’s not even about the projects that caught the voters’ fancy; it’s about the projects the HFPA thought would earn them the most gift baskets and entice the biggest stars to attend their fancy awards show. It amazes me that every year people complain about the silly choices and snubs as…

I second the love for We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, which is also my favorite film of the festival so far. There’s always a danger with a film like this, a genre-bending project that plays coy about what kind of film it even is, that it’ll end up being less than the sum of its parts. That’s how I’ve felt about…

The way I always saw it was this: I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that someone like Epstein might be murdered to protect shady, powerful people. But at the same time, if a prison’s security protocols are so fundamentally unreliable that an assassin could sneak in, murder someone, and then disappear …

I look forward to the inevitable argument between Clarence and Sweets about whether or not Clarence ever met Barack Obama.

It wasn’t a great show, but it still had some killer moments. Most notably, no work of fiction was more prescient about the impending age of COVID than the sequence in which the ship’s passengers mutiny in order to throw themselves out the airlock.

True, even the baseline story I laid out is something of an extrapolation, though probably a safe one. According to Whedon’s ex-wife, he had his first extramarital affair on the set of Buffy, which he later attributed to being “surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive young women. . . . Suddenly I am a powerful…

Yeah, it’d be one thing to say, “Given what we know about Whedon’s general skeeviness, we should take it seriously when women accuse him of sexual misconduct.” But to this point no women have accused him of sexual misconduct, and I don’t know that the same logic can be extended to argue, “Given what we know about…

There is a magical moment that I love in this one: in the first dinner, when Dumbledore or I cannot remember who does a magic trick, and all the kids smile, surprised. All of them. Even Draco Malfoy, who is still allowed to be a boy before being totally screwed up by his education and influences. Colombus never…

As I understand it, the adaptation rights to the characters introduced in the novel Red Dragon, including Hannibal, Will Graham, and Jack Crawford, were sold separately from the rights to the characters introduced in Silence of the Lambs, which include Clarice, Paul Krendler, Jame Gumb, and Benjamin Raspail. That’s…

No, definitely my friends. Apparently the Catan rules used to have some flavor text about how the person with the most victory points is the winner, and the other players must hail the new Lord of Catan! One gaming couple I know would demand that the losing players literally shout “All hail the new Lord of Catan!” at…

It’s not so much that you can choose to lose, but that in doing so you can use a straightforward game mechanic to confer a huge advantage on the other player of your choice. Like, you can lose at Monopoly on purpose, but you can’t just give another player all your Monopoly money.

As far as I know, the official rules make it clear that you can’t bind anyone to future trades but don’t place any conditions on current trading ratios. It’s actually why some of my gaming friends and I have always considered Catan a fundamentally broken game—because the opening-ended trading makes it incredibly easy…

I don’t think the age difference would be quite so weird if the show didn’t do the typical thing where they cast a not-particularly-youthful twentysomething actor as the teenage main character, so it looks more like the story of a preteen sleuth solving mysteries with his favorite uncle.

Yeah, this is an especially weird project on which to fantasize about an unexpurgated original cut, given that it’s infamous for having been an absolute bear to edit into shape, because Hughes shot reams of extra footage without really having any idea how or if he would use any of it. Basically, it was a movie that…

I’d probably rank them as 1>>2>>>4>>3. There wasn’t much I loved about the current season, but there was still a fair amount I liked, and nothing I hated as much as season 3’s Varga, whom I found both extremely unpleasant and totally incoherent as a character.

“I am genuinely exhausted, and am stepping back to martial my energy towards my own life, which is also at the brink of exciting change.”

Yeah, and even if Page were still of an appropriate age, she probably wouldn’t be eager to sign on for the adaptation of a game that basically ripped off her likeness.

Ellen Page is a full twenty years older than the character of Ellie, so yeah, she’s aged out of the role at this point.