Interesting that the “From the Executive Producer of” card refers to season 2 as just “Versace” when it was actually called “The Assassination of Gianni Versace.” I wonder if FX’s lawyers advised against putting the word “assassination” into an ad about a living former president.

Ted Lasso has clearly set up a world where there aren’t global consequences, it’s about the personal relationships and conflicts of the characters.

I think the biggest difference between O.J. and Versace is that the former was clearly the baby of writers Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, the masters of the modern biopic (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, etc.). The latter, on the other hand, was the brainchild of writer Tom Rob Smith, whose experience…

Stranger Things would contractually have first dibs, though, since almost everyone got famous after they signed to the show. All their outside work would have to be scheduled around the show, not the other way around.

But why is it better for the actors to start out obviously too old than to start out age appropriate and eventually mature faster than the characters? Obviously, the ideal scenario for the sake of verisimilitude is that the characters and actors age at the same rate for the whole course of the series, but if that’s…

I mean, it’s not just that they “tried to justify” it at the end. Hopper had a character arc that started with him trying too hard to hold on to all these things that suddenly mattered to him and turning into an asshole as a result, and ended with him learning to let go and have faith that everyone he loved would…

Yeah, the subtle joke is that karate is simultaneously a huge deal in “the Valley” while simultaneously no one really cares about it because, well, it’s just teens doing karate.

Saying that her contract has provisions for bonuses from theatrical release does not say that it was exclusively a theatrical release (and why would it? It was written before the pandemic and before Disney+ was a thing).

I’ve only seen CODA and not Le Familie Bélier, but my understanding is that the American version does a much better job of representing Deaf culture. At the very least, it features talented Deaf actors rather than hearing actors in the Deaf roles, which certainly contributes to the sense of verity.

Yeah, me too. It’s not the Great American Novel, by any means, but I found it mostly fun and endearing.

It’s too tricky a role to cast on looks, though. They need someone who can capture Ellie’s innocence and vulnerability but also her precocious resolve. She has to be young enough to convincingly play a barely pubescent kid (a lot of the wish-casting has been actors well into their twenties) but mature and experienced…

In this case, though, one of the two primary creative forces behind The Last of Us the HBO series is also one of the two primary creative forces behind The Last of Us the video game. I don’t think we have to worry about Neil Druckmann’s lack of respect for his own game!

There really isn’t a racial subtext to the fact that some interviewees treat the Random Roles feature as another obligatory stop on a press junket, while others treat it as an opportunity to gleefully share every dirty secret they’ve kept bottled up over their career, and you always hope it’s going to be the latter…

True, but the entire season will be in the can by that point, and I assume it’ll cover the entire first game. So HBO will just pretend they always intended for it to be a limited series and we’ll get a complete story. Not the worst adaptation outcome ever.

With this movie, as with most “special edition” cuts, I find myself longing for a semi-special edition that puts back in a few key scenes (e.g., Penny’s birthday scene, which if I remember correctly fills in a pretty gaping hole in the narrative) and omits the numerous too-cute indulgences the director swept off the…

As far as I know, nothing in the new release is new; it’s just a remastering of both the theatrical edition and the original director’s cut.

Ha, I’m guessing he’s named “Tunnel” in honor of Elon Musk’s never-not-funny plans to replace mass transit systems with tiny underground passages for cars to drive through?

It’s funny, because I would agree the the series had probably only a couple really great episodes, but I would point to completely different episodes. The first episode, for instance, struck me as a pretty awkward mix of real-life racial drama and fantasy adventure; as metaphors go, “The monsters represent sundown…

I actually think Watchmen starts to go downhill exactly halfway through: as in, halfway through episode 5, “Little Fear of Lightning.” For the first half of that episode it seems like we’re watching a grounded story about two victims of Veidt’s faked alien attack connecting via their shared trauma—but then all of a…

Yeah, and if I remember correctly, the Angel writers were even willing to portray Lorne as canonically gay, but his actor, Andy Hallett, pushed for him not to have a romantic interest at all, since the character was based so heavily on him and that better reflected how he lived his life.