Not what I said. The issue with this particular doomed love affair is that it’s bound up in a dreary faux-deep story about an evil duke, as if pop music were about standing up to the Man in some portentous political way instead of just by being young and heedless.

There’s also a tendency for the film’s fans to be like, “Ugh, those stodgy critics who complain about the frenetic pace and mix-and-match cover songs just don’t appreciate a film that’s fun and poppy!” But to me the problem was always that Moulin Rouge mangles that pop sensibility in service of a story that’s…

This reminds me of the kinds of debates I used to get into with people in the early 2000s about Michael Moore. Someone would point out some egregious falsehood in one of his films, and the inevitable response would be “Who cares if he got that minor detail wrong, when he’s so right about George Bush / gun control /…

I always think about the interview he did in the middle of Buffy’s run, where he was complaining about how his cast was getting other roles and losing their focus. He made some disparaging remark about how Gellar went off to star in a teen version of Dangerous Liaisons, like that was just so dumb.

Hannigan and Gellar were apparently very close in the early seasons—when Gellar hosted SNL during season 1, she held up a sign during the goodnights that said “I Miss You ALY”—but they famously did not get along in later seasons. In the best-known incident, Hannigan complained in an interview that Gellar had…

Also, though, Whedon seems to have hidden a lot of his aggression from his favourites (see the recent James Marsters interview - Marsters had his own run-ins with Whedon, but claims never to have seen the abuse described by CC, while still taking her at her word).

I mean, I’m as weary of facile political takes in cultural discussion as anyone, but it seems silly to fault the reviewer for engaging with the class issues that this particular film explicitly raises. What, do people think the filmmakers changed the home invaders from a pair of dirty career criminals to a struggling n…

Is it really queerbaiting if it’s basically a subtextual story about a closeted gay teen? Like, to my mind Will’s S3 storyline only makes sense narratively if you see the connection between Will repressing the Mind Flayer’s return and him repressing his sexuality. Otherwise there’s nothing leading from the emotional…

It’s rather pugnacious, but it’s not actually inconsistent; Chase has talked before about how he considers the viewers who liked Tony and the viewers who wanted him to get a bloody comeuppance to be one and the same. To his mind, it was their way to have their cake and eat it too—to cheer Tony for years on but then…

And also Hacks.

“Goddamn Variety had to print the story before I got the rights. Now that bitch is asking for the sky.”

I dunno, I’m really looking forward to a movie where anytime a character goes to make a piece of toast, we get an insert shot of the fictional scientific text The Mechanics of Toast-Making explaining how the laws of physics destined them to make toast at that exact moment.

The film definitely retains the lesbian subtext. Which is one the reasons I enjoyed the movie more than the reviewer, I think—because there is so much going on that it’s hard to dismiss it as a simplistic morality play. Though I do understand why some people seem perplexed by the film, since it’s more interested in…

As someone who’s not familiar with the book, that didn’t seem weird to me, as I read it as the Emperor having launched Plan A (replace the Harkonnens with House Atreides to sow discord between them) and the Bene Gesserit having taken it upon themselves to pivot to Plan B (loan the Sardaukar to the Harkonnens to wipe…

Honestly, the casting I was most worried about was Bardem as Arnaz, and this doesn’t assuage my concerns. By changing Desi from a baby-faced heartthrob to a ruggedly handsome man’s man, the film risks changing the dynamics of the Ball-Arnaz marriage quite significantly. The fact that Lucy was with a younger man was a…

Once something in this damn system breaks, I don’t think there’s a chance it’s ever getting fixed. For the past few years, Kinja has been falling apart a piece at a time: links in comments stopped working, then like totals disappeared from profile pages, then notifications stopped linking to specific posts, etc., etc.…

Re: Ann Coulter’s “minions,” those aren’t just anonymous underlings. The uptight rule-grubber is Jerome Marcus, one of the conservative lawyers who later represented Trump in his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, before getting an attack of conscience and withdrawing his representation after the January 6…

Wait, since when is the solution to “Q does a godlike thing” that our heroes go off and find a completely independent way of undoing it? Even if you do manage to put things right, he can just snap his fingers and put them wrong again!

I mean, of course this is reputation management. No one would go on a national talk show to discuss their private struggles just for their own personal betterment! But considering Mulaney’s entire career depends on his public reputation, I don’t find that particularly untoward. If an addict blew up at his boss he…

As far as I know, there haven’t been any documented cases of movie theater attendance leading to a major outbreak. Certainly, a bunch of people sitting in the same direction, mostly in silence, in a large, usually well-ventilated room, seems markedly less risky than activities that have caused documented outbreaks,…