The main characters are a bunch of lower-middle-class high-school kids from Detroit. Defeating the monster through jet-setting is probably not in the realm of possibility.

Oh no, how dare I say the thing that you just agreed with me about! The fact that Gambon was not giving a “thoughtful and unbothered” performance is exactly what I think makes it better than Harris’s inert portrayal.

Yeah, and to me it was always silly, because Gambon was a huge improvement on Richard Harris, who was in failing health and only took the role to please his granddaughter, and it showed. Harris was this legendary hellraiser in real life, but he played Dumbledore like a sleepy old grandpa, when a big point of the…

One can question whether it’s morally acceptable, but the film itself is strong evidence that this kind of nudity is legally above board. Romeo and Juliet was a wildly popular and critically acclaimed film released by a major studio that has been shown in high school classrooms for the past half century. It’s simply…

Even the masking thing could’ve easily gone the other way: “Dr. Fauci said we didn’t need to wear a mask, but I always knew you should wear a mask!” They could’ve sold red MAGA-N95s emblazoned with messages like HEY, FAUCI, KISS MY MASK! and whatnot, and made fun of all the snowflake libs who were too afraid to wear a…

There are a lot of reasons why the Harry/Ginny relationship didn’t work on screen, but I think an underappreciated one is the fact that it’s supposed to be set up over the course of Chamber of Secrets, which gets by far the worst film adaptation of the whole series. The movie goes through a greatest-hits collection of…

Every other Hollywood movie set: a) Actors are not responsible for checking their own prop guns. b) The armorer and other crew members responsible for firearms safety are competent and conscientious professionals.

But didn’t Oher’s initial story confirm that he knew about the conservatorship all along? His claim is that they misled him into thinking it was the proper legal way to adopt a person who’s already an adult—which is exactly how the quote from his book characterizes it.

Yeah, it’s not even like they ran out of book material and had to start vamping—they ditched Varys’s backstory before they even got to that point!

Yeah, the article SoftSack linked to concludes that it probably started with a journalist in 2002 referring to a later Kyoto trip by Stimson and his wife as a “second honeymoon” just as an artistic fillip, and subsequent journalists copying the reference but dropping the “second” part.

Me, I always wonder what it even means for a character to “deserve better,” which has become a common critical/fan complaint in recent years. It’s not like a character is a real person who can feel the pain of their unfulfilled potential; better to say the actor deserves better, or the fans deserve better, or…

I can certainly imagine a more seasoned actor doing a better job with the material, but the writers knew that they didn’t have a seasoned actor but a kid who had been cast as Bran in his first on screen role at the age of nine and had been playing the role one particular way for the better part of a decade. They…

Yeah, I don’t know why people treat GRRM’s story points as some irreplaceable resource. If he didn’t give them enough details about how the story was supposed go, the writers on the show should’ve just made up their own details like the writers on any other show.

Well, we’ll probably never know whether Martin’s version of that story would’ve made sense, since he’s almost certainly never going to get around to finishing the series. But I don’t think King Bran was an inherently unworkable idea, and since Benioff and Weiss apparently knew for quite a while that the series was…

Having read the original screenplay, which is available online, I assume the extended cut is mostly about restoring the film’s original and very dumb pop-psychology arc for Bruce, which involves him struggling with repressed memories about his parents’ death.

There’s also clearly an art to knowing how to handle Lorne that doesn’t necessarily map onto whether he likes or dislikes you. There are people like Tina Fey or Seth Meyers who were obviously well-liked by Lorne and knew how to parlay that into doing great work on the show and in their post-SNL careers. And then there…

Page has actually shared a different story about Ratner being a complete shit to him in essentially the opposite way: When they were filming X-Men: The Last Stand, Page was eighteen at the time and not yet out as either trans or liking women, but Ratner said to a woman on set with them, re: Page, “You should fuck her…

I’m sorry, what? My point is that people don’t get sent to prison without conviction or a plea deal, so it’s a lazy contrivance that Barry does.

No, he definitely didn’t get convicted or take a plea. He gets thrown in the penitentiary immediately upon arrest (the corrections officers are watching the press conference announcing his arrest when he arrives), and one of the major storylines in the first few episodes is Gene meeting with the DA to plan Barry’s…

I feel exactly the opposite: The first part of this season was by far my least favorite run of episodes in the whole series, drawn-out and repetitive (how many different times can Fuches flip-flop about whether he loves or hates Barry?), and full of lazy contrivances (why is Barry in full-on prison if he hasn’t yet…