I read Lonesome Dove after seeing the miniseries, and there were actually aspects of the miniseries I liked better than the book. But I agree, it's a good read. I haven't read anything else by McMurtry, but I really liked the film "Hud" which is based on something of his. It's much, much darker, though, and isn't…

If you want to continue with Twain when you've finished that, I highly recommend "Following the Equator." It's non-fiction, about a trip around the world Twain took late in life, and it's one of the funniest and most thoughtful books I've ever read.

Bilbo's barely in the movies at all, Gandalf's dialogue is largely limited to "Run!", most of the Dwarves don't talk and when they do they're practically indistinguishable as personalities, the cameos from Galdriel and Elrond and Saruman were wasted on a nonsense retconning of the Witch King's backstory which, if you…

This topic is made for me! When I read, I read mostly classics, and this year was a doozie.

"but hey, so did LOTR, so what?"

It won't help, because it's not the length that's the problem. It's the terrible quality of the writing itself. There are no characters and no depth to the dialogue. A shorter version will be mercifully short, but it won't be better. And a long version didn't have to be this bad.

Scooby Doo's "long hallway with many doors" bit, particularly.

I thought of Scooby Doo rather than Clones.

We could have had three long films with no fanfic.

The general consensus is that The Hobbit doesn't contain enough material for 3 long movies. That's wrong; it absolutely does, especially when you add in the necessary material from the appendices. The fact that these movies are terrible is in no way related to the decision to make it three movies instead of one. It…

I'll have to take your word for it. It seems that most of the stuff I hear is from that 1/3rd.

I love Lennon's vocals on "Twist and Shout." But I love McCartney's vocals on "Oh! Darling." Funnily enough, Lennon said Paul didn't sing that song well and that he could have done it better. He might be right about doing it better, it's in that marginal almost-shouting area that John liked. But I like how it shows…

He's barely in the movies.

Rudolph and The Grinch hold up well, the others not so much.

Watched Dirty Dancing for the first time. Wondered when modern dance movies got so serious. None of them are as perfectly simple as Astaire and Rogers's, they always have to throw in a bunch of unwieldy social commentary. However, the quality and quantity of the dancing in this one were high, and that kept it really…

I encountered PewDiePie through a younger relative, but I had no idea he was actually famous until later when he started being written about in the mainstream press. I thought it was just a random YouTube account with maybe a few thousand followers or something.

I thought it was damn good. It's true that every bit could have gone farther had there been fewer things going on, but the overstuffed nature of the episode is part of its characterization of contemporary media, like the PewDiePie boxes and tweet scrolls and the notion that "everyone is watching everything."

Yes, he excelled at the host segments. I think it's largely because of his obvious love for useless inventions and puppetry.

It's also possible to like Joel better as a personality but to like Mike better as a riffer. I think that's where I am.

Hardly an episode of The West Wing, undoubtedly his best show, went by without an awkward sexist comment that *could* be written off as coming from the mouth of a flawed male character, but that clearly was more than half believed by Sorkin and his team.