I would assume it's a matter of this writer and the original one just genuinely having different opinions. There's no rule saying that if the site publishes a review of something that every other staffer must agree with that review.

Lol Nichols isn't even a liberal. He's a leftist, and yes, there's a difference, which maybe you would know if you'd pick up a book once in a while.

True story, I tried to finally watch that film a couple years ago and actually gave up halfway through. As a rule I don't bail on movies, no matter how bad - but I just couldn't do it that time.

With the resurgence in theaters doing screenings of 35mm prints of films again I've been annoyed as hell that Lucasfilm still seems to be limiting the ability of theaters to do any screenings of the Star Wars films. I actually did get to see the (unfortunately) '97 version projected with what must have been a dusty…

Look up the Harmy "Despecialized Editions," plus the Silver Screen Edition of the first film. Seriously. They look beautiful and all the alterations are removed. Harmy is so obsessive he actually reinserted a stray hair that got into the matte effects by accident, which almost no one else even noticed was removed in…

You should get the Silver Screen Edition version of the first film too, if you can. There are actually some other 35mm scans of the other two floating around also, though they are a lot rougher. But the Silver Screen Edition looks beautiful, and it's 100% authentic to the original. Harmy himself recommends it over his…

Yeah the fact that the "empire" comes back, sort of, bothered the hell out of me. Doesn't that make the whole triumphant ending of Return of the Jedi less special? It's the biggest thing giving me that nagging feeling that they would have been better off leaving well-enough alone. I mean, aside from Disney's balance…

I enjoyed TFA (Rogue One was boring), but I can't help feeling that you're mostly right. There is not a lot of spontaneity; it's perfectly well-made film but extremely predictable and really hinges a lot on the original three. I'm excited to see the next ones, but I've pretty well accepted that they will never be up…

It has a few decent jokes (the tooth chipper ride is funny), but on the whole I thought it was a mess. Don't get me wrong, there are way worse episodes from down the line afterwards, but it did set what was more or less the (increasingly tiring) formula of a lot of the next few seasons, which was basically Homer going…

Hell, I basically grew up on the SE versions (though I exclusively watch the theatrical ones nowadays) and I'm in the same boat. NO ONE called it A New Hope until '99 even, when the prequel trilogy started coming out and necessitated calling them by "episodes" or whatever. Yeah, we all knew it had A New Hope inserted…

Yeah, even the video games (like Super Star Wars on SNES) still referred to it as just "Star Wars." To my memory, even immediately after the SE no one really called it "A New Hope," because even the marketing for that referred to it as the "Star Wars Special Edition," followed by "Empire Strikes Back Special Edition"…

Yes, but we're referring to a show that was written 20 years ago, without DVDs in mind.

The ironic thing is that The Simpsons, even more so than a lot of other comedies, is really very much "room-written" and the actual name on the episode doesn't mean all that much a lot of the time. (It does as far as the showrunners, but not the individual writer, necessarily.) Oftentimes the credited writer may have…

I love this episode, but I do have to agree a little. Even taking the "thousands of hours of entertainment for free" part at face value, it's not like the people who actually work on the shows don't get paid to make them. They're not actually doing it for free except insofar as the viewer doesn't necessarily pay…

DVDs weren't exactly much of a thing in the early 90s.

I don't know if you have the box sets, but Oakley and Weinstein actually did a "secret" (you have to punch numbers on the remote to access it I think) commentary for, I think, "Lisa the Simpson" where they discuss exactly that. They basically say that in their opinion, showrunner terms should be like presidential…

It's not that it was new, it's more that it became something the show did week after week. When they did Homer at the Bat, it was the exception that proved the rule, a "special" episode rather than the guest star of the week. To be fair, even by the end of the golden era they were definitely using guest stars quite a…

Even though it's a bad episode, I do give "Principal and the Pauper" some slack in the sense that I don't think it actually had much to do with the decline of the show, like some people do. People forget (or don't realize) it was actually held over from the previous production season; Oakley and Weinstein had spent…

I forget the exact exchange but there's also a funny scene where Homer is driving the other characters and asking why the kids are there, why Grandpa is there, etc. Not a lot of great jokes in that episode, but a few gems.

I tend to give old Simpsons Archive/alt.tv.simpsons reviews some slack, cause I realize they were operating under totally different standards than whatever the show has sunk to by now. But Sean, buddy, an F for Homer's Phobia? That's an amazing episode.