Fucking YES. There were several scenes in this season of House of Cards where characters would put a coffee cup down on a table and it made a noise where you could tell that the cup was hollow. Fucking amateur.

This is more the ads and the discussion than tropes of the shows themselves: There needs to be a moratorium on revealing that an episode has a "SHOCKING TWIST!" Nine times out of 10, it's that a character dies, and I spend the entire episode trying to see which one they're setting up to eat it. That just happened…

That's a fair point. I'll give him Pay It Forward - as mawkish and clumsy and overall bad as it was, I think its heart was in the right place. And hell, I'd give him The Shipping News too - that's a pretty unfilmable book and he did the best he could with it.

I'm reminded of what Ebert once said about Michael Douglas:

The Wayne's Worlds absolutely hold up - a bit dated, to be sure, but still very funny movies.

I think Drew Carey mentioned in his Reddit AMA that they need to get the rights/music clearance and there's not enough interest for it from Netflix or otherwise. I can't imagine the latter is true.

Conversely again, I thought the first two acts of Phillips were slow and plodding and the third was where all the emotional resonance and tension was.

I fully agree with this rant. The "get off my lawn!" types who claim CGI isn't real cinematography don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

I feel weird in that I want 12 Years to win a lot of awards (especially in the acting, which was tops), but I didn't like it very much. For me, it felt too PBS-y and the characters and situations were one-dimensional, essentially reiterating how terrible slavery was without offering insight or context.

Remember when Electronic Gaming Monthly said that Sonic and Tails were unlockable characters in Super Smash Bros. Melee? And when you and your friend spend a Mountain Dew and Cheetos-fueled weekend attempting to get 20 KO's in Cruel Melee, only to find that it was the cruelest of all April Fool's pranks?

Band Geeks (where Sweet Victory comes from) is by far the best episode of the series, and one that really only could have been pulled off in a later season when all the characters and relationships are established.

Oh God, I forgot about Gary. So much of my sense of humor and childhood development is tied to Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side.

I've cried at two so far in my life (Phil Hartman and Roger Ebert). Though I didn't cry, I felt day-ruining sadness when George Carlin and Heath Ledger died (and weirdly, John Ritter)

There better be a similar-to-the-original ass shot for Ealy, or I'm walking the fuck out.

It is an unfortunate fact that Alex Pettyfer's best two roles were as a young, dumb stripper (Magic Mike) and a virulent racist/rapist (The Butler).

And how in the FUCK does a company a) spend a high nine figures on a shoe, and b) entrust a high-nine-figure shoe account to someone who can't be older than 25-26? I can't suspend disbelief that much.

Waiting wasn't all that great, but one of the things I appreciated about it was its general subversion of the "I'm going to be the next Top Chef!" trope. It acknowledged that working for a restaurant is a full-time gig for most people, and a drag for almost everyone, livable only because of cigarette breaks, backroom…

One of my favorite side characters of late was Steve Martin as the president of the organic food company Tina Fey worked for in Baby Mama. The movie as a whole was meh, but lines like "I will now reward you with five uninterrupted minutes of eye contact" and "I stepped on this shell while I was running through the…

In newspaper comic strips, Foxtrot is this for me. Bill Amend switched to Sundays-only in 2006 because he wanted to do other things, but that strip had run out of gas long before. You know it's time to put a strip out to pasture when entire weeklong plots are almost verbatim repeats of earlier stories. Getting the…

Both Weeds and The Office were shows where I eventually said "Well, I've watched the bulk of the series - I might as well watch to the end." The Office at least had small rewards here and there in the latter seasons - Weeds was a slog from season 5 onward.