Goddamn. Thanks for all of these. Just to name one less-obvious favorite, your piece on Daisy Kenyon and the film itself really took me by surprise. Some echoes in this (great) writeup, as different as they are.

Pistol Opera is something. Finally caught it during the recent retrospective in the US; once was not enough.

Yeah, it's not like the premise (reshuffled X-Files) was responsible for the excellence in later seasons. It sang for a time because the cast was strong, the writing played to their strengths, and the show got considerably weirder and more willing to take chances.

It's tough, as Dowd says in his review, to cover so much ground so quickly, but there's a lot of power in that approach too. Certainly no coincidence that it takes a viewer from DW Griffith to Tamir Rice in such a short time (a point Jelani Cobb makes pretty explicitly in the doc, of course). DuVernay knows her way…

I said something similar above, but I think it's a really useful primer to the broad view of racial justice in the US. It's still powerful even if you're well-acquainted.

Covered in the doc, thankfully. That kind of connection can't be made often enough.

How about the interpretation of a relevant clause of the 14th Amendment?

Yeah, having just watched it, I do hope it turns viewers on to Alexander's work. As forceful as the format and presentation are, I think people would be best served by encountering her argument in its full form (The New Jim Crow).

One day, hopefully. You'd think Bong Joon-ho would have gotten recognition from the Academy, but obviously Korean cinema is still just a little below their radar.

Yeah, Fortitude was at least 75% of a really good show. Gorgeous to watch and well-acted, if nothing else. I'm not sure how compelling a second season will be, but I hope I get the chance to be disappointed.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something obvious, but I can't ever remember hearing Television on a TV show before. Consistently fantastic choices, no question.

This sounds great. Hopefully it hits a theater near me (unlike fucking Office, which I still need to catch).

Their Crescent Honeymoon EP (which preceded it) is janglier and less polished, but definitely worth a listen too. When I first encountered them, they were touring behind it and opened for Against Me! in this tiny-ass venue…both were great.

Hey, I just mentioned them a few comments up! Great album, good group.

Myth Takes was solid, but for my money Out Hud was always the best thing in the !!! orbit (especially by this mid-00s period).

Hot Fuss was a deliberately slick, heavily-produced record…and then they decided to go in a different direction. Flowers talked a lot in press leading up to Sam's Town about rejecting pitch-correction and wanting to make more of a "real record." I think the mediocre results speak for themselves.

His writing for the revival was a mess, but I think his direction might have been a close second in that category. It takes rare incompetence for a seasoned TV hand to fuck up their own (admittedly bad) scripts.

That's considerably ahead of me. No matter how I sort it, looks like mine is the promo 12" of Love Unlimited's "I'm So Glad That I'm A Woman," with the runner-ups mostly being box-set/recent limited releases that were expensive to begin with.

Well, I'm sold.

The Jesse Washington piece on his namesake's lynching in Waco is tremendous. I'm going to give the site a little more time to produce more of that long-form storytelling before judging it too harshly, but I'm a little underwhelmed by the day-to-day quality so far. It's competent, but not Grantland yet (with that major…