The weirdest part about this is how the band has kept making the worst possible decision, apparently deliberately. It’s certainly problematic to be named after the pre-war south, but they weren’t even in the top ten most overtly racist country acts, so I doubt it was hurting them much.

Then they changed their name to…

If you accept that Jackson bore the brunt of the pointless shitstorm caused by 2 seconds of exposed boob, then it seems like the decent thing to do is respect how she wants the situation handled, something Timberlake did better than Barsanti with this “here’s the very tenuous way it could still be his fault, but I’m…

You have to work really hard to arrive at the conclusion. According to etymology online, in addition to the folkloric meaning, the origin words that became “dwarf” have been used to refer to exceptionally short human beings since English was subdivided into West Saxon and Mercian, and all smaller than average plants…

Yeah, and when a guy who actually belongs to the group speaks up about insulting it is, the onus is on society to listen and have the uncomfortable conversation. “It’s not you being demeaned; it’s a fairy tale race with the same name and defining characteristic!” isn’t really a compelling defense. It just seems like a…

It’s only really being considered because there aren’t enough Americans with dwarfism for their civil rights struggles to really crack the national consciousness. It it were Snow White and the Seven Mexicans, about a group of Latino dudes living in the woods with names like Sneezy and Dopey that were also the sum…

I don’t really get why you’d ever shelve a mostly finished movie, especially for more than a year or so. Even a bad film will make its money back over time — Hudson Hawk, Ishtar, and Waterworld are all in the black — but that process doesn’t start until you actually release it.  Maybe you’re worried about hurting your…

This feels somewhat inevitable. When Netflix launched, it was essentially replacing Blockbuster. When they moved into streaming, they were the only serious game in town. It seems like nearly every major studio had a deal with them.

Now, nearly every major studio has a competing streaming service, and over time,…

This was my thought process.

It’s so tone deaf that I’m not sure if he honestly thought it would help rehabilitate his image or if he’s just decided to go fuck it and say whatever is on his mind, safe in the relative freedom of knowing that his career as a major studio darling is over.

Your explanation makes some sense, but I have to believe he’s…

Eh, I think it was a long, slow unraveling. His biggest fan site closed its doors shortly after his ex-wife accused him of infidelity with young actresses hoping to get cast on Buffy, which is gross and a huge problem for someone who has represented himself as a champion of women. But hey, it’s not all that uncommon…

I don’t think I’ll ever get the point where I can personally enjoy his stuff again, but either way, a good start would be to see him lose any rights to it in an absolute avalanche of civil suits.

When you’re rich and famous, the whole world is your enabler, so I kinda get it (and by that I mean I understand why he’s taking this position, not that I’m endorsing it).  

Imagine you’re a grown man with a girlfriend threatening to beat up mom’s new boyfriend in front of your kids. Upon a moment’s reflection, you might reconsider that, right? Even putting ethics aside, which we absolutely shouldn’t, endorsing physical violence as a solution to hurt feelings is going to make them way…

She’s a 40-year-old multimillionaire, internationally famous and her family’s cash cow since 16, who has probably never been in charge of her own life and was only legally allowed to be in theory for about eight years. Of course she’s not mentally healthy. It would be frankly astounding if she were. There’s…

Yeah, and that’s the problem. The series feels like it was built to end right around when they ran out of Ted & Robin stories, I want to say in the third of fourth season, and they started working to that from day one. It didn’t stop there, though, and the characters had years more development after that.

But because…

Eh, I feel like a lot of these “surprise! their life is shitty now” retakes are just in service of resetting their arcs so we can walk the characters back to where they already were at the end of the first movie. The Matrix is the most glaring recent example, but they also kinda did it with Luke Skywalker (he learns…

I read the last scene a bit differently. Dexter’s not trying to save Harrison from the trauma of a life of killing, necessarily; he’s trying to save him from the trauma of a life of having Dexter as a father. This is spelled out explicitly by both characters in their final scene together.

I don’t quite buy that…

I come to the AV club more or less because I’m a knee-jerk completionist who has a really hard time getting more than a few episodes into something and then quitting before the bitter end. I’m very selective about what I even start for that reason (and so have never seen this show). I watched Weeds and Dexter for…

I think his movies suffer a bit because they’re dealing with some pretty clear second stringers in the villain department that aren’t done any favors by the film CGIing the shit out of them. The Green Goblin and Doc Ock are standout villains with relatively unique designs and multiple seminal Spider-Man stories to…

I’m not a huge fan, but the “plot” of wrestling always seemed like a way to quickly add stakes to beefy men tossing each other around by letting them perform goofy skits in between body slams. The main draw still seems to be more in the feats of strength than the storytelling. I’ve never heard of like a The Wire or a…