It feels like we’re in a heavily experimental period. We’re treating streaming like a thing that happened to broadcast television, when I’d argue it’s really a new medium whose rules we haven’t totally worked out yet. You used to be able to take the number of viewer eyeballs to advertisers, adjusted by demographic,…

And in a year when Succession, a show famous for its big warm heart, won six Emmys, I’m going to go ahead and suggest that it’s not that the Heathers TV show was too mean so much as that it wasn’t very good.

What bugs me has remained pretty consistent: the early seasons did a great job of building up three clear major factions and a bunch of minor ones that all had conflicting goals and likeable, three-dimensional characters. While far from morally perfect, many were at least good-ish but legitimately seemed like they…

I think there’s still just a psychological break when the lead is a CGI character surrounded by otherwise normal people, maybe even just on a sub or semi-conscious level, where the audience has more trouble empathizing or engaging with the character. Your brain instinctively flags one of the characters as being less…

Two minutes before, actually.  My friends and I have been arguing over whether I won or lost for ten years.

The Academy occupies this weird middle space where it tends to reward weighty issues dramas and efforts that feel more like they were driven by the creatives than the studio, but are actually pretty hesitant to reward anything too weird or experimental, the stuff that really pushes the boundaries of what film is…

Agreed, but the category is confusing.  It seems like what they’re actually saying is “Best Movie to Make More than a Quarter Billion (?) Dollars” and I think it’d be both funny and helpful if they just came out and called it that.

Yeah, I’m one of those film snobs who thinks that in a perfect world, the award should go to the best movie — indeed, that the awards are kind of a consolation prize for the fact that the best movie almost never makes the most money in a given year — but if you absolutely have to do it, just admit you’re throwing a…

Of that list, I only watched Burn Notice, which was fun if highly formulaic and possessed of a mythology that rivaled the X-Files for needless and confusing expansion, building to a resolution that was clearly not going to be worth it years before it arrived. In retrospect, it’s the kind of show tailor-made to have…

That’s the spectrum in nutshell. On the one end, you have something like Everything Everywhere All At Once, where none of the characters, plot beats, or the specific setting, existed prior to the script. It employs some genre tropes and the general idea of nuclear families and Chinese-American laundries in California,…

I think Adapted Screenplay being seen as a lesser award than Original is true, makes some sense, and largely explains this controversy. In the kind of adaptation that most people think of first, one that hews closely to the story of, say, a book, a chunk of the work has been done for you before you sit down to write.…

That’s fair, and something similar occurred to me after I had posted.  The thing that was stuck in my head as the real non-ideal outcome was something like Glass Onion being forced to compete as an adaptation of Knives Out.  So I’d probably just include a carve out in the rule for sequels written by the same author as…

While I would probably design the rules differently if I were doing it personally — it’s clearly an “original” story — that seems right given the rules that exist. The Academy has been pretty consistent on their position that if one or more main characters existed prior to the writer sitting down to write the script,…

Frankly, I’m not even sure Disney knows how the law applies at this point. Because on the one hand, yeah, eyebrows are part of the modern version and not the original, and on the other hand, it’s hard to imagine “their version of the character has eyebrows, which is illegally similar to our also-eyebrowed version”…

This is the basic problem with aging as an “edgy” comic. Edginess doesn’t age well in general, but when you’re young, you’re usually taking on the old sacred cows and loosely arguing for a new way of looking at things that can be interesting and thought-provoking even if you’re ultimately wrong. Almost all aging…

Honestly, that’s more likely than not. If you’re a singular genius with an unmatched and irreplaceable voice and perspective, people will put up with a lot of your bullshit. If your main draw is being able to shit out a lot of unremarkable, technically proficient product, well, there are a lot of guys who can do that,…

Yeah, and I suspect that this is at least as much based on personal relationships as on principled  critical detachment. While I think there are huge quality variations between Nolan, Spielberg, Bay, and Snyder, there is no denying that they’re some of the biggest directors of the last twenty years be box office…

They don’t, really. Like you can write whatever you want in there, but provisions covering illegal activity are unenforceable. Ultimately, MOST NDAs are at least partially based around intimidation and bluffing, and the majority overstate the scope of what they can actually cover.

Yeah, I saw the title and assumed the answer was something other than the huge budget disparity, because that’s the second question you ask to determine how successful a movie was. It’s like asking why a Ferrari is considered a car for rich people and then writing a whole article to explain that the reason is because…

Your read on the ratio is really off. Somewhere between 50-100% of the humor in any given joke is mined from the visible discomfort of the guy delivering it. Like a quarter of the stuff doesn’t even really have a punchline if you don’t know that the guy reading it is a left-leaning television personality seeing it for…