Seriously, two women have won the gender neutral Best Director category in the last ten years, three in the entire 96-year history of the awards. The issue is complicagted, and I’m sympathetic to the idea of gender neutrality, but I understand where Polley and the others are coming from and I’d certainly want some…

Maybe not in a literal “who is the character” way, but in a “who is the main comedic talent behind Seinfeld the sitcom” way. You’d assume it’s Jerry Seinfeld because it’s his name on the show, but based on their careers afterwards and even just the years they did with and without David, it’s pretty obvious that it…

I think that’s part of why it’s hard not to read “something else,” something far uglier, into this kind of whining. Seinfeld did a network sitcom 30 years ago and mostly works clean. He is clearly intimately familiar with having to work within limits on content. Now, there is slightly more pushback on racist and…

The best thing about Armageddon is this Affleck quote:

“Relevant” is pretty subjective, but it does seem like even with the guys you mentioned, there was a pretty obvious time frame where most of the records they’re going to be remembered for were made. If you ask someone who’s 25-30 to name a Bowie song, I’d bet it’s at least three times more likely that, if they can do…

At this point, I think it’s gone on too long to make finishing them ever feel worth it. The conventional wisdom is that the books are great, he’s a genius, and the showrunners fucked it up. But now the ending not only has to be better than the show’s, it has to live up to almost a decade and a half of hype, and he has…

Yeah, I’m not convinced Dexter is a concept meant to be a sprawling epic. A psychopath incapable of forming human connections or emotional attachments seems interesting on paper, until you realize that those things are where 99% of conflict comes from. It’s why the TV show cheats on the premise constantly and the…

Dexter was, pretty famously, out of ideas by about the third season and only got worse from there, culminating in arguably the worst series finale of all time. It’s not impossible that a real creative visionary could find a new angle on the premise, but “we’re making a prequel!” is as close as a studio comes to…

Yeah, ‘97 felt like it got a huge boost just from mining some of the less scriptural books of X-Men lore. E is for Extinction is from the popular Morrison run and was solid bedrock, and Fatal Attractions sold a ton of copies, but it’s not like Operation Zero Tolerance was even a particularly fondly remembered arc. But…

Agreed. It’s just not that interesting. The article is right that the love triangle doesn’t work, but that’s as much because Manny’s only character trait is “unflinchingly supportive.” Josh Segarra is a fine actor doing what he can, but the character is simultaneously a dream guy and not someone I can imagine any…

O’Barr was an orphan raised in the system who wrote The Crow as a way of dealing with the death of his fiancee, and he’s nothing but supportive of the adaptation. There are a lot of fair criticisms you can make of the movie, but a lack sincerity probably isn’t one of them.  That’s definitely his angst up there.

The problem there is that we’ve basically defined “loyalty” as “I enable all my friends’ and family’s worst impulses” and not “I have refused to give up on trying to help them become better people.” Like if you kill somebody, a loyal friend is the one who tries to get you to see why what you did was wrong, visits you…

Yeah, if anything, he’s been desperately trying to get back into show business. His personal sense of shame doesn’t even seem to exist, let alone be somehow preventing him from working.

Also, as a sidebar, he’s been accused of sexual abuse by upwards of 16 people. Those kinds of accusations are individually always…

I think that’s arguably the core issue of the whole MeToo movement. Everyone is against the people who victimized them or their friends and sexual abuse in the abstract, but systemic change also requires people to stop trying to accuse the victimizers that they’re friends with, and that’s just a bridge too far for a…

Yeah, that’s my head canon, too.  It’s like how sometimes Paul Bunyan is seven feet tall and sometimes the state of Michigan is his handprint.

This is a vague memory of something I read decades ago, so grain of salt and all that, but as I recall, the original film was made with so few resources that the light “dystopian future” elements were added to explain why everything looked rougher than it would in a higher budget version of the future. It’s otherwise…

The debate isn’t really over ideology vs. taste. It’s “is the problem with me or them?”  There is a subtle but gargantuan difference between asking “Why don’t the kids today appreciate comedy?” and “Why don’t the kids today appreciate MY comedy?” Guys like Seinfeld assume the issue is the first one when it’s virtually…

Doubly so coming from a guy who constantly pissing and moaning about how the kids these days don’t laugh at his gay panic bits.  Honest to Christ, if you think the kids are too sensitive these days, there’s a deep lack of self-awareness in trying to solve that problem by constantly whining about it.   

There is basically a 1:1 correlation between comics who complain about how the woke younger generation is ruining comedy and comics whose material doesn’t resonate with people under 35 anymore.

I feel like Albini took a lot of the best and the worst ideas from the punk aesthetic, but as he got older, he jettisoned the worst stuff and held onto the best, which is something very few people managed.