He tried, he really did, but he was handicapped by the fact that he had to play most of his scenes against Hayden Christensen.

Oh fuck yeah. Morrison as Jango Fett was the only part of Attack of the Clones that was any good at all, and he was one of only two actors (poor Christopher Lee being the other) to escape that film with any dignity intact.  Genuinely glad to see him getting a chance to reprise the part.

Time and place, place and time. I saw them a bunch of times circa 2000-2003 and they were absolutely one of the most exciting live acts I’ve seen in my life: Brian Viglione is an astonishing drummer, Palmer herself is (or at least was) a compelling performer and they put on brilliant shows that completely captured the…

Hot take: Roald Dahl was a despicable shitstain of a human being, and “Matilda” encapsulates nearly everything that was lousy about him. (Honestly I’m surprised the Trunchbull wasn’t explicitly made to be Jewish in the book.) The DeVito / Perlman movie came as close as it was humanly possible to redeeming the material…

I tend to think that Palmer’s shtick was really well tuned for the job of being the lead singer of a Boston-famous band who also threw elaborate arty house parties and busked in Harvard Square for kicks.

Eh, I mean maybe? But just as likely the “off” is the well-documented stuff we already know: he’s not great at long-term relationships or monogamy (in this he has a large chunk of the human race for company) and he doesn’t like to talk about his family’s involvement with Scientology (and who can blame him).

The grand irony there being that frankly Palmer and Gaga are more similar than different: talented but limited artists who bootstrapped themselves into early fame by sheer force of will.

I realize that I stand nearly alone in this, but “In on the Kill Taker” was the moment they figured out how to respond to punk “breaking” and use the studio tools to their advantage rather than chafing against them. The opening to “Facet Squared” is a dynamic monster that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Sugar…

Am I the only one who read Chronically Aroused’s letter and thought that the neurologist should be the first doctor she should call? It could be stress, it could be a random hormonal shift, but that kind of out-of-nowhere and suddenly constant somatic sensation could also be a microstroke or intracranial pressure from…

Yeah, it’s insane backwards and forwards. The Turtles-vs-DLS case was (reportedly) settled for $1.7M, over a 12 second sample, but that’s the least of it: the sample was only used in the background of one of the skits and could be easily replaced. But apparently the clearance contracts for the rest of the album’s…

Yeah, that jumped out at me too. It’s one of the most important hip-hop albums of the 20th century and... no, sorry, you can’t buy it.

Harry Potter fandom is an endless pit of insanity and has been for decades.  It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that HP fan drama killed livejournal.

Peak “OK Boomer” energy here.  My god.

It also suffered from an incredibly rushed writing schedule: EON finally settled the decades-long legal mess that had kept them from using SPECTRE or the Blofeld character since the Roger Moore era while “Bond 24" was still in pre-production with — at least as rumor had it — a mostly finished script. Instead of…

Also — and thankfully — they changed Roland’s character from “offputting and threatening” to merely “odd and sad.”  Which is good, since it meant that I went from actively dreading every second of him being on-screen to merely checking my watch occasionally.

Once some time has passed, I’d love to get the scoop on how they actually put this together.  I’m guessing they just shipped a click track to all of the singers? Sadly there’s not a teleconference product on god’s earth that’s low-latency enough to support multipart vocal harmonies.

The production schedule is, I suspect, also to blame for a lot of The Last Jedi’s wonkiness. 20 months is a brutal timeline for a film of this scale, especially when the director is also the primary screenwriter. IMO there wasn’t much wrong with TLJ that another 6-8 months of careful script revisions wouldn’t have…

It’s always been amazing to me that for a while there he was one of the three or four most famous people in the world, and he somehow seems to have popped out on the other side of that experience as a completely normal, well-adjusted human being. Harrison Ford turned into a grumpy recluse, Carrie Fisher’s struggles…

I mean, minus the mystery-of-the-week aspect this is already a fairly close match to Vicious, and frankly Vicious would have been greatly improved by being a mystery-of-the-week show rather than a weird attempt to bring back the single-camera laugh track sitcom.

E.T. works so well, at least in part, because the film holds Elliott’s perspective throughout.