We got our first taste of this when Nolan allowed the character of Batman to actually come to a natural conclusion back in TDKR. I don’t think anybody had ever thought to do that before, but it speaks to an advantage movies have over comics. It’s a blessing in disguise that human actors have a short window (10-15…

It sounds kind of like that Jason Segel Muppet movie where the Muppet lead is an original character, thus relegating all of the known Muppets with decades of history to supporting or cameo roles. Even if this is really a story about how some nobody from nowhere gradually assumes the mantle of Scorpion over the course…

The MCU made a good case for the idea that Steve was wrong during the events of Civil War, and that he made the entire galaxy unsafe by splitting up the Avengers over Bucky, which made it easier for Thanos to collect all the Infinity Stones.

Eh, it’s not clear anyone aside from Bucky and Sam knows about Old Man Rogers traveling from his alternate timeline to anoint Sam with the shield. It seems like the official story is that Steve either died in battle, or never returned from his mission to replace the Infinity Stones.

The way Wyatt Russell sold us on the “I am Captain America!” line reading (both times, in different contexts) was quite an acting feat. That could easily have fallen completely flat if he hadn’t done the work to show us just how much Walker really meant it.

Does anything in Black Panther really count when it’s an action movie with an all-Black cast (and Martin Freeman)? Like, if you’re going to have action scenes involving a security force comprised entirely of Black women, that means there will be some violence visited upon Black women. It doesn’t make that violence…

Smith also did something that is basically impossible for aspiring filmmakers to do today, which was fulfilling the myth of the scrappy amateur writer/producer/director self-financing an uncompromised creative vision that garners mainstream attention. The mainstream has long since moved onto solely cranking out…

Republicans generally nominate the guy who came in second during the previous competitive primary (it was true of Romney, McCain, H.W., and Reagan). In the 2012 primary, Romney had trouble closing the deal against pipsqueaks like Rick Santorum, and the GOP electorate was already so deranged they were doing crazy…

Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones both have excellent pilots, the difference is that BrBa actually pays off every element introduced in the pilot in a satisfying way later on in its run. Whereas GoT generally fails to do that, either because the answers are stupid or irrelevant to the endgame.

I was also really sold on the Wakandans’ genuine feelings of betrayal that Bucky would work with Zemo. They did so much to help Bucky reclaim his past identity (despite not really having any selfish motivation to do it), they didn’t try to hold him accountable for the things he did under HYDRA’s control, they even…

Harrison Ford isn’t a great technical actor (although he did improve his chops later in his career), but peak Han/Indy/Deckard Ford has one of the greatest screen presences of all time. Pratt is okay, but he just doesn’t have that. The fact that they’ve waited over 30 years to recast following Last Crusade is also…

Also, NYC rents rose way faster than inflation during the 21st century, after the show went off the air. You can’t just plug $3000 into an inflation calculator to wind up with the modern-day $4600/mo figure. In the mid-90's a moderately successful comedian could afford to rent in the UWS, as the city had not yet fully…

It’s totally fair for the girlfriend to have realized, after a few months, that she could never trust the LW again. But upon realizing this, she should have said, “I know we both tried to make this work, but I just can’t get over the betrayal or trust you again, so that’s it.”

I think it’s fair to demonize the girlfriend. She won’t let go of something that happened four years ago, and Dan is right that she’s just using this to control the LW, as she tries to control all his other behavior.

Also wanted to add that $600 is a perfectly reasonable price tag for a durable leather jacket. Buy nice or buy twice! Lucille didn’t know that it would be easy to raid a Schott warehouse after the zombie apocalypse.

I stopped watching around the time they wrote out Rick, because that was the point it became clear the series was just going to keep ambling on without purpose until it became unprofitable (I wish the series’ content provided some kind of metaphor for this state).

I also haven’t been a fan of the way Dan frames it as the snooping becoming “retroactively justified.” It’s a violation whether or not the snooper finds something. It’s just that when they find something, that something is almost always a far greater violation that blows up the relationship, which makes the lesser…

As I told my wife, who is Black, when she showed me that picture — “That’s Lenny Kravitz — I’m going to crack.”

My point is more that the plot details of the MCU effectively make it impossible that they spent any time together prior to Tony Stark’s funeral. Lots of other character pairings make room for offscreen adventures (for example, Sam and Wanda spent years together on the active Avengers roster between movies, even…

One thing that felt off in this episode is that when you think about it, Sam and Bucky really don’t know each other that well. They have minimal interaction during the events of Civil War, which takes place over a few days. At the end of that movie, Bucky is frozen in Wakanda and Sam becomes a fugitive with Cap. Sam…