Yeah I noticed a bunch of other things on a second watch around this issue. One important clue is that Christopher makes it clear that he is privy to events that occurred after his death — he grumbles about how Tony gave his widow pocket change. This means Christopher also knows what happened to Tony in Holsten’s.

My issue is that the franchise *keeps* returning to Tatooine, which was deliberately conceived as a boring backwater planet. You’re supposed to watch Luke hanging around a moisture farm waiting for something exciting to happen elsewhere, in one of the thousands of more interesting planets implied by the story. The…

The worst MCU movie is clearly Thor 2. I didn’t think there was any debate about this.

Last season, which was filmed after Bob Einstein died, there was a throwaway line or two about Marty being in China. So they seem to have made a choice not to kill off the character, and Marty is just living abroad now.

Michael Massee was not, by any account, an asshole. When he died of stomach cancer a few years back, every obituary mentioned that he was the one who fired the mishandled prop gun that killed Brandon Lee. I remember being horrified that the man’s legacy was intertwined with someone else’s deadly fuck-up. In a 2005…

Gun nuts often complain about minor mechanical inaccuracies when gun shots are added in post.

Yeah the Marvel multiverse seems to be a long-term plan to incorporate existing IP that Marvel didn’t own the rights to in 2008, as well as a meta excuse to recast actors who have aged out of their roles or died. It’s not like what DC is doing, where they desperately need to jettison lots of stuff that wasn’t working…

Because it’s the final Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford. They can take a COVID-related box office hit on a movie like Black Widow that they never wanted to make in the first place, but they get one bite of this apple and they want to make sure people aren’t worried they’ll die if they go to see Indiana…

So I read the first couple issues of the comic years ago and never got into it, but the reason I never watched the show is that the showrunners spent their entire promotion campaign in a defensive crouch reassuring viewers that the premise wouldn’t be offensive to trans people. I was aware of the basic story, and had…

The Beatles themselves were members of the Silent Generation, all born prior to 1945. The Boomers did not exaggerate how great the Beatles were, they’re the worst generation ever because they didn’t listen.

I’m guessing that in the pilot, Donna and Eric die offscreen in a car accident or something depressing like that, given that the original actors aren’t confirmed to appear — but the grandparents are apparently series regulars. So the daughter originally heads there for the summer, then winds up spending the rest of…

2003 Dave probably had the exact same view on trans issues. He didn’t change, the culture did. Chappelle’s Show wasn’t full of trans jokes because nobody was really talking about trans issues back then.

I think this writeup is too charitable to the Brosnan era, which is all over the place tonally and quite a bit sillier than it needed to be. When they rebooted with Goldeneye, there wasn’t a clear template for success (popular action movies of the time were star-driven and blockbusters were moving towards out-there Jur…

You also have to criticize the work that exists, not the one you wanted them to make. The show established The Watcher and explained his role and vows, and then gradually showed his disenchantment with those limitations. Yes, it was obvious almost immediately that Uatu would interfere with events, but they did the…

It’s never easy to appreciate trailblazers when you’re consuming their work after seeing what other people did with the playbook already in hand. Before The Sopranos, nearly every hourlong drama was a procedural that followed a set episodic formula — down to the same dramatic beat before every commercial break —…

Yeah, I feel this review (and the general reaction) isn’t giving the movie enough credit for some of its unexpected revelations. Granted, all of these revelations rely on the viewer’s prior knowledge of the series, but that’s how this movie was consciously devised and I don’t think that’s a knock against it any more…

It was technically unresolved as we didn’t see the identity of the actual shooter. We now know that Junior ordered Dickie killed for the most ridiculous and petty reasons — which is totally in character — but he could well have hired Barry Haydu to shoot him. Although even when that episode originally aired it was…

I still think the real problem with a Rangers of the New Republic series has little to do with Gina Carino, and everything to do with our prior knowledge that the entire series is a narrative dead end. The New Republic only ever exists for about 30 years before the First Order blows everything up in TFA, which means…

I think they always knew they’d settle (it’s not like paying out $50 million or even $500 million would cause Disney execs to go hungry), and they just wanted to humiliate ScarJo a little bit before writing the check to deter other talent from doing the same thing. It’s got to be a little unpleasant to have a bunch of…

According to the official Disney writeup of that episode, Loki basically just used the Space Stone to teleport to the Gobi Desert (presumably in his own timeline, on the same day as the Battle of New York). The TVA showed up because he wasn’t supposed to escape Thor’s custody with the Space Stone — which would have…