Exactly, Gus’ fatal flaw is his perfectionism, perfectly illustrated in this episode by the urgency with which he ensures that Los Pollos Hermanos won’t skip a beat despite all the recent murders around the Fring/cartel operation. Couldn’t someone open the chicken joint an hour late? That’s not how Fring works.…

I’m really enjoying how Better Call Saul makes you hate Walter White, despite his absence from the story, because it drives home just how much labor and suffering and planning Walter destroyed with his petty ego trip. You kind of always got that Gus had spent an enormous amount of time and money building the…

I love how genuinely committed Gus is to maintaining his front operation. He really just needs to keep the lights on and sell enough chicken that the authorities won’t question the income he shows on his tax returns. But it’s not like Gus to do the bare minimum with anything. His front operation must be the best damn…

I don’t think that’s a fair evaluation of his career. Smith was given every opportunity to “make it” as a legit filmmaker after the Clerks breakout. He was gifted several major studio medium-budget movies. None of them connected with audiences or critics. He was fired from multiple franchise projects like Superman and…

It’s actually pretty impressive that Netflix forestalled this fate as long as they did. They realized they were too reliant on their competitors for content right at the start of their pivot away from discs to streaming, and they wisely poured a lot of money into original content. If they hadn’t made House of Cards exa…

Well, Harry and Meghan are famous primarily because of the family Harry was born into and not because Meghan used to appear on a basic cable drama. So the Netflix deal is leveraging Harry’s association with the royal family for personal profit.

Universal attempted to do this with that Luke Evans Dracula Begins movie (which I remember finding entertaining, but I can’t remember anything about it now) and the Benicio del Toro Wolfman movie. The issue was that neither attempt really landed with audiences enough to warrant additional standalone sequels, let alone …

Considering that Ezra is constantly assaulting women, it sure looks like Ezra is faking the “they” thing to cover for Ezra’s toxic misogyny (and make people write grammatically tortured sentences).

You raise an interesting point in that, ironically, Marvel’s lack of success in other media throughout the entire 20th century actually made it much easier for them to issue definitive live action takes on their characters from 2008 on. The only Marvel movies that ever worked were X-Men and Spider-Man, and that meant…

My personal reaction was that there was literally nothing Louis CK could do to redeem himself in my mind, because his entire act had been retroactively exposed — his schtick was openly confessing to being a horrible person and then charming the audience into accepting him as a good person. His appeal for me relied on…

I’ve been predicting for years that the twist will be that Kim actually was still with Saul during the events of Breaking Bad (and we just never saw her because we never saw much of Saul’s personal life), and she reunites with Gene during the post-BrBa timeline.

Yeah but I think the point of all that was to draw a parallel between the girl and the dinosaurs, because their very existence was equally unnatural. The technology required to extract and rebuild dinosaur DNA from 60 million year old mosquitos trapped in amber is so mind bogglingly advanced that the task of creating…

Couldn’t they just put up stub reviews for the stuff they’re not covering, where they just put up a short synopsis and then we can comment? They’d get lots of clicks for free. I have very strong opinions about why Picard doesn’t work and there’s no place to write them!

Wasn’t she just a normal human clone, who felt kinship with the dinosaurs because they were also clones? Or did I miss something there?

This movie sounds horrible but I think the real problem is alluded to in the article — the original is a classic, yet it’s also a poor premise to build a franchise around. It’s got the same problem as Jaws, in that there is no way to make multiple installments without telling the same basic story, while raising the…

Temple of Doom is perfectly watchable. Crystal Skull, on the other hand…

I went with it. I preferred the prosthetics over a scenario where they just put contact lenses on JGL and called it a day. I also thought the final product with two actors (who don’t really look alike) was much better than if they had digitally aged JGL or digitally de-aged Bruce Willis for a dual role.

I don’t think the film’s issues can be blamed on Brandon Lee’s death — most of his part had been filmed, and there were only three shooting days involving him left on the schedule. They did some chintzy editing and early CGI around the death and resurrection scenes. With a competent prop master the movie would…

I’m not arguing that any of the movie worked, because it obviously didn’t, but I think at the time Jan de Bont saw it as a clever inversion of the original formula — instead of delivering fast-paced thrills, he would build suspense around the inevitability of a slow-moving boat colliding with an island, a conflict…

Yeah, good points all around. I think what we’re really discussing is the role head canon has played in fans’ understanding of the story over time, which is separate from a legalistic interpretation of the dialog.