The pixel fucking stuff is about making VFX houses redo near-complete effects shots for their original bid. Marvel’s notorious tweaking in post doesn’t actually lead to a lot of cost overruns, which is why they do it. Marvel wasn’t going to rewrite the script in the middle of production, reshoot large portions of the…

Well, the posters have Shuri front and center, and Nakia off to the side somewhere, so unless the marketing campaign is seriously trolling the audience, this choice was made a long time ago. Probably before the vaccines were approved.

I think the Game of Thrones universe in general has a muddled philosophy around “nature vs. nurture,” frequently including characters that act exactly like their parents with the same flaws, while also including anomalies who are the exact moral opposite of their parents. So like Jon Snow’s habit of making the same…

I think what they’re going for is that Alicent has spent decades believing that if Rhaenyra ever becomes queen, Alicent and her children will be executed. So, as a matter of survival, she must make sure that doesn’t happen. If Aegon becomes king, the threat goes away, she gets to live out her days as the queen mother.…

I think the time jumps are working for HotD because they’re able to recast and use gross old age makeup to convey the passage of time. One issue for this LotR series is that so many of the major characters don’t age, so if they had spaced this season’s story over like 500 years, you’d have a lot of scenes with elves…

The vast majority of roles in film and TV are written for healthy attractive people of reproductive age (roughly 18 to 40). Nobody wants to watch 600-pound people date or struggle to climb stairs unless the story is specifically about the challenges of being that obese, and even then it’s pretty rare for these stories…

I think it’s because straight people didn’t show up.

That’s exactly what it would mean and I hadn’t even thought about that connection!

I’m still upset that Donald Sutherland didn’t play Jack Bauer’s father on 24.

Yes it seems like Miller didn’t understand he was playing a fictional character and that acting is make believe. But also, Reynolds was absolutely correct. The Weasel character is just there to get some laughs during exposition scenes and they limited his screen time in the first two movies so that he didn’t overstay…

Well, but both the Targaryens and the Velaryons have the silver hair! That’s the trait that makes both families stand out in Westeros, and that’s the reason they’re both always talking about intermarrying to preserve their pure Valyrian blood. It’s kind of great how within the world of House of the Dragon, nobody…

The author of the profile also mentions up front that they attended the same school. I read a lot of jealousy seeping into the narrative, a “look how silly and crazy my incredibly successful former peer is!” slant to everything.

Trevor Noah had alt-right personalities like Tomi Lahren on early in his tenure, and I remember him just getting rolled by her in particular. After a while they just stopped booking right-leaning guests. Jon Stewart routinely booked conservative guests, but they were always more tied to the establishment, and he was…

Noah is an appealing TV personality, but I always felt like the public discourse lost something when Stewart stepped down. Back during the W era, Stewart would absolutely flay conservative guests, who would keep coming back for the publicity. Early in the Trump administration, Noah repeatedly shared his platform with…

And on top of that long list of atrocities Dany commits, there’s the fact that throughout the series, she nearly always favors conquest through indiscriminate bloodshed, which her advisors are always trying to talk her out of. She views ruling as her birthright and when anyone refuses to immediately bend the knee on…

He was giving the public insight into his process, which is a successful one, because it produces a great performance. Is he supposed to pretend like he just shows up on set and recites the lines and clocks out? It’s one thing when “method acting” is used as an excuse for bratty and abusive behavior on set, or when it…

That New Yorker profile is a hack job. Strong’s performance as Kendall is brilliant, one of the most layered performances on TV, a case study in making the audience sympathize with an unlikeable character. Comedy is drama in disguise. Succession would collapse if Strong played Kendall as an SNL impersonation of Donald…

I think he’ll be fine. Maybe he’ll surprise us with a fun turn as the Goblin King in the inevitable remake of Labyrinth, or something else more suited to his strengths as a performer. I’m not a hater and I will eventually check out Don’t Worry Darling, but it’s not surprising that so many reviews are saying the same…

They’re pretty close to being able to make new movies set in between OT episodes, starring entirely digital recreations of the original cast. At least, it seems like Disney has been investing in technology for the last decade or so specifically to realize their dream of infinite content from finite IP.

It’s got to be 2 Days in the Valley. The whole movie was marketed around a catfight between Theron and Teri Hatcher where they’re both wearing skin tight outfits. John Herzfeld barely did anything of note after that movie, but if you Google him, he totally looks like a creep.