I know! The ambiguity around this relationship is whether or not Joel had any feelings for Tess, not whether or not they had sex (because they obviously did and we don’t need a picture drawn).

I kind of liked the Warlady Karen conceit as an on-the-nose deviation from the expected Negan archetype in that role, but I agree that the nature of the story implies that Joel and Ellie will be moving on from Kansas City by the end of next episode. It’s a little bit silly, but I’m cool with it because we’re…

Plus, how likely is it that Cox observed anything weird on the X2 set? Even back then he was about 40 years too old for Singer to take any interest in him. Brian Cox wasn’t invited to the coke parties with barely legal twinks.

I think the Rock in particular made a conscious choice to avoid challenging himself as an actor, instead choosing easy roles tailor made for his screen presence, which was settled pretty early on in his career. I don’t think he’s lazy — he’s always working and hitting the promotion circuit. But he’s clearly not…

Bartlett was just as brilliant on The White Lotus. His line reading of “Would you like to find out?” alone is worth the journey.

How else do you make a DCU work? The obvious playbook is to do a Superman and then a Batman and then have the two of them meet and then they meet Wonder Woman and Green Lantern and stuff and then they form the Justice League. The Snyderverse failed in nearly every element of execution — they never even got Superman…

I feel like this episode was exactly the kind of slower, more character-driven standalone story that TWD often tried to tell — it’s just that those detour episodes of TWD often didn’t work because the writing (and to a lesser extent the acting) wasn’t up to the task.

This was my interpretation as well — Frank is suffering from a terminal disease that had no effective treatments in 2003, when modern medicine collapsed. The line about “we didn’t know how to treat it even before the world went to shit” suggests that it’s not cancer, because we had treatments for most cancers in 2003.

Scorsese did wind up pushing himself quite a bit in later films. I think the criticism of Casino as a Goodfellas remix really got to him. His following four movies were Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, all of which are stylistically very different from each other and from his earlier…

I like both Succession and The White Lotus but I find that the latter just doesn’t work as well as satire. At the end of the day, it’s always pulling its punches and encouraging us to sympathize with the wealthy guests. Succession really commits to the conceit of its main characters being irredeemable shitbags, and…

It’s been well over a decade and I’m still annoyed at the decision to expand the Best Picture slate of nominees. It feels patronizing. We all know Top Gun and Avatar wouldn’t have been nominated if there were only five slots, and we all know they’re not winning now. The whole thing is just an excuse for them to…

Both the comics and TV show of TWD have the same issue, which is that you get to a certain point in the story and realize that it’s not going anywhere planned, it’ll just keep running in circles until it’s unprofitable. In both formats I lost interest shortly after Negan arrived.

Well yes, the proper way to handle this is with civil litigation. It shouldn’t be a criminal case.

Setting aside the “vanity” producer credit issue — Baldwin was almost certainly involved in gathering financing and not the day-to-day production — even if Baldwin had personally hired the armorer, the fault would still lie with the armorer, unless he knowingly hired an armorer who had a history of loading live rounds…

I think the idea is that the monster egg was comparably small when it dropped into the ocean (a month or so before the main action?) and then grew to kaiju size in the ocean. There isn’t a huge time jump there because the romantic leads are still awkward around each other about their hookup when the main action takes…

Their current build doesn’t really matter. Once they’re cast in the role, the studio unleashes its army of nutritionists and personal trainers and steroid injectors. Christopher Reeve was actually quite slender when originally cast in the role. The guy just needs to be tall and have a square jaw, and they can bulk him…

The trick of Ragnarok is that it presents a dark story that could have been played straight, but adds a lot of jokes. L&T tries the same trick, but there’s just too much darkness to the story. Stage 4 cancer, kids dying in the desert, kids being kidnapped, gods being slaughtered. When there’s a silly joke or music cue…

I came here to say this. The volume looks great for TV production because you can get lots of VFX shots done in camera and streamline the post pipeline. But, once you’ve shot it, that’s what you’re stuck with. A TV director can just live with what they captured on the day. But for a perfectionist used to fussing over…

Have you watched it recently?

The Next Generation cast *did* get a proper sendoff, when the series originally ended. Then they made horrible movies until Nemesis bombed, which is why the characters’ storylines ended abruptly.