Good. It’s in the pantheon of greatest American stage musicals but the movie is pretty bad. I’m not sure there’s a stage musical this undeniably great with a film adaptation this flawed (maybe Carousel or Pal Joey but it’s tough to imagine anyone trying to film Carousel without a radical rethink of how it depicts…

It really depends on how you play Adelaide. There's a legitimate reading of the character as far smarter and far more independent than she pretends to be. Sarah is the one I see as far more dated in how repressed and naive she's made out to be. 

There’s a whole extra-Biblical Midrashic and legendary tradition of Methuselah as a fighter of demons or fallen spirits.  I assume that’s what they’re going with here.  

I don’t know that I could defend Aronofsky’s Noah as a good movie, exactly, but I find it kind of fascinating in how it tries to be a religious movie, a dark character study, and some kind of weird climate change metaphor all at the same time.

He's a delightful devil in the episode Printer's Devil (though it would make an interesting connection if it were the same character in both). 

Get me Burgess Meredith! He’s been dead for 20 years? Then get me Oscar winner Tracy Jordan!

Yeah, for that plotline to have any dramatic weight you would need to care deeply about Clark and Lois and paint the pre-Darkseid Earth as less of a cold hellscape to begin with. Though it does make that Flash scene make more sense.

I thought the Bart stuff actually worked pretty well.  You can get why he might identify with any kind of anti-authority streak and he seemed to maybe learn something.  Milhouse getting attracted to a world in which his feckless whining makes him powerful also makes total, pathetic sense.  The Lisa part of this seemed…

As a kid I drew a lot of inspiration from the scene in Sister Act where she says “bless you” with the exact intonation of “fuck you.”

Weaver’s character is Grace Augustine. St. Augustine is the big theologian on the topic of grace. What this has to do with Avatar’s actual plot I have never understood. Is it just because she merges with the world soul at the end? A name that heavy handed surely can't be an accident. 

The one kid was named Gray. I remember this only because it made me think of Gray's Papaya. 

It's kind of incredible that this show premiered four years before a long lived show like The Vampire Diaries and managed to outlast not only Diaries but the perfectly respectable five year run of its spinoff.

The three episodes I watched were kind of bizarre in terms of acting. Goodman and Metcalf are good or even great actors but suddenly seemed very off and awkward while Goranson seemed like an old pro. 

del Toro as Swiper feels a little on the nose. Morally compromised, sneaky dude is like half his IMDb page at this point. The second he came onscreen in The Last Jedi the entire theater seemed to be expecting his sudden but inevitable betrayal. 

Look, Langella is a world class actor and he seemed totally invested in Skeletor. It's a shame no one else seemed to care that much.

I have mindblowing news about a certain mild mannered Metropolis reporter.

I would certainly be tempted to play with buckets of spiders.

So now we’re actually acknowledging that Lily may be a sociopath? 

I’m so confused by the mixed metaphor in the opening sentence. Are we setting fire to the albatross around our neck or what?  I know I’m overthinking Newswire stories but it beats grading essays.

I always think of the “kids news” episode where Lisa becomes so insanely jealous of Bart’s fluff human interest stories that she puts him in mortal danger.  I mean, I love Lisa Simpson as a character and she sometimes has good cause to feel underappreciated in her family but when she goes full-blown jealousy monster…