Yeah, you're definitely being too vitriolic, and you could easily lose all of the "you people actually like the movie not because it works for you as a movie, but because of [bad reason I've made up]" stuff without detracting from any of the critical points you're trying to make. But I also do appreciate the thought…

"I've had a theory for a while that certain fans and critics like Altman because the stuff is so artlessly made … that it reinforces their own authorial fantasies — in other words, you imagine that you could do it … I think these are the same people who dismiss conspicuously talented filmmakers like David Fincher or…

Yeah, I think Altman's Marlowe is pretty true to Chandler's character too— "it's okay with me" isn't really a "bohemian" updating, it was always his attitude to most non-violent activities. The main difference is that the original Marlowe, despite being a drunken wreck, had all kinds of useful knowledge and skills…

SPOILER: They were found. They weren't super interesting.

The style is totally different from The Space Merchants— it's not really a satire, it's more of a straight attempt to portray what life might really be like in this far-out situation— but Gateway is still pretty funny, especially in the background material that appears here and there in sidebars, like all the…

Also: 1. You can't just "go through" a gateway, you have to sit for days or weeks in a tiny ship that wasn't built for humans, never knowing if your air supply will last. 2. Earth is fairly fucked.

It'll be derivative if they make it derivative. If they stick with the basic focus of the book, it'll be nothing like Stargate since hardly any of the characters ever see an alien world— or if they do, it's almost always a terrible, uninhabitable one— and no one ever meets an alien.

The first sequel, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, has some problems but is pretty interesting IMO. But yeah, Gateway is extraordinary.

"it was still jarring to open this episode by establishing that things have taken a turn for the staid in the Horvath-Sackler coupling…"

I know about 5 words of Russian, but I can still tell that the translations aren't very exact; there was one line where the English subtitle had a whole sentence of some generic phrases of agreement, and all the actor said in Russian was "Good." But that may just mean that they did some last-minute rewrites or the…

She didn't have any information about the walk-in except for the approximate time he showed up. That turned out to be useful to the FBI, but it's also the kind of thing they could've plausibly found out from their own surveillance of the embassy (the guy seemed way overconfident about being able to avoid detection— I…

Jesus, I really hope the advertisements are lying. Those posters were so obnoxious that I just assumed this would be one of the worst movies ever made, but it sounds a bit better than that; I'm relieved at least that they don't actually have that God-awful smirk on their faces all the time.

If you can get here in the next few weeks, go for it. I'm sure he could use cheering up.

The great thing about pitting Will against Chilton is that it's easy to see Will as a psychopathic supervillain from Chilton's point of view, given that Will is very angry and very weird and very smart and he dislikes Chilton nearly as much as Hannibal dislikes all human beings.

It's also possible that that particular advice hit a nerve for Dom, because he's been waiting tables for years and imagining what it'd be like to be the big cheese in the kitchen, and in his imagination that involved not having to be out there smiling at lots of people. So, to him, Lynn has just tried to change one of…

I think the left-fieldness was realistic. A high-pressure, high-stakes, super-personal creative project that you've been thinking about doing for years but have never actually done anything like it, that's also a collaboration with someone you barely know and have poorly defined boundaries with, is guaranteed to bring…

And a sad real-world situation that they couldn't have known about yet on the show, but I wonder how they'll address it next season: Esta Noche is closing due to money troubles, probably to be replaced by more generic upscale bullshit.

I don't think Hannah's mom saying that Adam is odd and unstable, when we've recently seen him being somewhat less so, has anything to do with Hannah being an unreliable narrator. Hannah's mom just has different standards than Hannah does, and Adam on his very best behavior is still just not a kind of person she's…

Didn't Gumb ask people to help him lift furniture into his van, or something very Ted Bundyish like that, rather than sneaking up behind them?

As soon as I saw Beverly putting all of Hannibal's suits in an evidence locker or whatever, I thought "This scene isn't just here to justify them coming up with a bunch of new suits for Hannibal to wear, is it?" And sure enough the next thing she told him was that he'd have to get a bunch of new suits.