I’ve been really looking forward to Thor: Ragnarok and the new McDonagh film for a while. The new trailer for the latter just has me even more excited. Seeing the trailers for the first time, I’m interested in and cautiously optimistic for Murder On the Orient Express. I Love You, Daddy looks pretty stylish - let’s…

Dating back to the Star Wars prequel days, I’ve always been underwhelmed by Natalie Portman’s acting for some reason. But it doesn’t help that the character she plays in the Thor movies is easily the least-developed love interest in all of Silver Age Marvel Comics (and that’s saying something).

Man, I liked the first Thor pretty well, but Thor 2 was abominable. It did have a few good points in the form of Chris O’Dowd and Tom Hiddleston’s scenery-chewing, but the plot was even more nonsensical than these Marvel movies usually are. I’m also a huge fan of Walt Simonson’s run on Thor from the ‘80s, and his…

Seriously, it’s sad that the bar of “never sexually harassed anyone, ever” appears to be too high for a lot of folks whom I might have once considered role models.

Whoa Katie, I really enjoy your writing usually and I agree that Papa John’s reasoning here is totally unsound, but some takes are too hot. Papa John’s (the pizza, not the man) is delicious.

To be fair, I guess that’s because none of the other members of my local chapter are ideologically pure enough.

Realistically, is the volume of Libertarians too great a barrier for you to rile up some support for your 2nd blood feud?

Yeah, I felt that Frances Ha was well-made and fairly pleasant, but I probably won’t ever have the impulse to watch it again. That’s actually how I’ve felt with every movie I’ve seen where Noah Baumbach and/or Greta Gerwig has a hand in the screenplay (then again, I keep seeing their new movies, so I don’t know what…

When the episode ended and nobody had died, I brought up last week’s teaser to my family and nobody remembered it. I’m glad I’m not crazy!

Another idea: use a couple of episodes to tell self-contained stories. Better yet, adapt some of those single-episode stories with begginings, middles, and ends, straight from a great single-issue story from the source comic book.

Yeah, I thought the consensus was that Daredevil Season 1 was the best of the Marvel Netflix stuff (it also probably had the fewest problems filling space - the first two episodes could stand alone, for instance, so the main story was only like 11 episodes long). For what it’s worth, I thought the first half of season…

David Lynch’s visual art is pretty interesting, even if it owes a lot to Bacon. His music is pretty bizarre, and I can’t tell if it’s amateurish dabbling or soulful expressionism, but it’s not a minor project for him. Some of the songs on his second album are pretty catchy.

It’s not that I hate the song on its own merits, but Randy Newman’s “It’s a Jungle Out There” was an unnecessary and inferior replacement for Monk’s original, delightful instrumental theme. I think the show had a lot more silly or middling episodes under the Randy Newman theme whereas it was a really great…

I think it’s hard to say whether Russia had a significant influence in the way that people actually voted. On the other hand, Russia certainly was effective in a) undermining Americans’ faith in the electoral process and b) boosting America’s (and the world’s) perception of Russia’s power and influence.

Man, I have to turn in my Literary Snob Membership Card for not recognizing that K’s baseline testing routine consisted of lines from Pale Fire. I should have gotten that one!

As the article notes, it’s not a big surprise that Sandler can act; rather, it’s surprising he agreed to act in a movie with a good script. What would be really surprising is if he accepted a really funny part in someone else’s (well-made) comedy. He’s had several good performances in the last fifteen years, but none…

Saying that there are “several well-known covers in jazz” is really understating it... before the 50s (and really until well after the Beatles hit the scene), “doing covers” wasn’t really a concept. People wrote songs, and then TONS of different people (if the writer was lucky) would perform and record those songs…

As a white man, let me assure you that I have never wanted a woman to watch me masturbate. I don’t even ever want to watch myself masturbate. Harvey Weinstein’s proclivities seem pretty uniquely creepy.

I didn’t read this particular issue, so I can’t really say much about Marvel Legacy, but here are my thoughts on Marvel’s troubles (and, where applicable, how DC’s Rebirth has succeeded while Marvel has failed):

Creatively speaking, two of Marvel’s most fertile periods came after collapses (the early 60s, when superhero comics in general had basically collapsed, and the turn of the millennium when Marvel was just coming out of bankruptcy). Now, as a Disney-owned asset, I don’t think Marvel will even get the chance to totally…