A reference I’m certain the MCU core audience will appreciate. 

Please, stop that, Mr. Simpson.

My suspicion is that this is meant as a tortured means of squaring the circle to allow a) the X-Men and mutants to be plausibly introduced into the MCU while at the same time b) maintaining the continuity of the MCU. Marvel film audiences are now already familiar with the concept of multiverses from Into The…

A superhero movie “hokey”? Why, the devil you say!

Did each of those characters just get Botox? They’re only slightly more emotive than the robots.

For me, Byrne is still the king for his ability to imbue his characters with a grounded humanity and emotion. He made ridiculous, outlandish characters and plots feel Earth-level, in the best way possible. 

I think it’s the latter as well, but also a joke on lame games like “Pictionary” which were popular at the time. It’s the kind of “family fun” game almost engineered to set off a huge blow-up and ruin relationships, and a good way to display Kirk’s sweaty, hopeless desperation.

The line from Krusty (which reminds me a lot of his intro line late in “Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part I”) and the additional material with Flanders, Lovejoy, and Homer is pretty solid, but I’m honestly relieved that had the restraint to cut out all the extra “backstory” with the cracker factory. Far too wacky,…

To be fair, I think it’s just the first eight episodes (I started listening last night), but that’s still roughly 9 to 10 hours discussing godawful writing.

Cline himself doesn’t seem to be all that interested in introspection. It would be fine to write a novel about shallow characters (think Great Gatsby), but there is no hint that Cline is at all interested in understanding his own characters or in building an interesting world.

Perhaps this is something mentioned in the book that I totally missed or have forgotten over the years, but I think it’s being charitable. If there was any intentional implication that this was the rationale (Cline doesn’t seem to follow the old adage to “show, not tell”), I still don’t find it all that plausible. The…

That’s a very good example of how to handle a limited repertoire of allusions to recent pop culture properly. Writers should ask themselves; who would be the contemporary analogue for the futuristic characters I’m imaging? What sort of character, if I were setting my story in the present, would have an encyclopedic…

Oh, I just Googled this and now I know what I’ll be listening to for the next week.

I hope someone got fired for that blunder!

The most insidious misogyny is always the one which couches it’s hatred for women in terms of exalting the “right type” of woman; whether it be eighteenth century “republican motherhood,” the nineteenth century Victorian “cult of domesticity,” or the twentieth century suburban housewife, misogyny is always an ongoing…

I also find it very baffling how someone like Cline can spend years of his life, writing two novels, on 1980s culture, a subject which he presumably is very interested in, yet has nothing to say about the ways in which popular culture interacts, influences, and is influenced by politics, economics, and society. He…

The fundamental problem with these kinds of nostalgic “geek-sploitation” soft sci-fi stories is that they often imagine a near-future in which what is considered “retro chic” today is still treated with the same fondness decades from now. Imagine if this were a novel set in 2020, but one in which our popular culture…

Here’s a question; is there necessarily a connection between the quality of a horror film as cinema, and its ability to scare? I would say that the movies I found to be the most terrifying were all over the place in terms of quality, and what scared me was very subjective. For example, the first Halloween and The…

“The main divergence point between La Révolution and its historical namesake involves Louis XVI, who, rather than convene the Estates General assembly to devise a legislative solution to the insurrectionist tensions stoked by the simultaneous crises of mass starvation and a crippling national debt, plots to sire an…

I think we’re realizing now that three dozen screens in a massive multiplex was a never sustainable business model. For a point of comparison, look at the history of book retailers. Before the rise of the mall, bookstores had never beem major corporate vendors. Around the 80s and 90s saw the rise of mega-stores, as…