Two things put Magnolia squarely in the exhausting (also spelled excrement) category.

The Thing + Big Trouble in Little China

Taste rankings aside, can we all agree that Incogmeato has the best brand name?

I’d extend ‘boxed stuffing’ to be ‘stuffing,’ period. I have never understood the appeal of of ‘stale bread, except wet.’ Particularly when there’s other much more enticing foods on the table. 

In my experience, most people don’t even know how to play checkers. Like, the actual rules.

While this might impart a little bit of garlic flavor, you lose most of it in the cooking water. The flavorful oils leech out, float to the top, and get dumped. There’s a little bit left in the cloves, which releases as they’re mashed, but not a lot. It’s like adding oil to pasta water, little to no effect.

But how do you win? I mean, this is a competition, right? There’s gotta be a prize or something.

_I_ don’t add ANY coffee, as I’m the one who can taste as little as half a teaspoon of the vile stuff in a cookie recipe.

If you’re making something chocolate, and the recipe suggests adding some instant or brewed coffee to ‘enhance the flavor,’ don’t do it unless you and everyone who’ll eat the cookies already likes coffee.

He sang a song, and I believe the camera lingered on him just a bit longer than necessary, like “see, see? It’s a famous modern guy!”

Morale booster. Nor moral.

Oh yeah, here in Colorado we search for “Black Liquorice” all the time. You know, the kind that definitely isn’t given out for Halloween, and is spelled “licorice” is the U.S.

“At its core, Donnie Darko is a film that thinks it’s much more clever than it is, about a troubled high-schooler plagued by strange premonitions about the part he plays in the end of the world.”

It’s not a bad comparison, though FGF is a marginally better and more intelligent film.

It is very bad.

“Cheese curds should be served at room temperature to optimize the sound.”

My suspicion is that her performance was adjusted so she wouldn’t seem like some kind of unfeeling, uncaring robot-woman mother to people who didn’t know the story/character. I understand that in theory, but I think they took her legs out a bit too much.

While I think Ferguson gave a capable performance, I think she and the director let Jessica be a bit too... fragile, perhaps? At times she seems almost paralyzed by fear, which doesn’t feel right for the character. She’s supposed to be a badass Bene Gesserit with superhuman levels of discipline, complete command over…

We sat all the way through the Dune credits and there was no Samuel L. Jackson scene at the end.

He... *checks notes* has a penis.