Appreciate the aside that there are lots of GOOD reasons not to use one’s birth name, but this isn’t one of those occasions for, um, reasons

This is the right decision, but I see a whole lot of culture critics on Twitter and culture websites like this one saying things like, “Why didn’t they see this was a problem earlier?” despite they, themselves, never leveling criticism of the practice prior. They probably had the same cultural biases and blindspots…

“Time to remember the best voting advice I ever heard: voting isn’t marriage, it’s public transport. You’re not waiting for “the one” who’s absolutely perfect: you’re getting the bus, and if there isn’t one to your destination, you don’t not travel- you take the one going closest.”

Yes, Welles! In some ways important for having the opposite trajectory as the artists on this list — run out of Hollywood, more or less, and forced to undertake indie filmmaking as a last resort rather than to make his “calling card” film.

Ha! Well, I was thinking more historically — which brings in Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Dances with Wolves, Godfather, none of ‘em with intermission IIRC. People’s bladders weren’t smaller in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.  And film critics, again, have been some of the people beating this drum the hardest, for some reason,…

I would sorta get this if Avengers: Endgame were the first popular film released with a 3-hour runtime, but... it’s super weird that this has become a meme despite the many, many big-budget studio films that have been longer than three hours and also didn’t have an intermission (another weird drum film twitter people…

Torn between opposing people who think biopics should only be strictly factually accurate rather than dramatic (the biographer, here, not Tolkien’s family, whose position is pretty understandable), and opposing this dumb movie that looks extremely bad

As Feige recently remarked, the MCU will take on a different texture with the premiere of the Disney+ streaming platform, where its original Marvel series will intersect with the films in “a very big way.”

Quantum Leap, if we can count episodes that aired across two seasons (but WEREN’T part of a serialized story, per the question requirements...).

Hey! This is a flat-out lie. Literally from November 9th, 2016, people were declaring that the Senate map in 2018 was near-impossible for dems to overcome (I encourage you to listen to any number of Pod Save America episodes from 2017 wherein they endlessly, insufferably repeated the phrase “now look, the Senate is…

Yeah, I’m hard-pressed to remember the character names of any movie I saw a single time, ten years ago. Hell, I can’t think of the names of the Get Out characters (was Brian Williams’s daughter Rose, maybe?) and I loved that movie. Not sure that says anything about the quality of the film.

Yeah, I went to Hollywood to watch some of the filming (nothing super exciting -- mostly vintage cars driving in circles for background) and it was super cool how decked out the stores/marquees were.  And it was fun to see even Los Angeles make a movie filming into a minor city event, for once.

His podcast with John Roderick is filled with him turning idioms or turns-of-phrase porn-y, unprompted.

Yeah, I somehow ended up being a massive Our Lady Peace fan as a teen/early-twentysomething despite not getting into the rest of that weird faux-grunge/alt-rock scene (I was otherwise an indie kid—Death Cab/Stars/Metric etc.). So every time OLP does one of these tours I’m starkly reminded of what music circles they’re…

Broad City hasn’t had a new season on the air since the news broke (or rather, they have, but it was right at the same time so episodes and credits likely would’ve been delivered and finalized).

This is a weirdly common and incomprehensible opinion. Why do you feel that way? Do you think vegetarians, by and large, don’t eat meat because of the taste? If someone likes a certain food but has a moral or religious objection to eating it, why does their finding a substitute that is similar but not made in a way…

Yeah. In my experience, theft in Hollywood certainly happens, but incredibly rarely. With a legit production company, they’d be much better off just buying you out — if for some reason they didn’t want you involved in the project — for a teeny, tiny little pittance of their budget than trying to rip you off secretly…

Is this a common misconception? Off the top of my head, Traffic in Souls clocks in at 75 min (okay, I looked up the runtime) and came out in 1913. I’ve never heard the claim that BotN was the first before — is that based on anything at all, or just the earliest one most people have heard of?

Sorkin often reuses lines and phrases, but they’re typically weird little idioms or nicknames and the like (e.g. “Not for nothin’ but...”). I tend to think it’s more reflective of how he himself talks (or at least, fancies that he talks) than actual laziness in the form of, “ahh whatever let’s just use that bit from…

I get that, and there’s definitely no shortage of bad sex in fiction, especially male-driven fiction — and in fact, in Murakami’s fiction specifically! I love his work and also he frequently writes sex scenes that make my skin crawl even when they’re not supposed to. This particular one seems pretty incontrovertibly…