You're making the classic mistake of assuming that good acting is measured according to versatility. Great versatility is impressive, but it is far from the primary measure of a performer's quality.

My concern with this review is that Phil seems to be projecting a critic's mindset onto the creators. Are the creators really the ones obsesses with defining how much of a crime show HLotS is, or is that the anxiety of the critic. Likewise, the line about Crosetti's scene as Emmy-bait. Obviously, artists are aware of…

I don't know if you were trying for a really subtle joke or not, but "English guy" Julian Fellowes wrote both Gosford Park and Downton Abbey. And calling then "rip-offs" is a bit harsh — they're movies/shows that explore the same setting. It's a bit like calling all modern Westerns rip-offs of Stagecoach, or all shows…

P.S.: I will say I am a bit of a snob when it comes to those fans of the new series who refuse to watch the older series because they can't stand the "Let's put on a show!" production values. I think that shows a kind of lack of imagination or generosity of spirit.

Oh, I'm not trying to scold you or anything — and, indeed, my feeling that Tom Baker is particularly definitive probably rankles fans who were there from the first three Doctors. It's an interesting problem that almost must arise in any long-running fandom. I guess the degree to which I was complaining about "new"…

In comparison to others, I'm still a newbie when it comes to Doctor Who — I got into it through PBS reruns a couple of years before the Davies reboot, so my first direct experience was with T. Baker and Davison. But even that little dose of Classic Who (along with renting some of the earlier episodes), makes me feel…

I would say learning the spoilers doesn't ruin Homicide, because the series isn't really about long plot arcs (which is more one of the "novelistic" features of The Wire). Homicide's pleasures lie in its character moments and interactions, not in suspense about what's going to happen to whom. Well, for the most part,…

I just recently watched "Modern Romance" and "Lost in America," neither or which I had any clear memory of. Comparing them to "Defending Your Life" (which is my favorite Brooks movie), I was struck by a kind of dramatic looseness. Both of them seemed to me to end rather abruptly — they sort of felt like Brooks saying,…

Kafka
"Kafka" is great fun (the two clerk's typewriter gag alone is brilliant). It's criminal it hasn't gotten a DVD release.

@mcc

1987. The "My Pet Monster" movie. And I feel fairly certain there were other movies in that same time period for similar plush toys that basically had no built-in stories themselves, but I'm blanking on them. It's possible a lot of these were just TV specials or videos meant to be packaged with the toys, but if we're…

One option for Lolita is to first listen to the absolutely phenomenal audiobook (read by Jeremy Irons — whose movie version was so-so, but whose performance on the audiobook is incredible). Much of the foreign language dialogue can be understood just from the tone and cadence in being read aloud. I also actually think…

I was in a discussion on another site a while back over whether it's "Ukraine" or "THE Ukraine." Apparently, the consensus was that the proper way to refer to the country is just "Ukraine." Calling it "the Ukraine" is a quasi-offensive archaism.

The problem is that the current tablet "app space" is barely a new medium. Beyond replacing the mouse cursor with your fingertip, it basically doesn't introduce any functionality that hasn't been available for a decade on the web. All the tablet boom really does is open up a new *market* — a new demographic of people…

Yeah, it's disgusting to think of judging how good or bad someone is based on their actions and their opinions. We should go back to the old way and judge according to the color of their skin or the shape of their skull.

Well, the OED shows "romantic comedy" as a term in use as early as the mid 1700s, but with a slightly different sense than we would mean now. However, they also have citations from the 20s and 30s that do seem to line up with our current usage. And "romcom" shows up as early as 1971.

The other problem with this idea is that it's based on the assumption that women are some monolithic group — that there's one genre for "women" that fits what "women" are interested in. That's pretty reductive. And that argues against trying to label things "dude movies" or what have you, because that commits the same…

I do think there's a difference between the way real people use genre labels and the way Variety reporters and industry people use them. As others have said, I don't think "romantic comedy" has a particularly negative or restrictive connotation for most ordinary people — but "rom-com" as an industry formula, as a…

Beautiful losers
I can see the "attractive actor can't get a date complaint," but a number of these seem to be based on the premise that attractive people never work menial jobs or have directionless lives. And that's just a bogus complaint.

I think this issue is pretty well settled if you replace "better than" with "more successful than." There's still a subjective element to defining what constitutes success, but it's clearer than bickering over how "good" a movie is, as though that's some universal quality that can be measured in any movie, regardless…