I am a huge Tom Waits fan; from where I'm sitting right now, I can count five framed Tom Waits posters on my walls, and there's more than that in my house. But I missed him in my first two encounters. The first was his performance in Coppola's Dracula. I remember seeing some behind the scenes thing about it on HBO…

Speaking of classic literature, for a period in middle school and maybe early high school, I carried around this perverse grudge against Shakespeare. My main gripe was that almost none of his stories were original, so how could he be such a great writer? He was just stealing other people's ideas!

I sort of had the reverse Coen experience: I saw Raising Arizona first as a kid (and loved it — though I think that was partly because my parents loved it and recommended it to all our relatives, who hated it, which confirmed our sense of being a family with superior taste), and in junior high saw Barton Fink and…

I don't know that I'd really compare them. The Simpsons is a great cartoon (and I don't mean that in a perjorative way), whereas KOTH is a sitcom that happens to be animated. I do think that KOTH on the whole does better — or maybe make that "more sophisticated" — character work than The Simpsons (especially…

I know this runs against the framing that Tasha and Keith present, but I don't know I would classify "The Road" (or even "The Stand" — though it fits better than "The Road" does) as "dystopian," per se. To me, the "dystopia" genre is about a horrific/disfunctional vision of a transformed society. Society isn't really…

If we're going to get competitive: we had a 300 baud modem (that's 300 actual baud, not the 28.8 *k* bps) for our Commodore 64. Used it to connect to Q-Link, which an online system that eventually morphed into America Online. Our huge upgrade was to a 1,200 baud modem.

The curious question is what insight the comments offer that the review presumably cannot. What is it that the discourse in the comments achieves that is not worthwhile for the review to do?

But perhaps for some shows it is not good to encourage analysis — at least, episode-by-episode analysis. Maybe the experience of some shows would be better if once the episode was over the viewer just sat back, thought "Wow, that was great; I'm really looking forward to next week!" and went on to other things rather…

"The awkwardly titled Hotel Impossible models itself on one of the smartest and most entertaining shows of its kind (at least in its original British incarnation), Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares."

I like both NPR's and the Economist's podcasts, but having the field dominated by basically just two institutions is hardly "doing just fine," especially when that field is "all of the world's news."

The "Babysitting" episode is pretty good — though mainly just for its last segment (about a brother and sister who made up a fake family to babysit for to get away from their toxic mother), which is phenomenal.

I think "pretentious" is bandied about in almost exactly the same way. In fact, Dr. Robuttnik gives us the basic tautology:

I think the meaning of the original sentence was that no one thought Anderson would have a career after X-Files because she basically had no identity as an actress other than as Scully. So the expectation was that she would either get stuck perpetually playing a "Scully-type character" in a series of decreasingly…

"That's how they get you." I truly hope that's a reference to Barry Sobel's routine on Dr. Katz — I know it's a common phrase, but every time I hear it and every time I say it, it comes out as Barry Sobel's dad.

I think part of the problem is that so many of the recent historical epics have a ponderous, overly serious tone. I haven't see the the Ridley Scott "Robin Hood" (though it's in my Netflix queue), but the trailers gave me the impression that it wasn't going to have any kind of humor or even just a basic sense of fun…

I cannot disagree with that (though that damns the writers, not the effects people).

While I have no doubt that this is a terrible movie that was infused with purely mercenary motivations at every step of its production, contrasting Harryhausen with " the generic CGI of an army of computer programmers" smacks of a bit of prejudice against CGI animation as an artform. There were plenty of mediocre and…

I'm not saying adaptations can't be self-sufficient and stand alone. They can, and, indeed, it may well be a virtue when they do.

It's not that you have to know the story to understand the story; it's that you have to know the story to appreciate and enjoy how the movie treats/manipulates that story. And that is one of artistic things the movie does.

"Having read the book, I might bring that information to the table, but
it’s obviously wrong to fill in such resonances that aren’t actually
present in the movie."