I love this show, but they really have reduced the Lucifer-Chloe relationship to the level of a romcom where the plot would resolve itself in 5 minutes if one character told another a key point of information. Lucifer has told Chloe everything, but for obvious reasons, she still doesn’t believe him. Showing her his…

Great column on The Ringer, BTW. I am the same height as your father, so I’m “merely tall,” but I still identified with just about everything in that piece. Airline seats are the worst.

As soon as I saw the headline, I said to myself, “they damn sure better not forget Barry’s abduction from Close Encounters.” That is some terrifying stuff, right there.

I admit that as the series progressed, I thought Genevieve’s reviews were needlessly harsh, apparently because of her familiarity with the book. Now that it’s finished, I see that Genevieve captured a lot of what was wrong with the series. There were so many plot threads that seemed to be shoehorned in from the book,…

Not a good sign when the lead’s doofus arch enemy is funnier in an episode than he is. That hot tub party was solid gold.

Actually, believe it or not, J.D.’s son Matt.

The new Muppet TV show had a lot of missteps. But when it came back after the winter hiatus with the new showrunner, it was beginning to get close. The episode where Kermit was desperately trying to talk Gonzo out of a death-defying stunt, and of course failing, was vintage Muppets. Then it was canceled.

I haven’t finished bingeing the last Superman show with no Superman in it.

And yet, The Lego Movie go to use Han, Lando, Chewie, the ‘Droids and the Falcon. That’s gotta hurt.

I collected the Dave Stevens Rocketeer comics, so I was stoked for this film. I remember being mildly disappointed because the lead was so vanilla, especially in comparison to the otherwise stellar cast. Billy Campbell had the look and the earnestness, but he lacked the charismatic twinkle I think these kind of…

I keep hearing about how campy this show was, but that wasn’t the case until the later color seasons. The first black and white season was a straight serialized sci-fi adventure. Smith was a murderous saboteur and the family became “lost in space” after Smith rigged the Robot to go berserk and kill them. In fact, the…

Something important to remember that’s been largely forgotten today: Burton’s Batman, like a lot of other films released in the summer of ‘89 (Star Trek V being another notable example) were rushed into production and released with unpolished scripts due to a Writer’s Guild strike. Plus, Vicky Vale was originally…

Critics keep attacking episode 7, but for the life of me I can’t understand why. It was actually pretty good.

I always assumed the fish scene was kind of an “in-your-face” insult to people coming from the back of the train. Back there, they’re eating (something I can’t state without spoilers). But towards the front, they can waste a tasty fish just to grease their axes. It would be like a Harkonnen washing their weapons with…

As I recall from my younger Famous Monsters of Filmland days, Hawks and Nyby did do tests with a practical effects monster that’s much closer to what’s described in the book. It wasn’t a shape-shifter, but it was much more like an alien squid than James Arness. But the creature was considered “too horrific” for the…

When the show kept emphasizing the fact that if Maze dies, she simply ceases to exist, I turned to my wife and said, “as much as I like this show, if they kill Maze, I’m out.” I still stand by that.

So does the show explain how 5'7" Moynihan becomes 6'4" Larroquette? Is that the invention that makes him rich?

Like many movies that came out in the 70s, I had not seen the film itself, but had the Mad Magazine version. I thought the dippy reveal of the killer was a Usual Gang of Idiots invention, but later learned, nope, it’s straight out of the source material. Like Hound of the Baskervilles, I’ll never know why this…

Steely Dan was going to be my choice. When I was in junior high/high school, they seemed the epitome of what would eventually be known as “Yacht Rock” - easy listening stuff your dad would like. But I’ve really come to enjoy them. When they sing “California, tumbles into the sea... That’ll be the day I go back to…

I just wish he would go back and edit the obvious mistakes. He’s admitted he wrote a lot of the stuff at the time off the top of his head (like calling Klaatu’s gift to mankind “a cure for cancer”), but he’s never corrected them. And in some cases, the mistake actually makes a difference to the point he’s trying to…